Newest Study Guides

The Sign of the Beaver is a children's novel written by renowned author Elizabeth George Spear. The story is set in the 1760s in the woods of Maine, close to the Penobscot River. It is commonly set as required reading for elementary school...

Elizabeth George Speare was born in 1908 and died in 1994. A novelist best known for her historical fiction, Speare won two Newberry awards for children's literature. Published in 1958, The Witch of Blackbird Pond was Speare's second historical...

Dream Stuff is an anthology of 9 short stories written by David Malouf. It was first published in Australia by Chatto and Windus in 2000. An edition for the United States was also released by Vintage books in 2001.

In the anthology, Malouf tackles...

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler tells the story of Tess, a 22-year-old woman who moves from Ohio to New York City and becomes a waitress at Union Square Cafe. There are prominent parallels between the protagonist and Danler’s own experiences...

Before the Fall, written by Noah Hawley, tells the story of a starving artist with a passion for painting named Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old boy born to a wealthy family surviving a deadly plane crash into the ocean. They are the only ones...

Emma Cline’s The Girls is a coming-of-age story inspired by the infamous Manson Family murders. The novel is set in Northern Carolina in the late 1960s. Its main character is Evie Boyd, a youthful recruit to a dangerous cult. Evie, naive and...

After his Last Policeman trilogy, Ben Winters started pondering the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other deaths caused by racial divisions. Winters decided to take the abstract and metaphorical idea that slavery is still with us in...

The author, Alan Judd, wrote The Kaiser's Last Kiss in 2003, a 208 page novel that deals with a fictional storyline that references historical events and has many historical resonances. The book is set in 1940 during the second World War and...

In his collection of memoirs, composed in a matter of seconds before his demise in 1776, David Hume put forth the accompanying expression. "Around the same time 1752 was distributed, at London, my Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals; which...

This work is essentially a 4346-line poem from the Middle English period. As the name suggests, it is "alliterative" and is a retelling of the legend of King Arthur. This work has been dated from about 1400; in terms of documentation, the most...

When one reads folk legends and fairy tales, there is always in the back of the mind a niggling little questioning of whether there just might not located somewhere deep in the past an actual historical basis. Certainly, tales of heroines like ...

“To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian” is a poem that was written by Arundhathi Subramaniam. Subramaniam is an Indian poet who is also an artist and lives in Mumbai and Coimbatore. She works to capture spirituality and...

Written by Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew was published in 1805. The work was written in French in the 1760s and 70s, but it was not published during Diderot’s lifetime. Von Goethe translated the text into Germany in 1805 and it was published...

Lemon Sky was first produced in 1970. Lanford Wilson had first developed it with Michael Douglas at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwright Conference in 1968. The play would be presented in a stage reading. It was well received by...

Streamers was first performed in 1976. The work is a play written by David Rabe that is set in an American army barracks. The men there are preparing to sail out to fight in southeast Asia. The play highlights the interactions between a group of...

Topdog/Underdog is a play that was written by Suzan-Lori Parks and premiered in 2001 in New York City. This play was well received, having won Parks the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as collecting a few other awards. Suzan-Lori Parks is an...

Essentially a sentimental novel written by Henry Fielding, Amelia (1751) was the last and perhaps the most intense of his works. Amelia chronicles the life of the eponymous heroine and Captain William Booth post-wedlock.

Amelia weaves a tapestry...

Timberlake Wertenbaker is a New York born, British writer raised in France. A daughter or a writer and a journalist, Wertenbaker’s interest in writing and language is no surprise and having started her career lecturing in Greek and French,...

Alternately titled The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight, Double is the fourth novel published by British children's/YA novelist Jenny Valentine. Valentine is a previous winner of the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction for her 2007 debut novel,...

George Brant's play comes out of the true story of Mary the elephant, hung in Erwin Tennessee on September 13, 1916. Erwin, Tennessee is the actual town where the events occured, included the young man being trampled to death by Mary and her...

Grounded is a full-length play written by George Brant. The premiere was mounted at the London’s Gate Theatre and proved so successful that it has since been translated into nearly a dozen languages for productions around the globe. Grounded won...

Written in 2003, this novel is about a set of different topics which are considered in detail. The book raises many questions, but there is no doubt that this story is rich in ambiguity. Since the author avoids discussing and explaining his works...

All That is Solid Melts Into Air is an academic text that was written by Marshall Berman. It was crafted between the years 1971 and 1981, and it was published in 1982 in New York City. The majority of the book looks at the sometimes incompatible...

William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy holds a distinctive place in American literature. With its publication by Isaiah Thomas and Company of Boston in 1789, The Power of Sympathy became the very first novel written by an American that was set...