A story that illustrates Saki’s (H. H. Munro’s) lesser-known talent for pathos, “The Interlopers,” collected in the posthumous anthology The Toys of Peace (1919), is a sort of Balkan gothic romance that moves from thrilling to hopeful to tragic, thanks… Read More ›
Rebecca West (1892–1983) was born Cicely Isabel Fairchild. Following a brief period on the London stage, West took her nom de plume from the outspoken heroine of Henrick Ibsen’s Rosmershalm when she began her writing career with the suffragette magazine… Read More ›
First published in the New Quarterly Magazine in July 1878, “An Indiscretion” was never collected by Thomas Hardy into any of the four volumes of short stories that he produced during his lifetime. Its eventual printing in 1934 caused a… Read More ›
“Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene” first appeared in FMR Magazine in February 1992. It was subsequently published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, the short story collection that appeared the year after Angela Carter’s death in 1992, and again in… Read More ›
This story by Martin Amis appeared in the 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters, comprising five short stories and an introductory essay, “Thinkability,” relating the author’s observations about the nuclear threat’s chilling effects on intellectual and spiritual life. Amis later referred to… Read More ›
Susan Hill’s 1973 widely anthologized short story “How Soon Can I Leave?” relates the relationship of Miss Roscommon and Miss Bartlett, two unmarried women living in the coastal town of Mountsea. Hill’s simple, straightforward style of writing is evident in… Read More ›
Originally published in the New Yorker, “The House of the Famous Poet” is set in 1944 during the shelling of London and follows the narrator as she travels on the night train from Edinburgh to London to resume work at… Read More ›
D. H. Lawrence tried unsuccessfully to get the English Review to publish “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” written in 1917 and originally titled “The Miracle.” However, in 1921 he revised the story, retitled it “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” and included it… Read More ›
Mary Fitzgerald-Holt has noted that The Hill Bachelors represents a marked change of style from William Trevor’s previous collections. “Gone are the dramatic moments of confrontation, the sometimes strident exposures of painful truths” (174), she writes. Indeed, this collection has… Read More ›
This story by the celebrated Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) first appeared as part of the collection Chronicles of the Canongate. Here, Chrystal Croftangry, the narrator of the collection, retells the widow’s story from the memorandum of a late… Read More ›
In 1921 Virginia Woolf published her first collection of short stories, titled Monday or Tuesday, which included “A Haunted House” as the opening piece. Although she continued to publish short fiction, this proved to be the only collection of such… Read More ›
The essay “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924) describes Joseph Conrad as a schoolboy amusing classmates by pointing to Africa on a map and declaring, “When I grow up I shall go there.” Eighteen years later, in 1890, Conrad obtained a… Read More ›
Originally slated to appear in 1847, “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,” the fifth and last instalment of the Christmas book series was delayed because of Charles Dickens’s exhaustion at maintaining the serialization of Dombey and Son (1846–48). In… Read More ›
Arguably the most popular of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, “The Happy Prince” is the first story in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which was published in 1888. The narrative, which has been favorably compared to the work of Hans… Read More ›
A short story by G. K. Chesterton originally published in The Story-Teller magazine in 1910, published in America’s The Saturday Evening Post in 1919 as “A Bolt from the Blue” and collected in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911…. Read More ›
Published in the collection Round the Sofa and Other Tales (1859), “The Half Brothers” is, as its title suggests, about two brothers, and it recalls those Old Testament brothers divided by enmity: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and… Read More ›
The first story in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s sensation collection In a Glass Darkly. This collection of stories forms a unified whole, held together by a frame story that resurfaces at the beginning and end of each consecutive episode. Written… Read More ›
The Good Times is a sequence of 20 first-person stories documenting the inner lives of working-class men and boys in Scotland. James Kelman portrays his characters empathetically in their common struggle to survive poverty, boredom, and failure with their self-respect… Read More ›
Elizabeth Taylor’s poignant short story “Good-bye, Good-bye” was first published in the magazine Woman and Beauty and then collected in The Blush and Other Stories in 1958. The story’s title points to its theme of two painful farewells. These leavetakings… Read More ›
Originally published in the April 1921 issue of The English Review and later included by Aldous Huxley in Mortal Coils (1922), “The Gioconda Smile” is inspired by the story of Harold Greenwood, a man who had been acquitted of poisoning… Read More ›
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