Newest Study Guides
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.
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.
Top Gun is an iconic American action film, remembered for propelling Tom Cruise into the public eye and Hollywood stardom. While it did not fare that well with critics, it was a big hit at the box office and was lauded for its special effects and...
Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia was declared in 2015 to be one of the top ten eating disorder books of all time. This memoir was beaten to the number one spot only by Clare Beeken's 2001 account of her journey from anorexia to compulsive...
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is widely considered one of the most ambitious and profoundly moving plays of the late 20th century, earning the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and a place in Harold Bloom’s Western canon (interestingly,...
The Royal Tenenbaums was written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson and released in 2001 to great acclaim. His third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, follows the development of the three gifted but troubled Tenenbaum children, and their reunion with their...
Published in 1984, The Barracks Thief is a war novel written by the American author Tobias Wolff. Published shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, the novel takes place in the decade before its publication. Following not the story of one, but...
The Band's Visit is a stage musical written by David Yazbek, based on a book by Itamar Moses. The book was itself based on the Israeli film The Band's Visit. The musical first opened off Broadway before opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in...
Ray Russell is an American author born on September 4, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. Despite Russell’s massive success in the literary world, he did not always work as a writer. After graduating high school, he served in the Air Force and...
God Help The Child is American author Toni Morrison's eleventh novel. It was published in 2015, Before this book's publication, in April, the literary world was given a small taster of the literary feast that was to come, when The New Yorker...
Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent in 1907 and the work is often taken to be the major work in a trilogy of political works that Conrad published around this time (the other two are Nostromo and Under Western Eyes). The book is also taken to...
The Canterville Ghost was first published in 1887 in The Court and Society Review. The first part was published on February 23, with the second installment following on March 2. It was accompanied by illustrations. By 1887, Wilde had achieved a...
John Milton was an English writer born on December 9, 1608. As a child and young adult, Milton was an avid reader and traveled often, which played a great role in shaping his beliefs and political ideologies. He is known for capitalizing on the...
Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away is a novel published in 2011 and written by British author and nurse Christine Watson. The book follows a typical marriage-problem plot, when Ezikiel and Blessing have a father that is cheating on their mother. With much...
All too often, novellas about haunting, spooky old houses and things that go bump in the night are reduced to the level of pulp fiction, despite their promising storyline and potential for suspense. However, in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, we...
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 film created by idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson. The film is loosely inspired by the literature of early 20th century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Director and co-writer Anderson had never even heard of...
M is one of the high watermarks of Fritz Lang's career, and more broadly of German cinema from the Weimar era between World Wars I and II. Co-written by the director Fritz Lang and his wife Tea von Harbou, M traces the story of a child murderer,...
Edward Albee's The American Dream is a one-act play that premiered at the York Playhouse in 1961. It satirizes American family dynamics in the 1960s, blending elements of the absurd with "kitchen sink" realism. Kitchen sink realism was developed...
Fifth Business is a novel by the famed Canadian author, playwright and professor Robertson Davies. Published in 1970, it is the first work in his Deptford Trilogy.
The novel follows the life of its narrator and protagonist, Dunstan Ramsey, and...
John and Elizabeth Sherrill, two American Christian authors, first heard about Corrie ten Boom while writing another book, “God’s Smugglers.” The subject of the biography, Brother Andrew, had travelled with Corrie during mission trips to Vietnam....
Born in the state of Massachusetts in 1874, Amy Lowell is an important figure in the annals of American poetry. Being the youngest of five children, Lowell and her siblings were born into a well-off family. In fact, in New England, the name Lowell...
Published in 2012, Dolly is a novel by the British author Susan Hill. The novel follows the path of a common horror plot - that of a doll that is recognized for more than it is. Most of Hill's books are horror and suspense stories like this one,...
Tim Turnbull is a poet from the north of England. He was born in Yorkshire in 1960 and started writing poetry in the early Nineties after being employed in forestry. His poems are almost all intended to be performed rather than read to oneself in...
Dandelion Wine is a novel first published in 1957 by Ray Bradbury, an American writer famous for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Throughout his long career he was awarded many prizes, including the 2004 National Medal of...
We Are All Made of Molecules is a fiction novel for teen readers by Canadian author and screenwriter Susin Nielsen. It tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy called Stewart, who is a child prodigy with no social skills, and Ashley, the most...
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times tells the story of Chaplin's iconic Little Tramp as he struggles to survive in a newly modernized world. The Tramp starts out working at a factory on an assembly line, but the new technology and oppressive...