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 Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was published as part of Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which came out in 1820. It is probably the most famous story from the collection, and it is considered one of Irving’s most important...
The Things They Carried, published in 1990, was a runaway hit and is included in many high school and university curricula. O’Brien has called the form of the work “meta-fiction,” indicating that it is neither non-fiction nor quite fiction. The...
"Barn Burning" was originally published in the June, 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is a prequel to the "Snopes" trilogy, made up of the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). In 1980, "Barn Burning" was made into...
We now know of Cormac McCarthy as an author who produces high-quality work and sells an incredible number of books, and as a Pulitzer-prize winning author. Prior to The Crossing, though, McCarthy was a virtually unknown author whose work went...
“From 1975 to 1979 - through execution, starvation, disease and forced labour - the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population.” From Author’s Note in First They Killed My...
Shantaram is the action-filled story of Lin, a character based very closely on the author, Gregory David Roberts. The novel chronicles approximately seven years in Roberts' amazing life, from his arrival in Bombay in 1982 until his departure from...
Fatal Attraction is a gripping and intense psychological thriller movie in 1987. It was an adaptation by James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer of a 1980 made-for-television short film also written by Dearden for the British market.
The film is directed...
The Oedipus myth goes back as far as Homer and beyond, with sources varying about plot details. The play that Sophocles presents is merely the end of a dramatically long story, and some plot background must be provided to make the story...
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James's Theatre in London on February 14, 1895, only a month after Wilde's previous success, An Ideal Husband. The packed-in audience rollicked with laughter at the on-stage...
Rabbit, Run was, to put it bluntly, the book that made John Updike - a mere twenty-eight years old at the time - a star. When it was published in 1960, Rabbit, Run heralded a distinctly new voice in American literature. The blending of precision...
Grimms Fairy Tales refers to a collection of stories released by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early to mid 1800’s. The first volume of the first edition was released in 1812. It contained 86 stories. An additional volume with 70 more stories...
Eclipse is the third installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on August 7, 2007 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.
The narrative begins immediately following the events of New...
New Moonis the second installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on September 6th, 2006 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.
New Moonreceived favorable critical reception, quickly...
“A comedy – three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.”
One month before Chekhov finished writing The Seagull, this is the synopsis he offered to Suvorin, a rich...
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is Alice Walker's 1983 collection of 36 essays composed from 1966 and 1982. At the start of the collection, Walker coined the term "womanist", which refers to a black feminist or another feminist of color. The...
No-No Boy is a novel written by Japanese American writer John Okada and was published in 1957. The novel is focused on a Japanese American man, Ichiro Yamada, a prisoner who has recently been released and is trying to find his way in the world...
In 1762, Rousseau published The Social Contract and another major work, Emile, or On Education. Both works criticized religion, and were consequently banned in France and his native Geneva. As a result, Rousseau was forced to flee his homeland and...
Marlowe, while he was still at the University of Cambridge, translated works by the Classical Roman poets Ovid and Lucan. The scholarly reading and translation of ancient Latin (and sometimes Greek) was required of all students in all disciplines...
Dream Psychology (Psychoanalysis for Beginners) is a book written by the famed neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The book introduced the concept of dream interpretation as the process of understanding one’s unconscious thoughts...
Written in Latin between 1 B.C.E. and 2 C.E., The Art of Love is a three-book didactic elegy on how to seduce and maintain a relationship with a woman or man. The Art of Love contains various allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, especially the...
The second work of one of the most renowned and prominent Canadian writers of the 20th and 21st centuries caused a lot of confusion among literary critics. The main reason of their perplexity was the fact that Alice Munro was a master of the short...
Child of God (1973) depicts the life of a violent young outcast in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee. McCarthy's inspiration for the novel came from history, especially a historical figure whom, in a 1992 interview, he refused to name. Despite its...
When Edith Wharton was a young girl, she was stricken with typhoid and spent time recuperating in Germany. During that period of convalescence, Wharton chanced to read what she later described as a “robber story” that left her in the grips of a...
"Watchmen" is a comic book consisting of the twelve issues published by DC Comics in the period from September 1986 to October 1987, and later reprinted in a graphic novel. The authors of the series - a writer Alan Moore, an artist Dave Gibbons,...
