‘The Lottery in Babylon’, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges first published in 1941, is among his most ‘Kafkaesque’ tales, bearing the influence of the Czech writer in a number of its key aspects. At the time, Borges was working a rather unfulfilling library job refilling the bookshelves, and […]
‘The Birthmark’ is a short story by the nineteenth-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1843. Although not as well-known as ‘Young Goodman Brown’ or ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, ‘The Birthmark’ is an intriguing tale which, like those more famous stories, contains ambiguous symbolism within its straightforward plot.
One of the most important and influential American writers of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692. And New England Puritanism is very much at the heart of his work. He’s regarded by many […]