‘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 […]
‘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 […]