Since its publication in her collection of short stories The World Over (1936), Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” has been frequently anthologized. Masterfully constructed with multiple narrative voices and in a satirical tone, “Roman Fever” is the culmination of a lifetime… Read More ›
The themes and elements of “The Rockpile” all share similarities with James Baldwin’s own experiences as a young man in Harlem. Baldwin followed in the footsteps of his stepfather, a storefront preacher, and preached from age 14 to age 17;… Read More ›
Conversion experiences are quite common in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Many of her characters realize personal emptiness and seek fulfillment in Christian rituals, hoping to discover a loving God who is more accepting and caring than the people who… Read More ›
Appearing in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, “Rip Van Winkle” was an immediate popular success. In retrospect, it helped refute the infamous question posed by the British critic Sydney Smith: “Who, in the four corners of… Read More ›
The four Rhoda Manning stories in Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), provide a perfect example of Ellen Gilchrist’s art: her laconic and pellucid prose, her indelible and oftentimes heavily ironized characters, her mastery of… Read More ›
The Red Badge of Courage, the Novella long considered Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War. Although celebrated both for the realism of its style and for the authenticity of its battle scenes,… Read More ›
One of Henry James’s most anthologized stories, The Real Thing was first published on April 16, 1892, in Black and White and later reprinted in the New York edition of James’s works (1909), a comprehensive, multivolume collection of James’s works…. Read More ›
In a thought-provoking allegory written nearly two years after “The Birth-Mark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a first-person narrator to introduce “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” This nameless narrator tells the reader that he translated the story, originally entitled “Beatrice: ou la Belle Empoisonneuse” (Beatrice:… Read More ›
Margaret Laurence’s “The Rain Child,” set in Ghana during the approach of independence in 1957, exposes a host of issues of identity complicated by historical, national, racial, psychological, and linguistic issues. A story from The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (1963),… Read More ›
“The Quicksand,” published in The Descent of Man (1904), portrays the self-examination of the wealthy Mrs. Quentin as she reaches out to help her son and his girlfriend. The instability of the ground upon which she has constructed her life… Read More ›
One of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “tales of ratiocination” whose emphasis on deductive reasoning became the basis for the modern detective story, The Purloined Letter features Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the archetype of the modern fictional detective who always outwits… Read More ›
Generally known for her fantasy, science fiction, and young-adult fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin insists that her writing is not bound by genre definitions. The Professor’s Houses was first published in the New Yorker (1982), included in The Best American… Read More ›
“The Pit and the Pendulum” first appeared in Edgar Allan Poe’s collection of short stories The Gift in 1843. The story is a terrifying tale of suspense in which Poe captures the horrors of confinement and torture. The main character,… Read More ›
The Persistence of Desire was first published in the July 11, 1959, issue of the New Yorker, was republished in Olinger Stories: A Selection (1964), and is collected in John Updike, The Early Stories 1953– 1975 (New York: Knopf, 2003)…. Read More ›
First published in the New Yorker on January 31, 1948, and later the first story in the 1953 collection Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” begins with Muriel Glass sitting in a Florida hotel room fielding a telephone call… Read More ›
First published in the January 27, 1997, issue of the New Yorker and then in the collection Birds of America (1999), Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That” is a riveting story about a baby diagnosed with kidney cancer, the paralyzing effects… Read More ›
Eventually part of the original Before the Gringo Came (1894) story collection and the later 1903 The Splendid Idle Forties Stories of Old California collection, “The Pearls of Loreto” first appeared in Harper’s Weekly in April 1893. The second of… Read More ›
Published in McClure’s, “Paul’s Case” was included in Willa Cather’s first collection, The Troll Garden (1905), a volume of seven stories about artists. “Paul’s Case” is Cather’s most anthologized story and one of the few she allowed to be reprinted… Read More ›
“An often ignored collection of stories that appeared, unceremoniously, in 1932,” The Pastures of Heaven can be considered the cornerstone of much of John Steinbeck’s later, great fiction (Nagel xxix). Upon publication, although it was ignored for the most part… Read More ›
“Parker’s Back” is an account of a man who, having obsessively covered most of his body with tattoos, surrenders to an impulse to have Christ’s face inscribed on his back. The last short story that Flannery O’Connor finished, and one… Read More ›
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