Study Guides
Free literature notes for 408 books. Each guide includes chapter summaries, character analysis, theme breakdowns, diction review, and 30 essay questions.
1984
George Orwell · 1949 · 10 chapters
The definitive warning about totalitarianism — written by a dying man who had already survived fascism, Stalinism, and the BBC.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962 · 7 chapters
A novel that forces you to learn the language of violence — then asks whether the state has any right to take it away.
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen · 1879 · 6 chapters
The most consequential door-slam in literary history — a woman walks out on her husband and changes the theater forever.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 1929 · 8 chapters
Hemingway's most devastating love story — where war and biology conspire to destroy everything men pretend to control.
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines · 1993 · 9 chapters
A teacher who doesn't believe in his own purpose must teach a condemned man to die with dignity — and in doing so, learns what it means to live.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015 · 8 chapters
A novel that demands to know how much a human being can endure — and refuses to give a comfortable answer.
A Long Walk to Water
Linda Sue Park · 2010 · 8 chapters
A true story of survival across two timelines: a boy walks 1,500 miles across a war-torn continent so that, decades later, a girl will not have to.
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman · 2012 · 14 chapters
The grumpiest man in the world turns out to be the most loving one — if you can survive meeting him.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1596 · 7 chapters
Shakespeare's wildest comedy asks one devastating question: if love is just a spell, does it matter that you felt it?
A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness (from an idea by Siobhan Dowd) · 2011 · 7 chapters
A boy whose mother is dying summons a monster made of yew — the tree that grows in graveyards and produces the chemical used in chemotherapy. The monster does not come to heal. It comes to make Conor tell the truth.
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster · 1924 · 8 chapters
The definitive novel of British imperialism: a story about whether two human beings on opposite sides of an empire can ever actually meet.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 1916 · 5 chapters
The novel that grew up with its hero — the prose literally evolves from baby talk to aesthetic philosophy as Stephen Dedalus forges a soul.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving · 1989 · 6 chapters
Owen Meany is the smallest boy in Gravesend, New Hampshire. He speaks entirely in capital letters. He believes God has chosen him for a purpose. When his foul ball kills his best friend's mother, a chain of events begins that will prove him right.
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry · 1959 · 6 chapters
A Black family in 1950s Chicago fights over a $10,000 insurance check — and every argument is really about whether Black Americans are allowed to dream.
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 1929 · 6 chapters
A woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction — but the sentence is only the beginning. Behind it lies four centuries of locked doors, burned manuscripts, invented sisters, and the long material history of why genius requires a bank account.
A Separate Peace
John Knowles · 1959 · 8 chapters
A story about two boys at prep school during WWII — and how the most destructive war Gene fights happens entirely inside himself.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams · 1947 · 9 chapters
A fading Southern belle arrives at her sister's cramped New Orleans apartment — and the collision between her illusions and her brother-in-law's brutal honesty destroys them both.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · 1859 · 10 chapters
The most famous opening in English prose introduces a story where a drunken wastrel chooses death so the man he envies can live — and makes you believe every word of it.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2007 · 8 chapters
Two women in Kabul — born a generation apart, brought together by a cruel man, bound by a love that becomes the most radical act of resistance either can imagine.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith · 1943 · 10 chapters
A girl in the Brooklyn tenements discovers that reading, writing, and sheer stubbornness can grow through concrete — just like the Tree of Heaven in her backyard.
A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin · 1968 · 10 chapters
A young wizard unleashes a shadow he cannot name, and must chase it to the end of the world to discover it is himself.
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle · 1962 · 12 chapters
Rejected by 26 publishers, this science-fiction fable about a misfit girl who saves the universe by loving her father became one of the most banned books in American classrooms.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1884 · 10 chapters
The most controversial masterpiece in American literature — a runaway boy and an escaped slave rafting down the Mississippi, asking whether conscience can overrule the law.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 1929 · 8 chapters
The most devastating anti-war novel ever written — by a man who was there at 18, and who the Nazis tried to silence by burning every copy they could find.
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren · 1946 · 5 chapters
A man who believed in nothing watches a man who believed in everything seize a state by the throat — and discovers that the nothing he believed in was just the truth he refused to look at.
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr · 2014 · 8 chapters
A blind French girl and a German orphan find each other across the rubble of WWII — and Doerr asks whether goodness can survive a world determined to destroy it.
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy · 1992 · 5 chapters
A sixteen-year-old Texan rides into Mexico to find the Old West. He finds love, prison, and the end of everything he believed about himself.
Amal Unbound
Aisha Saeed · 2018 · 0 chapters
A twelve-year-old Pakistani girl loses her freedom to a feudal landlord — and discovers that knowledge is the one thing he cannot confiscate.
American Born Chinese
Gene Luen Yang · 2006 · 8 chapters
Three stories about hiding who you are — a Chinese folk hero, a second-generation kid, and a sitcom nightmare — crash together in a twist that redefines all of them.
American Pastoral
Philip Roth · 1997 · 8 chapters
The most American of fathers raises the most American of daughters — and she builds a bomb.