Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
In her illustrious career which was peppered with numerous literary awards for her poetry, May Swenson wrote over fifty poems ranging from clipped and nonchalant ‘Analysis of Baseball’, which quite literally analyses every element of the game, to...
The Last Samurai, published in September 2000, was written by Helen DeWitt, an author who graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Classics. The novel effortlessly combines different languages and cultures to tell the story of a...
William Stafford was one of the most prolific poets in American history, having published more than sixty different volumes of verse over the course of his life which stretched across most of the 20th century. Stafford is the very definition of...
Born in 1942, Sharon Olds garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984 and the nation’s highest literary honor, the Pulitzer Prize, in 2013. Her poetry is defiantly earthy on the subject of sexuality and uncompromisingly honest on the...
Mere Christianity is a theological book written by C.S. Lewis and published in 1952. The book talks about Christianity, explaining the religion and dispelling any controversies. C.S. Lewis narrates the book and spends most of the story defending...
Published in 1939, Finnegans Wake is James Joyce’s final work and one that defies the ability of most readers. Those with the intellectual foundation and experiential backbone to make their way through this dense, confusing, innovative and...
The Wild Geese is a novel written by the Japanese writer Mori Ogai, published between 1911 and 1913 in Japan and in the year 1959 in America. Initially, the novel was published as a series and then later, as it was translated it was compiled into...
Arabesques were written by Palestinian author Anton Shammas and were published in 2001. This novel tells a captivating story about the complex lives of Palestinian Christians, which is centered on Shammas' upbringing. During his youth, he studied...
The tale of Tristan and Isolde traces back to at least the 12th century with its lost origins perhaps going back much further to some ancient Celtic legend. The story has been a durable one for storytellers with a lineage tracing a line from its...
Poems—the full title being Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect—is the primary reason you are familiar with his verse or vaguely recognize the name if you are not. A term that gets tossed around with great frequency is “books the changed the...
“Eugenie Grandet” is a novel written by Honore de Balzac. It was partially published in the “L’Europe litteraire” magazine in September, 1833. The first complete publication was accomplished in 1834.
Honore de Balzac was one of the first literary...
The Measures Taken was written between the years of 1929 and 1930. These moralistic Lehrstücke, or “learning plays,” were written against the Communist backdrop of social, economic, and political turmoil in Germany. First performed in 1930 in...
Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is widely considered the only novel of lasting significance ever written by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos. Fortunately for the soldier whose writing ability contributed to his losing one...
Earle Birney was a twentieth century (1904-1995) Canadian poet and legendary teacher. He was nick named “a chronicler of Canada" and is considered one of Canada's finest poets. Based upon his life, Birney has written poems that can be placed into...
Joy Kogawa is a Japanese-Canadian novelist born on June 6, 1935 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During World War II, she and her family were forced to move from their home to an internment camp in Slocan, British Columbia and eventually Coaldale,...
The Fall is a fictional, philosophical novel written by Albert Camus and was published in 1956 by Vintage Books publishing company. It has been translated and released in both English and French copies.
The novel is made up of numerous dramatic...
William S. Burroughs is an American author born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, he led a very privileged lifestyle considering his family was wealthy and emphasized the importance of education. Thus, Burroughs was an avid...
Restoration is a novel that was written by Rose Tremain and published in 1989. It was pretty popular, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 and being the Sunday Express Book of the Year. In addition, Restoration was made into a film in...
One of the few guarantees you will ever find in life is that Ken Kesey will forever be best known for writing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With that in mind, many people may be surprised or even shocked to learn Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes...
Witness is an autobiographical novel written by the American Jay Vivian Chambers. The novel was published in 1952, nine years before the author’s death. The novel was a best-seller for more than a year and it focuses on the life of the author.
The...
Women and Other Animals is a collection of short stories written by the American author Bonnie Jo Campbell and published in the year 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The author was awarded the Associated Writing Programs Award for...
To fully appreciate the context and background of Glengarry Glen Ross it helps to know who Thorstein Veblen was, to be familiar with postmodern literary techniques and—perhaps most importantly—not assume that just because you saw the movie you...
Published in 1958, The Question (French title: La Question) was a largely autobiographical work that described methods of torture used by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. The text recounts the author's arrest by French...
