Academic Team Lit- Short Stories

This is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948.^[a] The story describes a fictional small American community that observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", which is intended to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens.

The Lottery

This is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator's sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the narrator committed. The victim was an old man with a filmy pale blue "vulture-eye", as the narrator calls it. The narrator emphasizes the careful calculation of the murder, attempting the perfect crime, complete with dismembering the body in the bathtub and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator's actions result in hearing a thumping sound, which the narrator interprets as the dead man's beating heart.

The Tale-Tell Heart

is a short story by American writer O. Henry, first published in 1905. The story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money. As a sentimental story with a moral lesson about gift-giving, it has been popular for adaptation, especially for presentation at Christmas time. The plot and its twist ending are well known; the ending is generally considered an example of cosmic irony.^[2] The story was allegedly written at Pete's Tavern^[3] on Irving Place in New York City.

The Gift Of The Magi

This is a Southern gothic short story first published in 1953 by author Flannery O'Connor, who, in her own words, described it as "the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida [from Georgia], is slaughtered by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit."

A Good Man is Hard to Find

This is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.^[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.The story describes a young woman and her husband. He imposes a rest cure on her when she suffers "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby. They spend the summer at a colonial mansion, where the narrator is largely confined to an upstairs nursery. The story makes striking use of an unreliable narrator in order to gradually reveal the degree to which her husband has "imprisoned" her due to her physical and mental condition. She describes torn wallpaper, barred windows, metal rings in the walls, a floor "scratched and gouged and splintered", a bed bolted to the floor, and a gate at the top of the stairs, but blames all these on children who must have resided there.

The Yellow Wallpaper

This is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in August 1927 in the literary magazine transition, then later that year in the short story collection Men Without Women. In 2002, the story was adapted into a 38-minute short film starring Greg Wise, Emma Griffiths Malin and Benedict Cumberbatch. The story focuses mainly on a conversation between an American man and a young woman, described as a "girl", at a Spanish train station while waiting for a train to Madrid. The girl compares the nearby hills to white elephants. The pair indirectly discuss an "operation" that the man wants the girl to have, which is implied to be an abortion, that was taboo to talk about.

hills like white elephants

This is a short story by Guy de Maupassant, first published on 17 February 1884 in the French newspaper Le Gaulois.^[1] It is known for its twist ending, a hallmark of de Maupassant's style. A woman borrows a necklace for a party, loses it, and spends years repaying the debt, only to learn it was worthless.

The Necklace (sometimes the diamond necklace)

This short story, also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell,^[1] first published in Collier's on January 19, 1924, with illustrations by Wilmot Emerton Heitland. The story features a big-game hunter from New York City who falls from a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean, where a Russian aristocrat hunts him. The story is inspired by the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were particularly fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

The Most Dangerous Game

This is a short story by James Joyce published as the third entry in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister.

Araby

is a short story by James Thurber. The most famous of Thurber's stories. It was made into a 1947 film, with Danny Kaye in the title role, though the film is very different from the original story. It was also adapted into a 2013 film, directed by and starring Ben Stiller, and is again very different from the original. The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes, each inspired by some detail of his mundane surroundings. As the story ends, Mitty stands against a wall, smoking, and imagines himself facing a firing squad, "inscrutable to the last."

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

This is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway first published in August 1936, in Esquire magazine. The story opens with a paragraph about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, whose western summit is called in Masai the "House of God." There, we are told, lies the frozen carcass of a leopard near the summit. No one knows why it is there at such altitude.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

is a short story by American author William Faulkner, first published on April 30, 1930 in an issue of The Forum.^[1] The story takes place in Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, in the equally fictional county of Yoknapatawpha. The story opens with a brief fourth-person account of the funeral of Emily Grierson, an elderly Southern woman whose funeral is the obligation of the town. It then proceeds in a non-linear fashion to the narrator's recollections of Emily's archaic, and increasingly strange, behavior throughout the years.

A Rose For Emily

This is a short story by D. H. Lawrence. It was first published in July 1926, in Harper's Bazaar and subsequently appeared in the first volume of Lawrence's collected short stories. It was made into a full-length film directed by Anthony Pelissier and starring John Howard Davies, Valerie Hobson and John Mills; the film was released in the United Kingdom in 1949 and in 1950 in the United States. It was also made into a TV film in 1977 and a 1997 film directed by Michael Almereyda. The story describes a young, middle-class Englishwoman who "had no luck". Although outwardly successful, she is haunted by a sense of failure; her husband is a ne'er-do-well, and her work as a commercial artist does not earn as much as she would like. The family's life exceeds its income, and unspoken anxiety about money permeates the household. Her children, a son Paul and his two sisters, sense this anxiety; they even claim they can hear the house whispering "There must be more money".

The Rocking-Horse Winner

This is a short story by Anton Chekhov. First published in 1899, it describes an adulterous affair between an unhappily married Moscow banker and a young married woman that begins while both are vacationing alone in Yalta. It is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

The Lady with the Dog

This is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). First published in 1898, it was based on Crane's experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned after the boat overturned. Crane's personal account of the shipwreck and the men's survival, titled "Stephen Crane's Own Story", was first published a few days after his rescue.

The Open Boat

This is a short story by American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk, who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, responding to any request with the words "I would prefer not to."

Bartleby, the Scrivener

This is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.

The Dead

is a science fiction short story by author Ray Bradbury written as a chronicle about a lone house that stands intact in a California city that has otherwise been obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and then is destroyed in a fire caused by a windstorm. The title is from a 1918 poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale that was published during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. The story was first published in 1950

There Will Come Soft Rains

is the third major-press collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver, published in 1983.^[1] It received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Narrated by a man whose wife is old friends with a blind man, the story shows the husband/narrator's distaste for the blind man who is coming to visit him and his wife for a few days. At times it seems that the man is jealous of the blind man for being so close to his wife; at other times it seems that the husband is disgusted by the man's blindness. In the end they bond in a way through the communication they share about what a cathedral looks like.

Cathedral

is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book. The story, set in an unnamed Italian city at Carnival time, is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him. Like several of Poe's stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative follows a person being buried alive – in this case, by immurement. As in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", Poe conveys the story from the murderer's perspective.

The Cask of Amontillado