Ian McEwan departs somewhat from his typical style and subject matter in the story “Solid Geometry,” published in his first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites. As in the rest of the stories in the collection, the main character… Read More ›
Sketches by “Boz” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People is a collection of Charles Dickens’s first-published works. He had begun his literary publishing career proper on December 1, 1833 (at age 21), when “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later… Read More ›
“Sir Edmund Orme” is one of Henry James’s many tales that revolve around strange apparitions. A fascination with occult (magical, theosophical, mysterious, or even spiritual) phenomena is evident in many of James’s tales and short stories. Like his contemporaries George… Read More ›
A much-anthologized story that first appeared in Mugby Junction, the extra Christmas number for Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in 1866. It later appeared in a one-volume edition of all the Christmas numbers from All the Year Round… Read More ›
This late novella, originally written in 1915, reworks themes from Joseph Conrad’s earlier writing, while also acting as an ambiguous response to World War I. (Conrad’s son, Borys, enlisted and became a second lieutenant while Conrad worked on the text.)… Read More ›
This fairy tale by Oscar Wilde was published in 1888 in a volume called The Happy Prince and Other Tales. After being away on a trip, a giant returns to his home only to find that children are playing in… Read More ›
In late 1909, Joseph Conrad broke off working on his political novel about Russia, Under Western Eyes, to write the short story “The Secret-Sharer: An Episode from the Sea.” First issued in two parts in 1910, in the August and… Read More ›
A detective story first published in the monthly magazine The Storyteller in October 1910, and subsequently in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). Father Brown attends a dinner party held by the chief of the Paris police, Aristide… Read More ›
“The Schartz-Metterklume Method” is one of Edwardian writer Saki’s mordantly humorous stories of rebellion against rigid, stodgy adulthood, but this time the attack is launched by another adult rather than a child. The story, which first appeared in the Westminster… Read More ›
Coming after two novellas featuring Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four), “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a short detective story, first appeared in the Strand magazine in July 1891. It recounts the case of the king… Read More ›
Encouraged by George Henry Lewes, Mary Ann (Marian) Evans purposed to write publishable fiction and began with a title that came to her in the middle of one night, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.” She conceived a… Read More ›
Round the Sofa, a two-volume collection of stories, short novels, and essays by Elizabeth Gaskell, was made up of earlier works published previously in magazines, notably Charles Dickens’s Household Words and, in America, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The disparate… Read More ›
In this much-anthologized story, Thomas Hardy combines realism and imagination to create a romance that illustrates the danger of allowing sexual desire to influence one’s marriage choice. Set in the village of Silverthorn in Hardy’s Lower Wessex, “The Romantic Adventures… Read More ›
David Ellis, in his account of D. H. Lawrence’s late years, explains that the author was paid 15 pounds for allowing the publication of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” in Cynthia Asquith’s 1926 anthology, The Ghost Book. This, states Ellis, was a… Read More ›
“The Road from Colonus” was written by E. M. Forster in 1903, shortly after he had visited Olympia in Greece. He had gone there as part of a cruise group made up largely of classical scholars against the enthusiasm and… Read More ›
“The Real Thing” was published in 1892 in Black and White and is considered among Henry James’s finest short stories. The tale explores the complicated interplay of life and art, of object and imagination. The unnamed narrator is an illustrator… Read More ›
Only two characters appear in Ted Hughes’s bestknown short story: an unnamed man and a black horse. The man, returning to a rural landscape after a 12-year absence, is attacked inexplicably by the horse but escapes muddy and unharmed. Compared… Read More ›
This story is the most ebullient of the reimagined fairy tales in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. The volume’s title suggests the more characteristic tone of these tales of sex, violence, and the struggles for power within male-female… Read More ›
Fay Weldon’s story “Pumpkin Pie,” published in the 1991 collection Moon over Minneapolis: Or Why She Couldn’t Stay, uses a shifting style of narration and integrated symbolism to comment on class and gender issues. The story follows Antoinette, a maid… Read More ›
The final story in Ian McEwan’s collection In between the Sheets (1978), “Psychopolis” was originally published in American Review and anthologized in the influential The Penguin Book of Modern Short Stories (1987), edited by Malcolm Bradbury, McEwan’s former tutor at… Read More ›
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