‘The Wife’s Story’ is a short story with a twist. Published in 1982, it’s a short tale whose narrator, at the end of the story, turns out to be different from what we have been led to believe. One of Ursula Le Guin’s best-known tales, ‘The Wife’s Story’ is story […]
John Keats (1795-1821) is one of the greatest poets in the English language, and one of the most famous Romantic poets. In just a few years prior to his untimely death from tuberculosis, aged just 25, in 1821, Keats wrote some of the most memorable poems about everything from art […]
What are the best short stories about the theme of motherhood? And who are the best mother characters in short fiction? Below, we select and introduce some of the most famous, and most widely studied, short stories which deal with the subject of mothers and motherhood. These stories range from […]
Modernist literature is often concerned with modernity as a kind of living death, but perhaps no twentieth-century writer offered a more explicit parable of this fact than Franz Kafka in ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. This story, which exists as a brief six-page tale and an even shorter fragment, was among the […]
If there is a ‘Shakespeare of the ghost story’, it is surely Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), better known to legions of ghost-story readers as M. R. James. No other writer of the ghost story has managed to summon the haunting aspects of the distant past quite so effectively and unnervingly […]