Joh Cheever’s account of Neddy Merrill, a middleaged man who traverses the expanse of an upscale suburban county by swimming a sequence of pools, is a highly ironic inversion of a conventional elegiac theme, the athlete dying young. His journey… Read More ›
The first-person narrator and protagonist Yunior, in the comic tale of infidelity “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” is someone with whom we could easily see Junot Díaz himself growing up. He is a young Latin American man whose street… Read More ›
Published in his first major short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? “The Student’s Wife” marks Raymond Carver’s first use of insomnia, a plot device and theme he returned to in later stories. As Ernest Fontana notes, insomnia… Read More ›
“Strong Horse Tea,” a woman oppressed by racism, classism, and ignorance looks to white culture for magical cures while rejecting the home remedies of her community. Rannie Toomer, a mother whose baby, Snooks, is dying of double pneumonia and whooping… Read More ›
As many of the stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio do, “The Strength of God” illustrates Anderson’s understanding of the grotesque as a character’s limited or distorted perspective of reality. As the old man observes in the opening story titled… Read More ›
Originally entitled “The Dream of an Hour” when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), “The Story of an Hour” has since become one of Kate Chopin’s most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, “Story”… Read More ›
In terms of both his life and his work, Peter Taylor (1917–1994) proves a good representative of the literary generation that provided a transition between the southern renaissance and the post–southern renaissance period. Born into an extended political clan with… Read More ›
One of Edith Wharton’s many stories of New York, The Spark was published with the subtitle The ’Sixties as the third of four volumes in a boxed set, Old New York, in 1924. This novella is the story of Hayley… Read More ›
Edith Wharton’s “Souls Belated” centers on Lydia Tillotson, a divorced woman, who travels with Ralph Gannett, a successful writer, but refuses to marry him so that she can maintain her self-esteem. McDowell detects the implied contradictory nature of marriage as… Read More ›
“Sonny’s Blues” is a first-person account by an AfricanAmerican schoolteacher trying to come to terms with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz musician and sometime heroin addict. Some of James Baldwin’s thematic preoccupations can be ascertained by noting the subtle… Read More ›
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire in August 1936 and is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most frequently anthologized short stories. It opens with the protagonist, Harry, a washed-up writer who has gone to Africa with his wife,… Read More ›
Originally published in Vanity Fair in 1983 and collected in Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories in 1986, Ann Beattie’s “The Snow” is about remembering and forgetting, and about the art of storytelling itself. Only three pages long and… Read More ›
In the 1951 essay “About Ed Ricketts,” published as part of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck records his recollection of the composition of his short story “The Snake” and identifies the occurrence as an actual event… Read More ›
This story, which initially appeared in Ernest J. Gaines’s collection entitled Bloodlines, has become a classic contemporary bildungsoman. Powerfully told with a convincing use of African-American dialect and dialogue, the story features nine-year-old James and the lessons he learns from… Read More ›
In the story by Ernest Hemingway, the setting is Africa, where Margot and Francis Macomber have hired the English guide Robert Wilson to take them on a big-game hunt. The Macomber marriage is on shaky ground, but “Margot was too… Read More ›
The name Shiloh customarily refers to the civil war battle near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, where nearly 24,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were wounded or killed on April 6 and April 7, 1862. In Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1982 story, however, the… Read More ›
At the height of World War II, William Faulkner wrote a pair of compelling stories exploring the viability and importance of America as a nation. Though the United States as a whole was his theme in these two wartime stories,… Read More ›
First published in the New Yorker in 1975 and included in Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards, “Separating” was incorporated with other stories featuring Joan and Richard Maple in Too Far to Go (1979), a short story cycle chronicling… Read More ›
As a 20th-century comic writer, James Thurber had few peers. Not only is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” considered his best story, but the term Walter Mitty also has entered the language as a metaphor for an ordinary man… Read More ›
The ghost story “Sea Oak” presents George Saunders at his most biting and also most tender. The story takes place in a housing development, Sea Oak, and centers around the unnamed narrator, his sister and cousin (Min and Jade, respectively),… Read More ›
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