By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Old Aunt Peggy’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). She wrote the story on 8 January 1892 and it was accepted for publication by Harper’s Young People – who paid Chopin $3 for it – although in the end it was never published in that magazine.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Aepyornis Island’, often styled as ‘Æpyornis Island’, is an 1894 short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). The story was first published in the Pall Mall Budget on 27 December 1894. In many respects it is a Robinsonade in that it features a man marooned on a desert island.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Father’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories. It is more of a sketch or even, perhaps, a piece of ‘flash fiction’ than a ‘short story’ in the conventional sense; but then one of the things that great writers in the short-story form have always done is make us question the very conventions of the form.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ is an oddity within the Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925-64). The shortest story in the book, it is actually a kind of fragment, and the earliest version of what would have been O’Connor’s third novel (the manuscript of which has been published in full – or as ‘full’ as it ever got before O’Connor’s death – in 2024).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Science fiction has reinvented the Robinsonade – a narrative based on the scenario described in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – on numerous occasions and in a variety of ways. We’ve had individuals stranded on a whole planet rather than a mere island (a scenario used, in recent times, as the basis for Andy Weir’s The Martian), and we’ve had individuals stranded on traffic islands in the middle of a busy city (see J. G. Ballard’s 1974 masterpiece Concrete Island).