After its initial appearance in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1961, “The Machine That Won the War” was republished in Nightfall and Other Stories (1961) and Robot Dreams (1986), and in innumerable student anthologies. The machine,… Read More ›
The initial story in Susan Minot’s 1989 collection Lust and Other Stories, this short tale sets the stage in both theme and subject for the stories that will follow. The 12 stories portray different types of estrangement in heterosexual relationships:… Read More ›
This children’s story, a part of Clifton’s book The Lucky Stone, is more about the community that is created by elders sharing stories with children than the plot of those stories themselves. As is often the case in working-class literature… Read More ›
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, Love Medicine began as a short story. Its author, Louise Erdrich, in close collaboration with her husband, Michael Dorris, planned it as a novel, yet many readers view it as… Read More ›
Grace Paley’s autobiographical story is a humorous account of events that transpired when she was a New York City grammar school student chosen to narrate the Christmas play because she had the loudest voice of any child in the school…. Read More ›
As were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949. It may well be the world’s most frequently… Read More ›
Like Willa Cather’s novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady, a novella-length work, is linked with the landscape of the western American plains. A Lost Lady is set in the Colorado prairie town of Sweet Water,… Read More ›
“Lost in the Funhouse” begins with young Ambrose, who was possibly conceived in “Night-Sea Journey,” now an adolescent, traveling to Ocean City, Maryland, to celebrate Independence Day. Accompanying him through his eventual initiation are his parents; his uncle Karl; his… Read More ›
As part of the modernist imperative to “make it new,” writers of the 1920s and 1930s consistently wreaked havoc with existing genre conventions. “Poems” no longer rhymed and scanned predictably; essays and reviews had a subjective, even idiosyncratic, slant; plays… Read More ›
Originally published in the March 1951 issue of Commentary magazine and subsequently included in collections of Bellow’s short fiction, “Looking for Mr Green” is one of Saul Bellow’s best early stories. It anticipates the unmistakable and abundant sense of happy… Read More ›
One of Eudora Welty’s frequently anthologized stories, “Livvie” focuses on the title character, a 24-year-old AfricanAmerican woman whose old and ill husband, Solomon, lies dying in their home. Solomon had married Livvie when she was 16, and, although the narrator… Read More ›
Pressured by his publisher, McClure, to write more Civil War works after the success of his novel The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane crafted with some difficulty “The Little Regiment.” The story, which Crane identified as a novelette divided… Read More ›
Originally published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (December 20, 1896), Lilacs centers on the annual visit of an opera singer, Adrienne Farival, to the Sacré-Coeur convent school she attended in her youth. In the beginning of the story, Adrienne makes… Read More ›
Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased… Read More ›
As a devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor felt her calling in life was to convert her readers through her stories. As with many of O’Connor’s stories, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” readers must struggle to define what… Read More ›
Life in the Iron-Mills, an account of the squalid life, blighted aspirations, and aborted potential of the Welsh mill worker and primitive artist Hugh Wolfe, is rightly celebrated as both a powerful indictment of unrestrained industrial capitalism and a superior… Read More ›
The historical record of lesbianism in the American short story has not received the same amount and depth of attention from historians and literary critics as has that of male homosexuality. Moreover, critics still disagree about what constitutes lesbian writing…. Read More ›
Legends of the Fall is the first of Jim Harrison’s three novella collections and, as the other two, it contains narratives: Legends of the Fall, Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name. Harrison recalled, “I always loved the… Read More ›
Washington Irving’s famous opening to this story, which first appeared in The Sketch Book in 1820, evokes the dreamlike, almost mystical quality of the Hudson River Valley. It also takes the reader to Sleepy Hollow, where almost anything might have… Read More ›
Originally published in the Kenyon Review (December 1, 1950), this story depicts conflicts among cultures, genders, and generations. Miss Mari Sasagawara, the 33-year-old unmarried daughter of a Buddhist priest, is a famous Nisei ballerina who suffers the indignities of living… Read More ›
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