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 ›
Katherine Mansfield incorporated literary Modernism into the genre of the short story in The Garden-Party and Other Stories, published in 1922. The title story, written in 1921, emphasizes mood, emotion, and relationships of characters rather than plot and reveals the… Read More ›
D. H. Lawrence wrote the first version of “The Fox” in December 1918. This version of the story was a straightforward tale about two women, whose lesbian partnership is implicit. Jill Banford is diffident and timid, whereas the more physical… Read More ›
One of the most anthologized of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, along with “The Garden-Party,” “The Fly” was published in the Nation in 1922. Conscious of its appeal to perceptive readers, Mansfield avoided the publication of this story in a magazine,… Read More ›
Jack Slay, Jr., has described the appearance of Ian McEwan’s first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites, as a “shock into literature,” owing to the themes and subject matter contained in the collection’s eight stories. The shock derives, first… Read More ›
“The Fall River Axe Murders” was first published in the London Review of Books in 1981 under the title “Mis-en-scene for Parricide”; it later appeared under its more familiar name in Angela Carter’s 1985 short story collection, Black Venus (Saints… Read More ›
This much-anthologized short story by James Joyce was first published in The Irish Homestead on September 10, 1904, and later became part of his famous collection Dubliners (1917). In contrast to the three stories of childhood that precede it, “Eveline”… Read More ›
“The Enigma” is one of five short stories included in the collection The Ebony Tower. John Fowles’s working title for the collection was Variations; although he was convinced by his publisher to discard the original title, the stories constitute variations… Read More ›
In “The Ebony Tower,” John Fowles wrote a variation on his novel The Magus (1965). Both narratives present a young man who, guided by an older mentor figure, has to make life-determining decisions while being tempted by an artistic young… Read More ›
As with many of his shorter pieces, Joseph Conrad interrupted work on a novel—in this case Chance—to write the Napoleonic novella The Duel. It was originally published serially in Britain as “The Duel—A Military Tale” in Pall Mall Magazine in… Read More ›
First published in the Theatre Annual (1887), “The Dualitists,” frequently cited as demonstrating one of Bram Stoker’s favorite themes, male bonding, evokes a world of children’s adventure stories. As in much of Stoker’s fiction, the driving force grows out of… Read More ›
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