“The Bowmen” first appeared in the Evening News (London) on September 29, 1914. Set in World War I, this supernatural tale recounts a fictional battle between British and German soldiers. The British forces are on the verge of suffering a… Read More ›
First published in the New Yorker and collected in The Blush and Other Stories, this is perhaps Elizabeth Taylor’s most anthologized short story. A. S. Byatt included it in the Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and it was… Read More ›
“The Blue Cross” appeared in The Storyteller magazine in September 1910 and heralded the first appearance of G. K. Chesterton’s most famous and enduring creation, Father Brown. The story, and the five further stories that followed at monthly intervals, were… Read More ›
The Bloody Chamber collects 10 of Angela Carter’s short stories, linked by their common source material, familiar tales from the folk tradition including “Bluebeard,” “Snow White,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” As the… Read More ›
The first collection of stories by Janice Galloway comprises 25 stories, apparently self-contained but all interlinked by a manifest coherence of style and imagery and the anecdotal surface of their plots: The various episodes and situations are told through a… Read More ›
The first important collection of Katherine Mansfield’s work and a touchstone for the modernist short story. Bliss brought together stories composed from 1916 to 1919; at this time, Mansfield was living through the last years of the World War I… Read More ›
This story was originally published in 1980 in the series Next Editions and was reprinted in 1984 in Angela Carter’s collection Black Venus. The common concern of the stories gathered in this volume is the demystifi cation of famous historical… Read More ›
A Bit on the Side, William Trevor’s collection of twelve short stories appeared when he was 76 years old, and it has been suggested that the tone of the stories betrays Trevor’s age. A distaste for modern, superficial culture is… Read More ›
“The Bishop’s Lunch” appears in During Mother’s Absence, a collection of Michèle Roberts’s short stories that was first published in 1993. The collection may be considered an unofficial sequel to Roberts’s novel Daughters of the House (1992), which was short-listed… Read More ›
The first of Margaret Oliphant’s popular series Stories of the Seen and Unseen, “A Beleaguered City” belongs to the subgenre of Victorian-era supernatural tales, such as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . In “A Beleaguered City” Oliphant uses different narrators… Read More ›
First published in Henry James’s 1902 collection, The Better Sort, “The Beast in the Jungle” is among the most anthologized of his short stories. Often read as a fable about failure, the tale of John Marcher is also seen as… Read More ›
“The Beach of Falesá” is a story of colonialism in the South Seas that shocked many of Robert Louis Stevenson’s admirers when it was first published in the Illustrated London News (1892). It is related in the first person by… Read More ›
“At the End of the Passage,” one of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian tales, was first serialized in 1890 and appeared in the 1891 collection Life’s Handicap. It deals with themes familiar to Kipling’s Indian fiction: the grueling day-to-day work involved in… Read More ›
One of the most enduringly popular of Henry James’s shorter fictions, The Aspern Papers was first published in serial form in the American journal Atlantic from March to May 1888. Its central theme concerns the attempt by the story’s anonymous… Read More ›
Ashenden, a collection of 16 interconnected stories, is based on W. Somerset Maugham’s own experiences as a British secret agent in Switzerland and Russia during World War I. When first published, the stories seemed so authentic that Winston Churchill accused… Read More ›
Although E. M. Forster produced sufficient material in his writing career for three collections of short stories, he published only two collections in his lifetime: The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). The Life to Come and Other… Read More ›
One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners, which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its… Read More ›
Magic subversion and ecological agenda coexist in Margaret Elphinstone’s collection of short stories. Quirky creatures populate the stories, which retain a strong humanity, even when cast in the fantastic genre. Human characters often hallucinate to grasp the unintelligible, and their… Read More ›
Originally published in Doris Lessing’s second collection of short fiction, Five (1953), “The Antheap” relates the growth from childhood to young adulthood of Tommy, the son of white settlers in southern Africa. As elsewhere in her short fiction (e.g., “The… Read More ›
Published in 1992, Angels and Insects continues A. S. Byatt’s interest in the Victorian era, which was established with her Booker Prize–winning novel Possession: A Romance (1990). The two novellas published as Angels and Insects are “Morpho Eugenia” and “The… Read More ›
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