By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel GarcÃa 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.
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.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Valley of Spiders’ is a short story by the British science-fiction pioneer, H. G. Wells (1866-1946). First published in the Strand magazine in 1903, the story is actually closer to Gothic horror or adventure tale than to science fiction, and shows Wells’s versatility and range.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ripe Figs’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Subtitled ‘An Idyl’, the story is one of the shortest Chopin wrote, running to just one page. She wrote the story on 26 February 1892 and gave it the working title ‘Babette’s Visit’; it was published in Vogue magazine in 1893 (Chopin was paid $3 for the story).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Villager’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story explores themes of identity, longing, and the human desire to escape reality. In the story, a woman who moved to New York with dreams of becoming a professional dancer visits an apartment to buy some furniture, and ends up briefly assuming the identity of another woman.