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Who’s-Dead McCarthy by Kevin Barry Analysis
In the short story “Who’s-Dead McCarthy“, Irish short story writer Kevin Barry takes someone’s darkly morbid fascination with death and exaggerates it in a story-length character sketch — a man who talks about death so incessantly that people cross the road to avoid him. It’s wonderful. I think humour only ever exists in something that…
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Ernestine and Kit by Kevin Barry Analysis
“Ernestine and Kit” is a short story by Kevin Barry, included in Dark Lies The Island (2013). It has been made into a short film by Simon Bird if you can get a hold of it. This is black humour at its best. I was captivated with this crime story from beginning to end — the…
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Beer Trip To Llandudno by Kevin Barry Analysis
“Beer Trip To Llandudno” is the mythic journey of a group of middle-aged men, ostensibly on an ale-tasting expedition, metaphorically on a life journey towards death. This short story is included in Barry’s Dark Lies The Island collection (2012). Kevin Barry won The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2012 for this particular…
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Favourite Words of Moira Rose
Moira Rose is the dramatic matriarch of the Rose family and a soap opera star, who takes an interest in civics after moving to Schitt’s Creek.
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Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan Analysis
The common thread between stories in this compendium: All stories are set in the same, off-kilter suburb. Some of the stories have no words, and might consist only of a single frame of narrative art. Creative Arts teachers find this really useful in the classroom.
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A Family Man by V.S. Pritchett Short Story Analysis
“A Family Man” is a short story by British writer V.S. Pritchett (1900-1997), published in a 1977 edition of The New Yorker. Pritchett was a critic as well as a writer, and as a writer, was best known for the short form.
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Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane Short Story Analysis
“Gallatin Canyon” is a short, grim road trip story by American author Thomas McGuane. This story served as the title of McGuane’s 2006 collection. In 2021, Deborah Treisman and Téa Obreht discussed its merits on the New Yorker fiction podcast. SYNOPSIS A man and a woman drive through Gallatin Canyon, toward Idaho, where the narrator…
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On Rhyming Picturebooks and Children’s Poetry Analysis
Examine the work of rhyming masters like Jane Yolen, Jack Prelutsky, Karma Wilson, Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen and Corey Rosen Schwartz. Tara Lazar, How To Write Children’s Picturebooks “If it’s going to rhyme, it’s just terribly important that there’s some repeated phrase, some sort of chorus-y bit.” Julia Donaldson, The Guardian interview In 1991 an editor in…
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Making Use Of Cognitive Biases In Storytelling
Cognitive biases are at play when an audience interprets any work of art. Storytellers can make use of them, and regularly do.
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Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People by Lorrie Moore Short Story Analysis
“Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People” is a mother-and-daughter road trip short story by American writer Lorrie Moore. This story was published in The New Yorker in November 1993. Also find it in Birds of America (1999) and The Collected Stories. The title of this story comes from something the mother of this…
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How To Write Like William Trevor
William Trevor didn’t like giving interviews. Part of the reason: Interviewers would try to get him to break down his process. But he considered the entire thing a mystery; he could never explain how he wrote. He worried that if he got too “academic” in his approach, he’d no longer be able to write. (He…
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Death Symbolism in Art and Literature
For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside…
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Symbolism of The Child
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of merely a descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these are the marks of childhood and adolescence […] The modern…
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A Continuum of Imaginative Powers
I enjoy stories about characters with wild imaginations, and that may partly explain why I love children’s books. From Where The Wild Things Are to highly symbolic fairytales to post-modern off-kilter realities, children’s literature is full of dreamscapes and fantastic journeys. But stories of imaginative power don’t end with childhood — there are many examples…
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Conflict In The Kitchen
Cover by Jessie Willcox Smith; lower left bottom says H114; original is faded and watermarked; Bell, Louise Price, “Kitchen Fun- Teaches children to cook successfully”, Harter Publishing Co, Cleveland, Ohio, ©1932, 28 pages