The longest story in Dave Egger’s critically acclaimed collection How We Are Hungry, “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” has been praised as both Eggers’s “finest, darkest story” (Reese) and a must-read for would-be mountain climbers. A number of reviewers… Read More ›
Ernest Hemingway’s Up in Michigan, published in 1923 in his first collection, Three Stories and Ten Poems, and more widely distributed in his 1938 collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, is one of his most famous stories… Read More ›
Set during the Civil War and Reconstruction and composed of seven stories (five of which had been published previously in the Saturday Evening Post and one in Scribner’s), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished has been viewed as both a novel and… Read More ›
At the height of World War II, William Faulkner wrote a pair of compelling stories exploring the viability and importance of America as a nation. Though the United States as a whole was his theme in these two wartime stories,… Read More ›
Known as the first short story published by an African American, The Two Offers (1859) also marks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first published fiction. From this very first story, Harper emphasizes a womanhood of independence, education, equality, and charity. Harper does… Read More ›
Two Kinds is a selection from Amy Tan’s (1952– ) critically acclaimed The Joy Luck Club (1989), which critics saw as an intricately woven “novel.” But that Tan intended the book to be read not as a novel but as… Read More ›
First published in Woman’s Home Companion in 1932 and included as one of three stories in the collection Obscure Destinies (1932), “Two Friends” has the structure and tone of a memoir. The story’s narrator is an adult looking back on… Read More ›
“The Turn of the Screw” was first published as a serial in Collier’s Weekly in 1898 and appeared later the same year in book form, in The Two Magics. Quickly becoming Henry James’s most popular piece of short fiction, The… Read More ›
Often touted as Louisa May Alcott’s condemnation of Transcendentalism, “Transcendental Wild Oats” (first published in the Independent in 1873 and reprinted in the Woman’s Journal the following year) reshapes an actual occurrence in Alcott’s young life into hilarious but pointed… Read More ›
In The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories, the reader must take care to remember that the Tim O’Brien who appears as a character is not the same Tim O’Brien who wrote the book. This can… Read More ›
Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the science fiction writer’s most widely anthologized short story. Originally printed in Collier’s, “Soft Rains” was revised and incorporated as a chapter in Bradbury’s first and most acclaimed novel, The Martian Chronicles…. Read More ›
When it appeared in the American Mercury in March 1931, the editor, H. L. Mencken, prevailed on William Faulkner to make changes in “That Evening Sun” (then entitled “That Evening Sun Go Down”) to make it more palatable to the… Read More ›
Tell Me a Riddle, the title Novella of Tillie Olsen’s 1961 collection, details the state of the relationship of an elderly married couple who, in their youth, emigrated from Russia. Now that their children are grown, husband and wife disagree… Read More ›
By the time Anne Tyler published “Teenage Wasteland” late in 1983, the heyday of the hippie counterculture was more than a decade in the past. Initially it seems that in this grim story she steps back in time to set… Read More ›
Joh Cheever’s account of Neddy Merrill, a middleaged man who traverses the expanse of an upscale suburban county by swimming a sequence of pools, is a highly ironic inversion of a conventional elegiac theme, the athlete dying young. His journey… Read More ›
The first-person narrator and protagonist Yunior, in the comic tale of infidelity “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” is someone with whom we could easily see Junot Díaz himself growing up. He is a young Latin American man whose street… Read More ›
Published in his first major short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? “The Student’s Wife” marks Raymond Carver’s first use of insomnia, a plot device and theme he returned to in later stories. As Ernest Fontana notes, insomnia… Read More ›
“Strong Horse Tea,” a woman oppressed by racism, classism, and ignorance looks to white culture for magical cures while rejecting the home remedies of her community. Rannie Toomer, a mother whose baby, Snooks, is dying of double pneumonia and whooping… Read More ›
As many of the stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio do, “The Strength of God” illustrates Anderson’s understanding of the grotesque as a character’s limited or distorted perspective of reality. As the old man observes in the opening story titled… Read More ›
Originally entitled “The Dream of an Hour” when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), “The Story of an Hour” has since become one of Kate Chopin’s most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, “Story”… Read More ›
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