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 ›
Grace Paley’s autobiographical story is a humorous account of events that transpired when she was a New York City grammar school student chosen to narrate the Christmas play because she had the loudest voice of any child in the school…. Read More ›
As were many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker and, subsequently, as the title story of The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris in 1949. It may well be the world’s most frequently… Read More ›
Like Willa Cather’s novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady, a novella-length work, is linked with the landscape of the western American plains. A Lost Lady is set in the Colorado prairie town of Sweet Water,… Read More ›
“Lost in the Funhouse” begins with young Ambrose, who was possibly conceived in “Night-Sea Journey,” now an adolescent, traveling to Ocean City, Maryland, to celebrate Independence Day. Accompanying him through his eventual initiation are his parents; his uncle Karl; his… Read More ›
As part of the modernist imperative to “make it new,” writers of the 1920s and 1930s consistently wreaked havoc with existing genre conventions. “Poems” no longer rhymed and scanned predictably; essays and reviews had a subjective, even idiosyncratic, slant; plays… Read More ›
Originally published in the March 1951 issue of Commentary magazine and subsequently included in collections of Bellow’s short fiction, “Looking for Mr Green” is one of Saul Bellow’s best early stories. It anticipates the unmistakable and abundant sense of happy… Read More ›
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