Charles Dickens (1812-70) is best-known for his fifteen novels and for shorter books like A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens’s was a restless talent, and during his publishing career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he also wrote countless articles, essays, and short stories.
Writers can get ideas from the strangest of places. Omelas, the distinctive-sounding but entirely fictional city in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, came from her reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon, (‘Salem, O.’) in her car’s rear-view mirror. But the […]
‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ is a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story, narrated as a non-fiction account by the fictional Menard’s equally fictional friend, sees the title character attempting to write the whole of Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote. The story […]