‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is a 1968 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Like much of his fiction, this story is an example of magic realism (which we’ll say more about below). Subtitled ‘A Tale for Children’, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous […]
Author: interestingliterature
A Summary and Analysis of Shel Silverstein’s ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’
‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ is probably the best-known poem by Shel Silverstein. A popular poem for children, it was first published in 1974. The poem describes a hidden other world which lies between the sidewalk and the street: a world which children know how to find, where things are somewhat […]
A Summary and Analysis of Amy Tan’s ‘Fish Cheeks’
‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club, her 1989 novel containing a series of interwoven short stories told by a number of Chinese-American women who are members of the titular club; but ‘Fish […]
A Summary and Analysis of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘We Wear the Mask’
‘We Wear the Mask’ is a poem by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), written in 1895 and included in Dunbar’s 1896 collection Majors and Minors. In the poem, Dunbar writes about the fact that many members of a marginalised community (which can be tacitly understood to mean the […]
A Summary and Analysis of Frank R. Stockton’s ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’
‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ is a widely studied short story by the American writer Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). This classic short story, which was first published in The Century magazine in 1882, began life as a story Stockton told at a party; he published it when it received a […]