Poets have often tried to emphasise the hopeful aspects of human nature, and our tendency to look optimistically towards the future as a brighter, happier time. Individual ambitions and aspirations, too, have often come under the purview of some of the best and most celebrated poets writing in English.
The tale of the Three Apples is not quite so familiar to Western readers as, say, the story of Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, but it is a more authentic tale in that it was included in the original medieval collection known as the One Thousand and […]
‘Axolotl’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-84). The story was published in Cortázar’s 1956 collection End of the Game and Other Stories. ‘Axolotl’ is narrated by a lonely man who regularly visits the local zoo, where he becomes fascinated by the axolotls in the aquarium. […]
‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is a 1940 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story tells of the narrator’s discovery of a fictional country named Uqbar, whose inhabitants wrote of the legends of a planet named Tlön. The inhabitants of Tlön believe a form of philosophy […]
‘The World of Apples’ is a short story by the American writer John Cheever (1912-82). It appeared as the title story in his 1973 collection of the same name. The story concerns an elderly poet who, while living in Italy, develops and overwhelming urge to write bawdy limericks instead of […]