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.
Quiet Torrential Sound is a very short play requiring a limited cast and setting published by Joan Ackermann in 1995. The play was also published in its entirety as part of the compilation volume, Ten Minute Plays from the Actor Theater of...
Michael Symmons Roberts, born in Preston, England in 1963, is one of Britain's foremost contemporary poets. Alongside teaching - Symmons is the Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, Symmons has won an array of literary prizes...
Before her tragically premature early death from cancer at age 48, Michele Serros was one of the rising stars of the increasingly popular and influential publishing niche of Hispanic-American literature. She was a leading member of what is...
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is a nonfiction book written by acclaimed journalist Katherine Boo, first published in 2012.
India is growing at a faster pace than ever. This growth has been documented...
Jamaica Kincaid wrote At the Bottom of the River, which consists of thoughtful, poetic short stories. This book was published in 2010. Within these short stories, Kincaid allows readers to explore the dichotomies of life.
In her narratives,...
Too Far to Go is a collection of short stories that were written by John Updike and published in 1979. They were published at the same time when a television movie was released of these stories. John Updike is an American author who writes novels,...
More popularly known by its German title Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy actually covers four volumes that were published over a period spanning 1867 to 1905. The final three volumes were all published after Marx’s...
John Marrant was a black man born in 1755 in New York. He was literate, and he could also play the violin and French horn. He also converted to Christianity, to the chagrin of his parents and family. He was forced to move away from them, and he...
“Dave’s Neckliss” (1889) is a short story written by one of the first African-American authors to enjoy success as a writer of fiction: Charles Chesnutt. His reputation was established on the basis of what came to be known as “dialect stories”...
“The Freedom of the Will” is an essay by Desiderius Erasmus, otherwise known as Erasmus of Rotterdam or just simply Erasmus. Erasmus was a Dutch Christian Humanist considered one of the greatest scholarly minds of the Renaissance. In 1520 Martin...
The Short Fiction of D.H. Lawrence is a collection of Lawrence’s short stories. Lawrence was an English novelist who was a prolific writer and artist, and this collection emphasizes his perspective on how modernization and the world after the...
Jack Finney first published a short story titled “Sleep No More” in Colliers Magazine in 1954. A year later, that short story had been fleshed out into novel length and given the lurid, but exponentially more marketable title The Body Snatchers. A...
Gita Mehta is the author of two previous books, Karma Cola and Raj. Karma Cola is a documentary satire while Raj is a work of historical fiction.
A River Sutra is a lyrical series of interlocking stories that transport the reader to a contemporary...
My Sainted Aunts was written and published (1992) by Bulbul Sharma, an Indian painter and writer born in 1952. Sharma spent majority of her life in Bhilia, and went to Moscow for her studies. Upon her return to India in 1973, she pursued a career...
James A. Michener is the author of The Bridge at Andau, which was originally published during 1957. It was published again during 1985 by Fawcett. Michener details a true account of the Hungarian Revolution. He talks about the city of Budapest...
Published in 2010, Vida is a collection of short stories that were written by Patricia Engel. The stories are narrated in first person, and the danger of anecdotal fiction is the lack of interesting descriptions and emotional involvement for the...
Woodcuts of Women: Stories is a collection of ten short stories written by the American writer Dagoberto Gilb and published in the year 2003. The short stories present ten stories and have as its main subject the interaction between men and women....
Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande was not only was instrumental in bringing the writer a Nobel Prize, but is regarded as both his own individual magnum open and the singular defining masterwork in the history of Symbolist drama. Heavily...
The Enuma Elish is the name given the collected myths passed down through the oral tradition that describe the creation myth of the ancient Babylonian civilization. The title that has been given to ancient manuscripts is a reference—what is termed...
Phil Klay is an American writer who was raised in New York, U.S.A and graduated from Dartmouth College. He served as a veteran of the U.S Marine Corps and a Public Affairs officer in the Iraq war (2007-2008). His service in Iraq gave him the idea...
Swamplandia! was written by Karen Russell and was published in 2011. The protagonist is Ava Bigtree, who is only thirteen, and her family owns Swamplandia!, a gator theme park in the Everglades (which is in Florida). The Bigtrees are alligator...
Hangover Square is Patrick Hamilton’s most successful and well-known novel, thought far from his most famous literary creation. Better known as a playwright, Hamilton wrote the original stage drama Rope, which Alfred Hitchcock later adapted for...
The Children of Men was written by P. D. James, an award-winning author of more than twenty books. Many of her books have been adapted into films and have been internationally broadcasted on television. This book was first published during 1992...
Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a testament to the commitment of needing to write and a slap in the face to every author who still can’t finish a novel despite writing on a computer while seated at a large desk. This narrative was Zora Neale Hurston’s first...