Originally published in British Vogue, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” is one of the nine pieces contained in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of traditional fairy tales. In particular, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon”… Read More ›
One of Rudyard Kipling’s many stories of life among noncommissioned soldiers in India, “The Courting of Dinah Shadd” was first published in Harper’s Weekly in the United States in 1890. It also gave its name to the volume of short… Read More ›
In the title story of Helen Simpson’s fourth collection, a science teacher takes her regular lunchtime stroll around Hampstead Heath. This is her “constitutional,” a reassuringly old-fashioned concept, far removed from power-walking, jogging, or similar goal-oriented forms of exercise: “The… Read More ›
One of Angela Carter‘s most famous short stories, “The Company of Wolves” was first published in the innovative and imaginative 1979 collection of fairy-tale themed stories, The Bloody Chamber. “The Company of Wolves” skillfully interweaves peasant superstitions, such as old… Read More ›
This story collected in the posthumously published Dracula’s Guest is about the power of the past to haunt the present. Bram Stoker also makes use of the plot device of the fatal return, a popular narrative in many 19th-century texts…. Read More ›
A literary sensation on the strength of his breakout collection of interwoven short stories—1991’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity—Will Self continued to impress with 1992’s Cock and Bull, a pair of novellas that take conventional notions of gender and turn… Read More ›
The decline of British power and influence in the international sphere following World War II was paralleled by substantial changes in life in Britain. The cherished, if idealistic, version of England as a “green and pleasant land” was subject to… Read More ›
The first of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a fairy-tale-like ghost story that has contributed much to the formation of the Christmas story as a genre. Written in October… Read More ›
This short novel is one of the products of Rudyard Kipling’s residence in the United States from 1892 to 1896. What Kipling described as a “boy’s story” was first published in serial form in McClure’s Magazine in the United States… Read More ›
While still a 23- year-old medical student, before creating the wildly popular character of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Captain of the Pole-Star.” Conan Doyle’s tale is a ghost story set aboard an arctic expedition, narrated by John… Read More ›
First published in the Court and Society Review, “The Canterville Ghost,” subtitled “a Hylo-Idealistic Romance,” concerns an American minister, Mr. Hiram B. Otis, who buys a haunted English mansion from Lord Canterville. When warned about the ghost by Canterville, Mr…. Read More ›
Entered in the “red notebook” (a notebook containing drafts of 9 stories) and dated September 1934, “The Burning Baby” was published in Contemporary Poetry and Prose in May 1936. The story is characteristic of Thomas’s early prose work with its… Read More ›
George Eliot described her short story “Brother Jacob” (written in 1860, published in the Cornhill 1864) as a “slight tale.” “Brother Jacob,” a story about deception, imperial venture, and self-interest, was the first piece written after her true identity had… Read More ›
This story is from A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss. In a number of very favorable reviews of this collection, critics noted Kennedy’s predilection for characters who can be moved only by extreme circumstances, as if their responses have been dulled… Read More ›
“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 ›
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