‘The Swimmer’ is a 1964 short story by the American writer John Cheever (1912-82), published in his collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. Cheever’s best-known story, ‘The Swimmer’ is about a middle-aged married man who decides to travel home from his friends’ house one summer afternoon, swimming in the […]
The story of Narcissus is one of the most enduringly popular, and instantly recognisable, from classical myth. The very name of Narcissus has become a kind of shorthand for self-love and self-regard. But the actual facts of the Narcissus story are a little more complex than they first appear. Who […]
‘And of Clay We Are Created’ is a short story by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (born 1942), included in her 1989 collection The Stories of Eva Luna. In the story, a mountain avalanche causes a cataclysm which leads to thousands of deaths. The story follows the attempts of a […]
‘Girl’ is a short story by the Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid (born 1949). In this very short story, which runs to just a couple of pages, a mother offers advice to her teenage daughter about how to behave like a proper woman. ‘Girl’ was originally published in the New Yorker […]
‘The Journey’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a poet who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words […]