ShmoopTube

Folk tales are all about conveying a deeper meaning—no banjos required. Arabian Nights is one of the most famous collections, so get ready to lea...

In Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, Death narrates the story of one girl who lived during the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it's kind of a downer—bu...

Crime and Punishment is all about a boy killing for money, literally, and then spending the rest of the book trying to hide it. Although the book c...

No HBO? Well then, how does a horror short story writing contest sound? And the winner is...drum roll, please...Mary Shelley. You go, girl. And tha...

Lisbeth Salander is a tough nut to crack. Hero? Villain? Somewhere in the middle? We're not sure, but we're hesitant to accuse her of anything...es...

Life of Pi tells the story of a boy and a tiger trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days... or does it?

What's the deal with "Nectar in a Sieve"? Shmoop amongst yourselves.

Maybe it's just us, but we don't like to put off our dreams. After all, who knows? Tomorrow night, we might not want to have hands that are giant m...

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. In our opinion, however, it should be popped into the microwave for about 30-45 seconds.

This video discusses Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a negative utopia in which women have no control over the government o...

Books become classics because they either reflect on or influence the world around us. As was the casewith Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Of...

Guy in a black leotard. In a cage. Not eating. Weird? Yes. Popular? Absolutely. Kafka's short story includes iconic artist-figures: a mouse singer...

Why would Yehuda Amichai write an entire book on the diameter of a bomb and the diameter of its range? Is he trying to convey a message? Is his boo...

She was just a girl who found herself in some unimaginably awful circumstances. If you feel like gaining some valuable perspective on the drama in...

Don't fly too close to the sun, Shmoopers.

Whenever you start regretting the choices you've made in your life, just review Oedipus' story, and you'll start feeling a heck of a lot better.

Shmoop is our shepherd.

The Mahabha-what-now? Although you may not be as familiar with this epic text as you are with the Bible, it's just as famous in other parts of the...

Every culture has some idea about where we all came from. Surprisingly, very few of them hypothesize that we are all simply figments of Lady Gaga�...

Today we aren't looking for the most virtuous person, or most likeable, but rather the most disturbing. Will it be Echo, the nymph who is doomed to...

Anyone who has ever bought anything from IKEA knows this to be true.

Odysseus should have checked out How to Return Home from War for Dummies. Step One: Do not mess with the son of a god. Actually, no need to read on—this act will come back to haunt you for...oh, say, 10 years.

How would you feel if you lost a diamond necklace that you borrowed? We don't know your life, but we'd feel pretty crappy about it. In "The Necklace," Matilde borrows a necklace to look rich for a ball—and loses it. She and her husband spiral into debt from the cost of replacing it, only to realize...well, watch the video to find out the rest.

This story goes as you might expect—a sprinkling of science, endless amounts of death and despair, and a whole lot of ugly monster. Oh joyous day!

In this memoir, Eliezer struggles with his relationship with his father during the Holocaust.

One of the bestselling books of all time? Yes, please.

Pious Aeneas goes from minor character in the Trojan War to founder of Rome, the city that conquered the world, meetin' ladies and experiencing major duty-induced guilt trips along the way. We wonder what Virgil could have done for Robin, Batman's perpetual sidekick...

Pious Aeneas strikes again. This time, with more destiny and hand-to-hand combat! (Of course, since we're talking about Aeneas, he's still harping about that whole duty thing.)

A dead man floats to shore. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke or a horror movie, but wait: it gets weirder. He's super tall, super good-looking, and all the local villagers get hearts in their eyes at the mere thought of him. He's still dead, though, so where does the story go from here?

So that's why Brad Pitt looks so fit in Troy! (The movie, not the city-state.) He's related to the gods, just like Achilles was. We always knew knew it was our lame mortal genes and not our refusal to hit the gym that was preventing us from building muscles like that.

We'd all like to think our families would accept us if we turned into giant bugs, but for Gregor Samsa, that was not quite the case.

All Okonkwo was asking for was a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Granted, swinging your machete around may not be the nicest way to ask, but still. The guy deserved better.

We like having rights, and we like not being genetically engineered or altered. Check out this video on three dystopian works to see why you simply have to agree with us—no dissonance allowed.

Did you hear the one about the guy who killed his dad and married his mom? Yeah, that’s not a joke, it’s Oedipus’ life. This video summarizes the Greek tragedy Oedipus the King as Oedipus investigates who murdered the old king (spoiler alert: he did). The moral of the story? Don’t investigate something you don’t want to know the answer to and believe the blind fortune teller Teiresias—he’s probably right.

If you associate "night" with darkness and depression and danger…then maybe you're not the happiest person to be around when the sun goes down. But you are on the right track when it comes to Elie Wiesel's autobiography. Prepare for some serious darkness, Shmoopers.

This dude decapitated a creature with snakes for hair and married a beautiful maiden that he saved from a sea monster. Let's see how many of you can beat that.

Would you like to be immortal? We expected as much. But how about ifyou were ugly and your mother tossed you out of your home, giving you a limp for all eternity? Yeah, bet living forever doesn't sound so great under those conditions.

A lot of you probably picture Hera as this heartless, bitter, vengeful…woman. We're here to show you that there's more to her than that. By the end of this video we'll have you all yelling, "Girl power!"

It's so nice when a poem is straight with you right from the get-go, isn't it? If more poems were this considerate, "The Road Not Taken" might have been called "I'm So Glad I'm Not One of Those Follower Types" and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" might have been titled "Freedom is Awesome."