By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright strange.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story, which runs to just a few pages, involves just two characters: an unnamed husband and wife. The husband has received a letter from an associate simply identified as Jimmy; the wife seeks to know what the contents of the letter are, but the husband hasn’t opened it.
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.
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.
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.