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A Day Like Any Other by Mavis Gallant Analysis
This story is interesting to me because of the year it was written. As a modern parent, I hear a lot about how ‘parents these days’ are overprotective of our children, interfering too much in their lives, stunting their emotional development. Yet this is a story of one such mother, and it dates from 1952. Have […]
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Little Red Riding Hood Fairytale History
“Little Red Riding Hood” is one of the best-known fairy tales. Depending on who tells it, this is a feminist story, or a patriarchal one. Little Red Riding Hood is told to children, but probably features often as a sexual fantasy. Elle avait vu le loup – “She’d seen the wolf” in French means she’s lost her virginity. There are also…
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The People Across The Canyon by Margaret Millar Analysis
Hear “The People Across The Canyon” (1964) read by Douglass Greene at Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
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Shirley Jackson’s Louisa, Please Come Home Analysis
“Louisa, Please Come Home” is a short story by Shirley Jackson, first published in Ladies Home Journal, 1960.
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The Tiger’s Bride by Angela Carter Short Story Analysis
“The Tiger’s Bride” is a short story in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection. Marina Warner writes of stories in The Bloody Chamber, published during the post-war feminist movement which largely denounced fairytales and everything they stood for: [Carter] refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatised genre, […]
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The Company Of Wolves by Angela Carter Short Story Analysis
Even if you’ve not heard much of Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves” and other subversive stories have probably influenced some of your other favourite authors.
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The Picnic by Mavis Gallant Analysis
The Picnic by Mavis Gallant is darkly comic, a ‘comedy of manners’, starring an eccentric old French aristocratic woman. The reader is afforded a close-up view into her life via an American family, the Marshalls, Major Marshall being stationed in France after the war. The Comedy of Manners is an entertainment form which satirizes the […]
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Accidents by Carol Shields Analysis
The more you read of [Shields’] stories the more you sense her delight in making connections, moving things on…If Shields had a single subject in these stories it was really solace, the strategies we employ to keep despair, or doubt, or even confusion at bay. Mostly that solace comes from language, whether it be literature or […]
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The Swimmer by John Cheever Analysis
“The Swimmer”(1964) is considered one of Cheever’s best short stories. Anne Enright feels that this would never have worked as the novel Cheever had originally planned and adds that it would work even better as a short story had he lost one or two pools. (The naturist communists are amusing but we don’t want any […]
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Madeline’s Birthday by Mavis Gallant Analysis
Mavis Gallant died last year, but if she were still around she might not think much of my attempt to dissect her stories in order to learn from them: Gallant is dismissive of analysing or explaining her work, and distrustful of academic attempts to do so. The Guardian, 2009 The same Guardian article says of her […]
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Short Story Endings and Extrapolation
A key term in classical Chinese poetry is ju jue yi bujue (句絕意不絕) which means “lines that end but meaning that does not end.” This is a useful distinction, and a similar concept applies to many short stories. Staying in Asia, Japan also has a concept which applies to many types of short story endings: […]