Everyday we hear about the dying coral reefs in Australia, the Amazon forest fires, the massive number of ocean animals washing ashore with stomachs full of plastics. But how often do we stop to think about our actions that have contributed to this destruction?
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When the African continent, and especially the Southern region, was grappling with HIV/AIDS pandemic, SIDA, in collaboration with the University of Cape Town, used literature to raise awareness by showing how communities were dealing with the disease. Edward Chinhanhu’s short story Our Christmas Reunion is among the pieces that shone in the ‘Share Your Story about HIV/AIDS’ creative writing competition and anthologized in Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Poems and Stories from Southern Africa. A story that interweaves love, family, innocence, loss, sex education, and AIDS so well that in the end, every one of the themes is felt in equal measure.
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Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ has been anthologized in plentiful collections and quoted in a multitude of settings, some without even knowing it.
Motivational speakers, pastors, promotion, and award speeches all tout its main theme of individualism and ‘following your own path’. How they took a different career path or made an infamous decision and that has put them at that podium. The poem’s last three lines often sum up these powerful talks,
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O’Henry is arguably the master of twist endings. Each of his plot twist catches the reader more off guard than the previous. Whether it is Della and Jim finding out they have sold their most prized possessions to buy each other nearly useless gifts in “The Gift of Magi“ or the drawing of a leaf we all assumed to be real in “The Last Leaf“. More typical of his narrations is a plot comprising two people, whose relationship is stressed by different circumstances. And in between, readers learn about the plot twist. These trademarks are also evident in the short story “After Twenty Years“, along with the author’s satirical humor and witty narration.
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Nearly everyone who reads Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery cannot even begin to fathom the true meaning of the lottery until it has already happened. The shock that we experience at the end on learning that the lottery’s winner becomes a sacrificial lamb to fulfill a tradition that has long lost its meaning catches us off guard.
And I think this is partly the reason this short story is still a success among Jackson’s readers; unknown to the reader, she builds on suspense that we only come to realize in the end. The hints that Jackson provides throughout the story only become evident after the first read. It is then that we go back to the story from the beginning and start seeing these instances of foreshadowing in bolder colors.
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A murder most foul, an unlikely culprit, and a leg of lamb served to the detectives. Through all these, readers are still likely to associate more with the culprit than any other character.
It is in the evening and heavily pregnant Mary Maloney is eagerly waiting for her husband, Patrick, to come home from work at the Precinct. However, when Patrick arrives, he is jittery and even makes himself another drink- a stronger one this time- before telling Mary that he wishes to leave her.
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In her interview with the New Yorker right after publishing the short story ‘Two Men Arrive in A Village,’ Zadie Smith discussed, among other things, the inspiration for this story. She mentioned the idea of eliminating specifics in storytelling in a way that allows a story to implicate everybody. In her words,
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Joycean epiphany: one of those often subtle but definitive moments after which life is never quite the same again. All of us, or a majority of us, have felt it. We discuss it so often as a literary effect that we forget how accurately it depicts human beings’ experience with change.
To some extent this translates to the way we shape our memories; editing as we go and forgetting some details . Just like in James Joyce’s short story Araby, a grown man remembering a single night with a mixture of scorn and tenderness, a night when his childhood and adolescence naivety is shed and replaced with anguish.
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Solomon Northup’s memoir ‘Twelves Years a Slave’ has received notable recognition in contemporary media. Among the many themes he explores when narrating accounts of his and other slaves’ experiences in the hands of white slave owners, violence is central.
While it is apparent that violence was part of slavery in America, most slaveholders tried to deny this, masking it with such explanations like the slave tried to escape with every chance they got.
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Solomon Northup’s memoir ‘Twelves Years a Slave’ has received notable recognition in contemporary media. Among the many themes he explores when narrating accounts of his and other slaves’ experiences in the hands of white slave owners, violence is central.
While it is apparent that violence was part of slavery in America, most slaveholders tried to deny this, masking it with such explanations like the slave tried to escape with every chance they got.
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