Literary small-town life at its most positive is crafted in ways that celebrate community, collaboration, and the gentle accommodation of vulnerability and eccentricities. Ring Lardner’s “Haircut,” however, once referred to as “one of the cruelest pieces of American fiction” (Hardwick… Read More ›
Written in 1892, Henry James‘s short story “Greville Fane” depicts the troubled and tumultuous relationship between a popular novelist, Greville Fane, and her two ungrateful children, Lady Ethel Luard and Leolin. The short story begins with the narrator’s receiving news… Read More ›
By emphasizing intense archetypal imagery, Flannery O’Connor raises her short story “Greenleaf” to a complex level. O’Connor’s choice of symbolic names, her suggestion of mythological fertility cults, and her use of light and dark images all serve to raise the… Read More ›
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s widely anthologized coming-of-age tale, initially published in Greasy Lake and Other Stories, tells the story of three young men— Digby, Jeff, and an unnamed narrator—who are abruptly ushered into adulthood through a painful experience at the lake… Read More ›
“Graven Image” first appeared in the New Yorker (March 13, 1943) and then in O’Hara’s collection of short stories, Pipe Night (1945). In his review (March 18, 1945), Lionel Trilling praised O’Hara as having, “more than anyone now writing,” “the… Read More ›
In the mid-1930s, Katherine Anne Porter’s early work was attracting the favorable attention of America’s burgeoning New Critics, whose techniques of close literary analysis to this day remain useful for reading Porter’s tightly written, symbol and imageladen fiction. Her story… Read More ›
Frequently anthologized, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” exemplifies Flannery O’Connor’s southern religious grounding. The story depicts the impact of Christ on the lives of two seemingly disparate characters. One is a grandmother joining her son’s family on a… Read More ›
In a memorable contribution to her stories that use the grotesque, Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” ironically reverses the old saying that country people are good and its corollary, simple. Set in Georgia, the story features three women and a… Read More ›
Sometimes called a novella, Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” offers a thorough introduction to some of the key themes, techniques, and character types that will populate Roth’s subsequent novels. While “Goodbye, Columbus” provides sharp social criticism, it is equally resonant on… Read More ›
Throughout Three Lives, in which “The Good Anna” appears, Gertrude Stein explores the heterosexual and lesbian relationships of three common women, Anna, Melanctha, and Lena. In her attempts to capture the thoughts and consciousness of these women, Stein uses a… Read More ›
When Eudora Welty published The Golden Apples in 1949, critics did not know whether to treat it as an experimental novel or as a collection of interconnected short stories. But Welty included the separate pieces from The Golden Apples in… Read More ›
“Gold,” the title story of Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection, fittingly mirrors Isaac Asimov’s half-century writing career. Asimov’s work has defined science fiction as a multilayered genre, ranging from the simple rearrangement of history to more complex manipulation of… Read More ›
Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s 12th novel, is generally ranked as one of his greatest—not least because it doubles as a unique collection of short stories. Most of these stories had been published separately between 1935 and 1942, in such… Read More ›
Widely regarded as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s masterpiece as well as one of his most frequently anthologized stories, the Yiddish version of “Gimpel the Fool” appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward (1953) before SAUL BELLOW translated it into English for publication… Read More ›
Appearing in Story magazine and traditionally considered Zora Neale Hurston’s most accomplished story, “The Gilded Six-Bits” had a favorable reception that helped call Hurston to the attention of critics and publishers and resulted in the publication of her first novel,… Read More ›
Although many critics do not view O. Henry’s stories as first-rate literature, some of his many hundreds of tales have become classic. “The Gift of the Magi,” touching as it does a common human cord, is one of those stories…. Read More ›
“Flowers for Algernon,” first published in 1959, is considered a landmark work in both science fiction and disability literature. It was expanded into a novel of the same name, which was published in 1966. Both the short story and the… Read More ›
In this novella from her first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, published in 1930, Katherine Anne Porter creates a totally rootless character, an American expatriate in Mexico with ties to neither the past nor the future. Laura finds no… Read More ›
John Steinbeck‘s “Flight” first appeared in his collection of short stories The Long Valley in 1938. It is a carefully constructed coming-of-age tale that chronicles a 19-year-old boy’s ascent to manhood, quick regression to hunted animal, and thence to his… Read More ›
John Cheever’s story, first published as part of the collection The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), is notable for the way it presents, through an apparently uninvolved, objective third-person narrator, a man’s callous and reprehensible treatment of a female employee…. Read More ›