‘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 […]
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 […]
Discoveries can take many forms: an explorer discovering a new land, an astronomer discovering a whole new planet or galaxy, or a poet discovering the truth about love, nature, or even, for that matter, truth itself. The following ten poems are our pick of the best ‘discovery’ poems: poems which […]
The English writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), who is better known under his pen name Saki, was a master of the short comic story and, in some ways, a missing link between Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse. What’s more, Saki was that rare writer who could write humorously, for […]
‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem which succeeds in part because of its suggestive symbolism. T. S. Eliot uses a tight and interrelated group of symbols, including deserts, rats, twilight, fading stars, and the hollow/stuffed men themselves, to summon a decaying civilisation, usually interpreted as representing Europe after the end […]