New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional “extrinsic” approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical… Read More ›
First published in Woman’s Home Companion (April/May 1930) and included as one of three stories in Obscure Destinies (1932), “Neighbour Rosicky” dramatizes an old Bohemian farmer’s final days. The story is a character study of Anton Rosicky but also a… Read More ›
Storytelling is as essential to human survival as food and water. Without stories we cannot remember the past, understand the present, or look forward to a future. Without stories we cannot share our experiences with others or describe our sometimes… Read More ›
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an extension of his gothic tales as well as the first detective fiction, although the word detective had not been coined yet. This story, along with “The Mystery of Marie… Read More ›
First published as the opening story in “The Moths” and Other Stories, “The Moths” tells the story of three generations of women, divided by their aims in life and their perspectives about the future. The protagonist, a girl of 14… Read More ›
Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” is widely anthologized in both high school literature and college introductory fiction courses largely because it offers a fine illustration of many of the potential conflicts that an author can incorporate into an compelling… Read More ›
The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” and Virginia Woolf’s assertion that sometime around December 1910 “human character changed” are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is… Read More ›
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Miss Grief” can be read as a comment on the literary position of American women writers near the end of the 19th century. The story contrasts the literary abilities, reputations, and social and economic circumstances of two… Read More ›
Originally published in the collection Geography and Plays (1922), “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” has received critical attention for two reasons. First, much has been made of Gertrude Stein’s experimentations with language and their consequent challenges to and elaborations on… Read More ›
Few of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories have garnered as much commentary as “The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable” since its original publication in the Token in 1836 and its subsequent appearance in the collection entitled Twice-told Tales in 1837. The… Read More ›
May Day is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s three long stories sometimes called novellas or novelettes. The title has three connotations: the maritime distress call mayday, a spring rite, and the socialist labor holiday. As the mixed connotations suggest, Fitzgerald purposefully… Read More ›
Adapted by an editor from the last two chapters of Richard Wright’s novel Tarbaby’s Dawn, this story appeared under the title “Almos’ a Man” in Harper’s Bazaar in 1939, and then in the O. Henry Award Prize Stories of 1940…. Read More ›
Most scholars believe that near the end of his life, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) became a brooding, bitter, disillusioned, and cynical man who doubted humans’ ability to right themselves and whose humor became increasingly dark and hopeless. His “The… Read More ›
The Management of Grief is collected in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The idea of “middlemen” is central to these stories of immigrant experience; Bharati Mukherjee presents characters in fl ux as… Read More ›
Bernard Malamud has been reckoned a magician himself in that, as one of the most significant Jewish American writers of the 20th century, he helped acquaint readers with Jewish culture as he simultaneously placed Jewish fiction in the mainstream of… Read More ›
Published in the August 1907 issue of Scribner’s magazine and in book form the following February, this novella exhibits Edith Wharton’s subtle realism and is one of her works depicting Americans in France. It tells of Fanny de Malrive, née… Read More ›
After its initial appearance in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1961, “The Machine That Won the War” was republished in Nightfall and Other Stories (1961) and Robot Dreams (1986), and in innumerable student anthologies. The machine,… Read More ›
The initial story in Susan Minot’s 1989 collection Lust and Other Stories, this short tale sets the stage in both theme and subject for the stories that will follow. The 12 stories portray different types of estrangement in heterosexual relationships:… Read More ›
This children’s story, a part of Clifton’s book The Lucky Stone, is more about the community that is created by elders sharing stories with children than the plot of those stories themselves. As is often the case in working-class literature… Read More ›
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, Love Medicine began as a short story. Its author, Louise Erdrich, in close collaboration with her husband, Michael Dorris, planned it as a novel, yet many readers view it as… Read More ›
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