By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is one of his earliest stories. It’s also one of his shortest, running to just four pages.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ is a 1974 short story by the British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009). Ballard’s unique contribution to literature was to take the trappings of science fiction – space travel, new technologies, and the rest of it – and apply it to spaces and concerns closer to home. This story is a classic example.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Cone’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in Unicorn magazine on 18 September 1895. The story is one of Wells’s few works of fiction to be set in the Potteries in Staffordshire, England: a part of the country in which he lived for a short while. It’s also an early work, written in 1888 when Wells was only in his early twenties.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Kaleidoscope’ is a short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1952 collection of interlinked tales, The Illustrated Man. ‘Kaleidoscope’ deals with the theme of death, and how human beings respond to their imminent deaths, by focusing on a crew of astronauts who are thrown out into space after their rocket explodes.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Red Room’ is H. G. Wells’s finest take on the ghost story. The plot of ‘The Red Room’ can be summarised as follows.
Summary
The narrator has gone to spend the night in the red room of Lorraine Castle, which, according to legend, is haunted. The castle is inhabited and curated by a number of elderly people. The narrator is twenty-eight years old and reassures them that it will take a ‘very tangible ghost’ to frighten him.