Chickamauga is Cherokee for “bad water,” the name a branch of the tribe gave to the creek alongside which they lived in the northwest corner of Georgia when they were decimated by an outbreak of smallpox. Subsequent historians dubbed Chickamauga… Read More ›
Shirley Jackson’s (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) short sketch Charles is frequently anthologized primarily because of the appeal of its protagonist, Laurie Hymen, whose first days at kindergarten prefigure his rebellion against the school system and against authority… Read More ›
By the Waters of Babylon, first published in 1937, is a prescient science fiction story set in an indeterminate, postapocalyptic era, not uncommon for this genre; this lack of detailed setting suggests an unstable physical and social environment. Only gradually… Read More ›
In 1938, when Richard Wright published Bright and Morning Star in the magazine New Masses, and in 1940, when he added it as the last of the stories in a collection entitled Uncle Tom’s Children, he did not yet anticipate the… Read More ›
Box Seat is perhaps the most provocatively ambiguous short story included in the African-American writer Jean Toomer’s Cane, a collection of poems, sketches, and dramatic vignettes. It includes such strange lyricisms as “shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon—the gleaming… Read More ›