‘The Boarded Window’ is a story by the American author Ambrose Bierce, who is also remembered for his witty The Devil’s Dictionary and for his mysterious disappearance in around 1914. Like many of Bierce’s tales, ‘The Boarded Window’ contains elements of the horror genre. The story is about a man […]
How did hyacinths, the popular flowers, get their name? And what have they to do with homoerotic love, wind, discuses, and Greek mythology? As ever, we’re here to answer these questions, by taking a closer look at the classical myth of Hyacinth and how he came to give his name […]
Centaurs are surely the most famous human-animal hybrids from classical mythology, along with the Minotaur. But what do centaurs represent? These creatures – part-human, part-horse – turn up in a number of different myths from antiquity, but the meaning of these stories, and what the centaurs symbolise, varies from tale […]
‘The God’s Script’, sometimes translated under the title ‘The Writing of the God’, is a 1949 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story concerns a Mayan priest who is imprisoned with a jaguar; the priest comes to realise that his god has hidden magic writing […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Canary for One’ is a short story by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). He began writing ‘A Canary for One’ in 1926 and it was first published the following year. It contains a number of the most characteristic features of Hemingway’s writing: clear, unadorned prose, […]