Elizabeth Gaskell’s story “Lois the Witch” was first published in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in October 1859. Set during the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692, the story offers a fi ctionalized chronicle of Lois Barclay, a… Read More ›
“Lizzie Leigh” is a story of a fallen woman that was probably begun in the late 1830s (Uglow, 125) but was published in Charles Dicken’s Household Words from March 30 to April 13, 1850. The story has received a good… Read More ›
This story was first published in Graham Greene’s debut volume of short stories, The Basement Room (1935). The piece emerged again in 1947 in Nineteen Stories and then again in 1954 in Twenty-One Stories. The Basement Room received a cool… Read More ›
“A Little Cloud” was one of the three late additions to the 15 stories that make up the collection Dubliners. James Joyce submitted the first 12 stories to a London publishing firm as early as 1905. When the printers objected… Read More ›
This story by George Eliot was first published in the July 1859 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. Latimer, its protagonist and narrator, begins his tale near the end of his life, when he is suffering from acute angina pectoris— a heart… Read More ›
For six months in 1921 and four months in 1925, W. Somerset Maugham traveled throughout the British-ruled Malay States, befriending the civil servants, planters, officials, and hostesses of the Malaysian colonies—and gathering abundant material for his fiction. “The Letter,” one… Read More ›
Masculinity in crisis has been a recurrent topic in Martin Amis’s fiction. The character John Self, that notorious example of unredeemed machismo in Money (1984) immediately comes to mind, but other characters, like Guy Clinch (London Fields, 1989), a prototype… Read More ›
The title story in the collection Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) was originally published in 1978 and is one of Graham Swift’s bestknown tales. It is representative of this author’s short fiction: The plot focuses on domestic strife,… Read More ›
“The Lagoon” was one of the first short stories that Joseph Conrad wrote and was his second to be published. The story is set in the Malay Archipelago, which also features in the novels Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast… Read More ›
“The Lady of the House of Love,” a short story, was first published in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. Although The Bloody Chamber is composed mainly of retellings of fairy tales, “The Lady of the House” is a… Read More ›
John Lane published George Egerton’s (Mary Chavelita Dunne’s) Keynotes in 1893 and Discords a year later, heading up what would become his new series, “Keynotes,” and bringing Egerton fame and notoriety. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Egerton’s Keynotes collection typified the… Read More ›
“Kew Gardens” was first published as a stand-alone work on May 12, 1919, by Hogarth Press in an initial run of 150 copies. This was quickly followed in June of the same year by a second edition of 500 copies…. Read More ›
One of Joseph Conrad’s early Malay stories, “Karain: A Memory” was first published in the November issue of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1897 and subsequently appeared in Tales of Unrest (1898). A story of betrayal and exile and a twofold frame… Read More ›
A pivotal story in Katherine Mansfield’s career, “Je ne parle pas français” is also a key modernist short story. The piece was composed over two weeks in the last year of World War I, at the time when Mansfield was… Read More ›
“Janet’s Repentance” is part of a trio of stories by George Eliot that was first serialized as Scenes of Clerical Life in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The other two stories in the group are “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos… Read More ›
“The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1965. The piece was later published in the volume of short stories May We Borrow Your Husband? in March 1967. The volume is subtitled “And Other Comedies… Read More ›
Intimacy is the most unapologetic and autobiographical work to date from Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954) and was published in 1998 to a roar of controversy. Critics were appalled by what they saw as the novella’s barely veiled depiction of Kureishi’s… Read More ›
First published in the West Africa magazine in 1983, “In the Shadow of War” was later included as the first story in the collection Stars of the New Curfew (1988). Based largely on Ben Okri’s experience of the Nigerian civil… Read More ›
Fay Weldon’s early collection Polaris and Other Stories both reflects and anticipates the concerns that engage her writing in its myriad permutations, before and since. By the time the collection was published, Weldon was a familiar female voice, in no… Read More ›
“In the Cage,” a realist novella, was first published during what is known as Henry James’s ‘middle period.’ In this phase of his writing, James focused on political and social themes rather than on his more typical explorations of the… Read More ›
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