Featured Stories

King Thrushbeard

Thrushbeard: German folktale from Brothers GrimmThe Brothers Grimm would have us believe that this folktale teaches a valuable lesson by documenting the fall of a spoiled princess who judges potential suitors by looks alone and is so ill-mannered that she says cruel things about them to their faces. Through her punishment (being married to a beggar street musician), we also learn that she has almost no household or practical skills. I’m not sure though about the central idea that the best way to teach humility is to publicly humiliate a person. Isn’t this what the princess was punished for at the beginning of the story?

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Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry

Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: Short story by Elizabeth McCrackenIn this story by Elizabeth McCracken, a homeless woman with no family has spent her life traveling the countryside and staying at the homes of people she says are distant relatives. Now in her eighties, she visits a young couple claiming to be the niece of the man’s great-grandfather. While there, she forms an unlikely attachment to a neglected, undisciplined young boy living nearby. When the truth comes out and it is time for her to leave, she considers taking the boy with her. Themes include homelessness, deception, family, loss, connection.

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With the Photographer

With the Photographer: Short story by Stephen LeacockThis story by Stephen Leacock makes use of irony and hyperbole to satirize artistic arrogance. A man who visits a professional photographer to have a portrait taken is humiliated during his sitting. The photographer not only criticizes every aspect of his facial features, but also insists on a number of different posture changes to hide what he considers flaws. Later, when the man views the developed product, his face has been so artificially altered as to be unrecognizable. Other themes include appearance and the disconnect between self-perception and the way others see us, insecurity, body shaming, humiliation, anger and frustration.

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Jeeves Takes Charge

Jeeves Takes Charge: Short story by P. G. WodehouseThis story is from Carry on Jeeves, the third of seventeen “Jeeves books” by P. G. Wodehouse. Its significance is that we learn how Bertie Wooster, a likeable but hapless upper-class layabout living off family money, came across and learned to depend upon his wonder valet Jeeves. In his first forty-eight hours on the job, Jeeves saves Bertie from losing his inheritance, and helps him avoid what would have been an even worse fate – marriage to Florence, his dominating, snobby fiancé. Themes include engagement and marriage, social class and wealth, scandal, master-servant relationships.

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The Pearl of Love

The Pearl of Love: Short story by H. G. WellsIn this story by H. G. Wells an Indian prince, devastated by the death of his young wife, has her body entombed in a sarcophagus and begins to build a magnificent shrine around it that he names the Pearl of Love. Over the years he makes the memorial grander and grander, until one day he tires of it. He not only disassembles the shrine, but also has the sarcophagus removed because it blocks his view of the lord of mountains. Themes include love, loss, grief, art and artistry, the nature of beauty, time and healing.

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Flowering Judas

Flowering Judas: Short story by Katherine Anne PorterThe major theme of this story by Katherine Porter is betrayal. Other themes include alienation, fear, corruption, despair and guilt. Laura, an idealistic American schoolteacher who traveled to Mexico to support the socialist revolution has a sense of impending doom. Trapped by the unwanted attentions of the corrupt, adulterous revolutionary Braggioni and with no love for the Mexican people, she feels lost and alone. Braggioni’s lifestyle is a betrayal of both his socialist ideals and marriage. In working for a socialist cause, Laura betrays her Catholic faith. Her sexual repression could also be seen as betrayal of her womanhood.

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The Cheater’s Guide to Love

The Cheater’s Guide to Love: Short story by Junot DiazIt is hard to like or feel any sympathy for the American-raised Dominican Harvard professor at the centre of this story by Junot Diaz. The serial cheater who slept with fifty other women over the course of their six-year relationship belatedly realizes that the fiancé who dumped him was “the one”. Over the next six years he struggles to deal with the consequences of losing her while facing performance issues at work, debilitating physical conditions, and constant racial taunts and profiling. Themes include love vs. desire, infidelity and its consequences, heartbreak, depression and recovery, self-awareness and redemption, racism.

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The Tiger

The Tiger: Short story by S. RajaratnamIn this moving tale by S. Rajaratnam, a pregnant Malay villager bathing in a river notices a tiger watching her from tall grass near the riverbank. Initially too scared to move, she is surprised as the tiger takes less and less interest in her. Eventually able to swim away, she immediately tells fellow villagers about the encounter. She feels uneasy when a party of men set out to shoot the apparently harmless animal, and is horrified by what they find after killing it. Themes include: fear, connection, compassion, bloodlust, motherhood, conservation (co-existence with vs. destruction/exploitation of nature).

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