Newest Study Guides

This selection of stories includes John Updike's most popular and critically debated short works. "Ace in the Hole," "A & P," and "Pigeon Feathers" are all characteristic of Updike's early style; indeed, 1953's "Ace" was the 21-year-old...

First published in 1922, Babbitt is set during the 1920s (the Jazz Age), the period in America following World War I that is considered especially materialistic and spiritually depraved. Politically, the country was charged with fear due to the...

Sir William Golding composed Lord of the Flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the novel's composition, Golding, who had published an anthology of poetry nearly two decades earlier, had been working for a number of years as a teacher...

Mark Twain is one of the most famous figures in American literature, and is known for his novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What is not as widely known about him is the surprising amount of essays...

Released in 1988, Mississippi Burning is a crime thriller film directed by Alan Parker. Though released in the late 1980's, it features some of America's touchiest Civil Right's Era topics - a disappearance of three civil rights activists is met...

“Sunny Prestatyn” is one of the poems in Philip Larkin’s poetry volume called The Whitsun Weddings, which is a collection of 32 poems published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber. The poem was believed to be first published in 1964, though...

“The Whitsun Weddings,” the titular poem of a book by the same name, is perhaps the most-discussed poem by Philip Larkin, known as England’s ‘poet laureate of disappointment.’ With eight stanzas of ten lines each, rhyming like Keatsian odes but...

Three Sisters is a play written by Anton Chekhov in 1900. It follows the lives of the Prozorov sisters as their fortune is in decline and they must seek out a happy life against the odds. The play traces various human disappointments, specifically...

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet whose work has risen in prominence since some of her verse was featured in the singer Beyoncé's film Lemonade, released in 2016. Her debut collection—entitled teaching my mother how to give birth—was well...

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book written by Frederick Brooks about Software project management. It was published by Addison-Wesley in 1975 and was re-published in 1982 and 1995. It is the first book in a planned...

The Valley of Amazement is a novel of two halves: the first, written from the point of view of Violet, the abandoned daughter of a courtesan house owner mother who abruptly leaves Shanghai to fly to San Francisco where she is able at last to meet...

Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with some elements of the novel that followed, Through the Looking Glass, serving as additional inspiration. In Alice's...

Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) takes place in 1931 and follows three girls who live in Australia near the so-called rabbit-proof fence. The town is called Jigalong and the girls are half-Aboriginal; they initially follow a traditional...

Ross Gay is a prolific young writer that gained prominence in the poetic circles of America. He published several books and recently started teaching at the University of Indiana. He is further known for his outspoken opinions on social...

Malone Dies was first published in French in 1951 under the title Malone Meurt. Samuel Beckett the author of the novel native to Ireland, later translated the book into English so that it could reach a wider audience. Malone Dies is the second of...

Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a multi-media book of poetry and photography by Claudia Rankine. It was originally published in September 2004. Rankine is a contemporary poet who is known for her idiosyncratic, politically-charged, and multimedia...

Bad Feminist is a collection of essays by Roxane Gay. It was published in 2014 by Harper Perennial in English. The book confronts feminist ideologies, what a good feminist is and what a person can and can’t do, even though they love doing it....

I Love Dick is a book written by the American author named Chris Kraus. The book was published in 1997 by Semiotext(e) and republished in 2006. The book is written from the writer’s perspective (Chris Kraus), as her marriage falls apart when she...

Get Out is a satirical horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Prior to making Get Out, Peele was best known as a comedian, and half of the sketch duo Key & Peele, beloved for entertaining and sharp satirical sketches on Comedy...

Blaine Harden is a reporter with a particular interest in North Korea and its politics. In 2008 he met a young man named Sin In Geun. The young man had defected from North Korea, no mean feat considering it is one of the most repressive and brutal...

Evicted tells the story of eight poorer families who are struggling to pay rent during the 2008 financial crisis (which over 3 million people lose their homes and many lose their retirement savings). It deals with how people survive in the face of...

In his short novella Signs Preceding the End of the World (originally published in Spanish but later published in English), which The Guardian said "From its opening pages... this marvelously rich, slim novel is working on many levels," author...

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat is best known as a fiction novelist and short story writer, but her memoir, written in 2007, was inspired by the head-on collision of both tragedy and joy in her life, occurring on the same day. Danticat...

Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, subtitled 'Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism', was met with very polarizing reactions when it was published in 2018. In her book, DiAngelo, an academic, unveils the reasons why white...