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.
"The Magic Mountain" is a philosophical novel of the German writer Thomas Mann, published by Fischer in 1924.
"The Magic Mountain" for its many motifs has a lot in common with the earlier story of Mann's "Tristan" (1903), in which the protagonist...
James Agee was an American author and a very influential film critic. He is known for an autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), for which he was posthumously awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize. He had begun writing A Death in the...
"Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." is a powerful and poignant memoir by Luis J. Rodriguez, a Chicano writer, and activist from Los Angeles. The book chronicles Rodriguez's upbringing in the city's gang-ridden neighborhoods and his...
The Lives of Animals is a unique work in the canon of South African author J.M. Coetzee. Published in 1999, the work is an amalgamation of non-fiction and fiction that come together for the purpose of stimulating discussion about the underlying...
"Anansi Boys" is a book penned by the talented British writer Neil Gaiman. It made its debut in 2005. Stands alone as a captivating tale that unfolds within the universe as Gaimans earlier work "American Gods." This novel masterfully combines...
Dispatchesis a New Journalism book by Michael Herr published in 1977. The autobiographical work details Herr's harrowing experiences as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War.
Prior to the book's release, many Americans had a very narrow...
Captain Correlli's Mandolin was written by Louis de Bernieres, a British novelist who lets his wild imagination shine through his writing. This fiction novel was originally published during 1994 and was later published during 1995 by Vintage....
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...
Civilization and Its Discontents, which Freud wrote in the summer of 1929, compares "civilized" and "savage" human lives in order to reflect upon the meaning of civilization in general. Like many of his later works, the essay generalizes the...
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...
In 1798, Coleridge and longtime friend William Wordsworth anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, a work which officially began the Romantic movement in English poetry. Though not the first of Colerdige's published works, Lyrical Ballads...
Tayeb Salih published Season of Migration to the North in 1966, ten years after Sudan received its independence from the British empire on January 1, 1956. The novel is heavily influenced by the tumultuous politics of the period. The 1950s 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...
