Recent Posts - page 62
-
Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” first published in Scribner’s magazine in 1927 and included in his collection Men without Women, which came out later the same year, has everything the Hemingway reader wants and has come to expect. The mood is… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers
Originally written and performed in 1916 as a play called Trifles, “A Jury of Her Peers” appeared in Everyweek on March 5, 1917, and became Susan Glaspell’s best-known story. On one level, readers may see it as an evocative local… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ellen Glasgow’s Jordan’s End
“Jordan’s End,” which first appeared in Ellen Glasgow’s collection The Shadowy Third (1923), shows the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” a kinship that Glasgow acknowledged. In Glasgow’s story, the ill-fated Jordan family… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Henry James’s Jolly Corner
First published in the English Review, this story, frequently interpreted in conjunction with “The Beast in the Jungle” and The Turn of the Screw, begins in medias res. Spencer Brydon, age 56, who has just returned to New York from… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was the first of Katherine Anne Porter’s Texas stories, all drawn from persistent memories of her own impoverished and motherless childhood as well as from her memories of her sternly rigorous and religious grandmother, Catherine… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Bernard Malamud’s The Jewbird
One of the most frequently anthologized of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Jewbird,” from the 1963 collection Idiots First, with its original blending of magical realism and humor to demonstrate the serious effects of bigotry and hatred, rarely fails to elicit… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s I Want to Know Why
“I Want to Know Why” is a coming-of-age story by Sherwood Anderson that first appeared in November 1919 in H. L. Mencken’s avantgarde magazine Smart Set and was later anthologized in the collection The Triumph of the Egg, published in… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Tillie Olsen’s I Stand Here Ironing
“I Stand Here Ironing,” first published in Prairie Schooner as “Help Her to Believe,” became the opening story of Tillie Olsen’s collection Tell Me a Riddle (1961). It is a mother’s monologue, instigated by a school counselor’s request that she… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Julia Alvarez’s Ironing Their Clothes
“Ironing Their Clothes” belongs to Homecoming, the first poetry collection published by Julia Alvarez, a collection of narrative poems that focus on domestic life, where the author uses family images to reconstruct her family’s past. This poem—a short story in… Read More ›
-
Analysis of William H. Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
William H. Gass is an eminent theorist and practitioner of postmodern metafiction, self-reflexive, performative fictions that emphasize the writing process itself by directing the reader’s attention to the author’s shaping presence in the showy deployment of literary strategies and conventions…. Read More ›
-
Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War), Michael Herr (Dispatches), David… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” initially appeared in Amy Hempel’s first collection of short stories titled Reasons to Live (1985), a group of stories that address various scenarios of coping, with this story, according to Hempel, providing… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Jill McCorkle’s Intervention
In an age of plastic surgery, stomach stapling, and laser treatments, American culture has placed its focus not on only hiding flaws but erasing them entirely in the quest for perfection. “Intervention,” by Jill McCorkle, was first published in Ploughshares… Read More ›
-
Analysis of O. Henry’s The Last Leaf
One of the most famous of the O. Henry tales, “The Last Leaf” (1907) not only concludes with the usual O. Henry surprise ending, but, like “A Service of Love,” is conveyed with a narrative tone of sadness and even… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time
The publishing dates, the authoritative text, even the genre of the text all prove intensely problematic, for Ernest Hemingway’s early stories and arguably his best sustained work. Published in Paris in 1924 as in our time, a series of vignettes,… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp
Originally printed in the April 1924 Transatlantic Review as “Work in Progress” and published the following year as part of In Our Time, “Indian Camp” is Ernest Hemingway’s earliest Nick Adams story. It focuses primarily on the relationship between father… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s In Another Country
There is something unique about the way Ernest Hemingway begins a short story, and readers will find no better example of this than “In Another Country,” first published in 1927 as part of the collection Men without Women. It seems… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s I’m a Fool
The myth about Sherwood Anderson—that in the middle of a successful advertising career he repudiated the moneymaking ethics and the regimentation of business in order to realize himself as a writer—has become part of our literary tradition, an ironic reversal… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Tobias Wolff’s Hunters in the Snow
One of the most penetrating and riveting of the 12 stories in Tobias Wolff’s 1981 collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, “Hunters in the Snow” was selected as the title story of the British edition that appeared… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story
Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” is an often-anthologized metafictional short story that provides, among many surprises, an important literary representation of the Vietnam War and the trauma it inflicted upon individuals. The story is part commentary… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.