By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The most successful and satisfying period of H. G. Wells’s long writing career ran from around 1894 – something of an annus mirabilis for him and the short story – until around 1904, when The Food of the Gods appeared. But there are some gems to be found after 1904, including novels such as In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, and The World Set Free, and there are some fine later stories.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector (1920-77) has not had as much attention as her fellow titans of South American literature, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. But her short stories are often dazzlingly inventive and, like the best of Borges, carry the force of a miniature parable or fable.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Popular Mechanics’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories, but although it is sometimes known by the alternative title ‘Little Things’, there is nothing ‘little’ about this tale of filial breakdown and domestic unhappiness.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904), written in 1891 and published in Vogue magazine in 1893. This brief narrative concerns a doctor who is summoned one night to a brothel, where a young woman has killed herself by shooting herself in the head.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in the Pall Mall Budget on 2 August 1894. In some ways a forerunner to later narratives like Little Shop of Horrors, the story is an unsettling tale about a parasitical species of plant which feeds upon the blood of a man who collects orchids.