The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Contains

Canonical title

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Original title

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Original publication date

1976

Disambiguation notice

Contents:

• Introduction

1. Part One: Stories. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, A private experience ; Sherwood Anderson, Hands ; Margaret Atwood, Happy endings ; James Baldwin, Sonny's blues ; Toni Cade Bambara, ... (show all)The lesson; Alison Bechdel, The fellowship ; Ambrose Bierce, An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ; Jorge Luis Borges, The south ; Richard Brautigan, The Cleveland wrecking yard ; Angela Carter, The company of wolves ; Raymond Carver, Cathedral ; Willa Cather, Paul's cause ; John Cheever, The swimmer ; Anton Chekhov, The darling ; Anton Chekhov, The lady with the dog ; Kate Chopin, Désirée's baby ; Kate Chopin, The story of an hour ; Sandra Cisneros, The house on Mango Street ; Sandra Cisneros, My name ; Sandra Cisneros, A house of my own ; Sandra Cisneros, Mango says goodbye sometimes ; Stephen Crane, The open boat ; Edwidge Danticat, Without inspection ; Lydia Davis, The caterpillar ; Lydia Davis, Happiest moment ; Junot Díaz, How to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl or halfie ; Ralph Ellison, Battle royal ; Louise Erdrich, The red convertible ; William Faulkner, A rose for Emily ; William Faulkner, That evening sun ; Gabriel García Márquez, A very old man with enormous wings ; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The yellow wallpaper ; Lauren Groff, The midnight zone ; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown ; Bessie Head, Looking for a rain god ; Ernest Hemingway, Big two-hearted river ; Ernest Hemingway, Hills like white elephants ; Zora Neale Hurston, The country in the woman ; Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat ; Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle ; Shirley Jackson, The lottery ; Sarah Orne Jewett, A white heron ; James Joyce, Araby ; James Joyce, The dead ; Franz Kafka, A hunger artist ; Franz Kafka, The metamorphosis ; Jamaica Kincaid, Girl ; Jamil Jan Kochai, Occupational hazards ; D. H. Lawrence, The rocking-horse winner ; Ursula K. Le Guin, The ones who walk away from Omelas ; Jonathan Lethem, Narrowing valley ; Jack London, To build a fire ; Ling Ma, Peking duck ; Katherine Mansfield, The garden-party ; Guy de Maupassant, The necklace ; Herman Melville, Bartleby, the scrivener ; Manuel Muñoz, Anyone can do it ; Alice Munro, Night ; Keiji Nakazawa, excerpt from Barefoot Gen ; Joyce Carol Oates, Where are you going, where have you been? ; Tim O'Brien ; The things they carried ; Flannery O'Connor, Everything that rises must converge ; Tillie Olsen, I stand here ironing ; Grace Paley, A conversation with my father ; Edgar Allen Poe, The cask of amontillado ; Edgar Allen Poe, The fall of the house of Usher ; Annie Proulx, Job history ; Marjane Satrapi, from Persepolis: “The veil” ; George Saunders, Stick ; Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, A brief encounter with the enemy ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow woman ; Zadie Smith, The lazy river ; Leo Tolstoy, The death of Ivan Ilych ; John Updike, A & P ; Helena María Viramontes, The moths ; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harrison Bergeron ; Alice Walker, Everyday use ; Eudora Welty, A worn path ; John Edgar Wideman, George Floyd story ; Richard Wright, The man who was almost a man
2. Part Two: Commentaries. Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind man steals yellow woman ; Sherwood Anderson, Form, not plot, in the short story ; Wayne C. Booth, A rhetorical reading of O'Connor's “Everything that rises must converge” ; Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I ; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, A new critical reading of “The fall of the house of Usher” ; Raymond Carver, Creative writing ; Ann Charters, Translating Kafka ; Anton Chekhov, Technique in writing the short story ; Kate Chopin, How I stumbled upon Maupassant ; Stephen Crane, The sinking of the Commodore ; Lindsey Drager, Not essay, nor fiction, but prose: of narration ; Terry Eagleton, How to read literature ; Ralph Ellison, The influence of folklore on “Battle royal” ; Richard Ellmann, A biographical perspective on Joyce's “The dead” ; William Faulkner, The meaning of “A rose for Emily” ; Janice H. Harris, Levels of meaning in Lawrence's “The rocking-horse winner” ; Zora Neale Hurston, How it feels to be colored me ; Shirley Jackson, The morning of June 28, 1948 and “The lottery” ; Gustav Janouch, Kafka's view of “The metamorphosis” ; Sarah Orne Jewett, Looking back on girlhood ; Jamaica Kincaid, On “Girl” ; D. H. Lawrence, On “The fall of the house of Usher” and “The cask of amontillado” ; Ursula K. Le Guin ; The scapegoat in Omelas ; Jack London, Letter to the editor on “To build a fire” ; Guy de Maupassant, The writer's goal ; Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” ; J. Hillis Miller, A deconstructive reading of Melville's "Bartleby the scrivener" ; Vladimir Nabokov, A reading of Chekhov's "The lady with the little dog" ; J. C. C. Nachtigal, Peter Klaus the goatherd ; Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth talk: short story into film ; Tim O'Brien, Alpha Company ; Grace Paley, A conversation with Ann Charters ; Edgar Allen Poe, The importance of the single effect in a prose tale ; George Saunders, Pattern story: thoughts on "The darling" ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective ; Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov's intent in "The darling" ; Mario Vargas Llosa, The prose style of Jorge Luis Borge and Gabriel García Márquez ; Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: a cautionary tale and a partisan view ; Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead?
3. Part Three: Casebooks
   1. Casebook One: Short shorts or flash fiction. Aesop, The fox and the grapes ; Franz Kafka, The wish to become an American Indian ; Charles Baxter, On the very short story ; Joyce Carol Oates, On very short fictions ; Lydia Davis, Reading short stories
   2. Casebook Two: James Baldwin's "Sonny's blues." James Baldwin, autobiographical notes ; Keith E Byerman, Words and music: narrative ambiguity in "Sonny's blues" ; Kenneth A. McClane, "Sonny's blues" saved my life
   3. Casebook Three: Sandra Cisneros. Sandra Cisneros, Straw into gold ; Ellen McCracken, On Cisneros's The house on Mango Street ; Julián Olivares, The house on Mango Street and the poetics of space ; Sandra Cisneros, The author responds to your letter
   4. Casebook Four: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The yellow wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Why I wrote "The yellow wallpaper" ; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration ; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A feminist reading of Gilman's "The yellow wallpaper" ; S. Weir Mitchell, from "The evolution of the rest treatment" ; Elaine Showalter, On "The yellow wallpaper"
4. Part Four: Appendices
   1. Reading short stories ; Grace Paley, Samuel ; Close reading short fiction ; Guidelines for close reading short fiction ; Sample close reading : Grace Paley, Samuel, 1968 ; Critical thinking about short fiction
   2. The elements of fiction ; Plot ; Character ; Setting ; Point of view ; Style ; Theme
   3. A brief history of the short story ; The origins of storytelling ; Early forms of the written story ; The tale of the medieval period ; The influence of the periodical ; The German influence and romanticism ; Realism ; Modernism ; The post-modern era
   4. Writing about short stories ; Keeping a short story journal ; Using the commentaries and casebooks ; Writing the paper ; Types of literary papers ; Student essay: Explication: "The devil's tricks in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'" ; Student essay: Analysis: "The path toward evil" [on "Young Goodman Brown"] ; Student essay: Comparison and contrast: "Bringing fiction to life: from folktale to short story in 'Peter Klaus the goatherd' and 'Rip Van Winkle'" ; Writing about the context and the stories ; Other perspectives ; Student essay: "Anton Chekhov's 'The darling' in Russian and English translations ; Writing the research paper ; Student essay: Research paper: "Lost letters: Gilman's achievement in 'The yellow wallpaper' ; Revising your research paper
   5. Literary theory and critical perspectives ; Formalist criticism ; Biographical criticism ; Psychological criticism ; Historical criticism ; Reader-response criticism ; Poststructuralist and deconstructionist criticism ; Gender criticism ; Cultural criticism ; Selected bibliography
   6. Glossary of literary terms