‘The Ebony Horse’ is one of the most exciting and enchanting story from the Arabian Nights, also known as the One Thousand and One Nights. Indeed, the tale is interesting because it even borders on being ‘science fiction’ before the genre existed. It sees a cunning inventor design an ebony […]
Fiction often deals with domestic matters, including family, and some of the finest short stories treat the important, though sometimes fraught, relationship between parents and their children. What makes a good parent? What if two parents disagree over what’s best for their children, or for the family as a whole?
What are some of the best short stories about childhood, and the experiences of children? Although there are dozens of classic tales about those formative years, the following stories represent, for our money, some of the finest stories about children taking the rocky path of knowledge and experience towards adulthood.
‘The Widow and the Parrot’ is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known works. But then how many people familiar with The Waves or Mrs Dalloway are even aware that Woolf wrote a short story for children? Woolf wrote ‘The Widow and the Parrot’ in the early 1920s for the family […]
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) was not a prolific poet, but her body of work is a substantial one and marks her out as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. However, the newcomer may find it difficult to find a good starting-point. With Sylvia Plath we might start with […]