short stories – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of J. G. Ballard’s ‘Having a Wonderful Time’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

I’m often surprised by how little serious critical attention some of the work of J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) has received. ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ is a good example.

Like many of the short stories from the 1982 collection Myths of the Near Future, this short tale – which is told as a series of postcards sent to England from the Canary Islands – anticipated a number of features of twenty-first-century life long before the twentieth century had run its course.

A Summary and Analysis of Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Electric Ant’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Electric Ant’ is a short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), written in 1968 and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October the following year. The story is about an ‘electric ant’ or robot which has always thought it was human; when it discovers the truth, it sets about trying to alter the reality around it.

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Apple’ by H. G. Wells

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Of all of the short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), ‘The Apple’ is perhaps the most allegorical. First published in the Idler magazine in October 1896, the story concerns a schoolmaster who meets a man on a train; this man gives the teacher an apple which is from the Tree of Knowledge.

A Summary and Analysis of ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is an early work written when Márquez was still finding his way towards his mature style.

A Summary and Analysis of Alice Walker’s ‘Roselily’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Roselily’ is the opening story of Alice Walker’s short-story collection In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973). The story explores the conflicting emotions of a young black woman on her wedding day, as she prepares for a new life in which she must leave behind her young children and move north from her home in Mississippi.