‘The Company of Wolves’ is the second of a trio of wolf stories in Angela Carter’s 1979 short-story collection The Bloody Chamber. It is also arguably the most controversial. The story is divided into two sections: a prefatory passage which discusses lycanthropy or werewolves, and the main story which is […]
‘Ode to My Socks’ is a 1956 poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73). Neruda, who was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was his pen name, though he later changed it officially), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is widely regarded as one […]
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific novelist, short-story writer, and poet, who is perhaps best-known for classic children’s books like The Jungle Book and for poems like ‘If—’. But Kipling’s short stories for adults often get overlooked – a fact which is perhaps hardly surprising given how much enduring and […]
‘Happy Endings’ is a short story (or, perhaps more accurately, a piece of metafiction) which was first published in Margaret Atwood’s 1983 collection, Murder in the Dark. The story offers six alternative storylines which feature a relationship between a man and a woman. Because of its postmodern and metafictional elements, […]
‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ is a short story by the British-born science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). It was first published in the 1953 anthology Star Science Fiction Stories #1, before being collected in Clarke’s The Other Side of the Sky. A short tale about religion, computers, […]