Short Stories and Essays

Middle East and Mediterranean

• Esther

• "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers"

North American

•  The Oral Tradition in the Modern World

• Washington Irving
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 
• "Rip Van Winkle"
• Edgar Allen Poe

• "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)

• Richard Connell
• "The Most Dangerous Game"
• O. Henry

• "The Gift of the Magi": Bright

• Stephen Vincent Benét (pronounced bih-NAY)

• "By the Waters of Babylon": Sci-Fi

•  Louis L'Amour

• "Trap of Gold": Adventure

• Alice Walker
• "Everyday Use"  
• Amy Tan
• "Two Kinds"

• Jon Krakauer 
• "Into Thin Air" 

• Contest Winner from Bookshop Santa Cruz: "Among the Trees" by Breanna Eddy 

South America

• Jorge Luis Borges
• "The Book of Sand"
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" 

British

• Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)  

• "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" 

• "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" 

• Edgar Allan Poe
• Click here for a bank of stories.

• Rudyard Kipling

•  "The Man Who Would be King"

• Hilaire Belloc

• "The Mowing of a Field" (1906) 
• "The Wing of Dalua"

• G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936)

• "A Piece of Chalk" (1909)
• More essays:
• A Defense of Nonsense (any essay in this collection)
• "The Blue Cross"(audio version) (the first of a series of Father Brown detective stories). Here are more tales:
• The Innocence of Father Brown
  The Wisdom of Father Brown
  Father Brown (from Collected Works)
   
•  

•  W. W. Jacobs

  • "The Monkey's Paw"

• Adelaide Casely-Hayford

  • "Mista Courifer" (1961)

• Doris Lessing  
• "Through the Tunnel" (or here as a .doc) 

  Russian

• Leo Tolstoy

• "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" 

Sample Essay Prompts

• #1 Compare the characterization (focus on the detectives) and atmosphere of "The Eternity Ring" (Foyle's War) and either "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" or "The Blue Cross."  

• #2 Coming-of-age: Compare a coming-of-age experience of your own with that of any single protagonist in our recent reading.  You must include at least one other literary device from our story unit as you compare the experiences (irony, plot, atmosphere).  

• Irony: make sure you treat this in detail in at least one paragraph of your essay (consider a structure that moves from innocence to experience to wisdom)
• Plot: make sure you treat the key points of a plot line (exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion)  

• #3 Compare and contrast two of the recent stories you've read, focusing on at least one of the literary elements from our story unit: plot and its elements, irony, atmosphere and tone, or symbolism.

 For further study:

• Glossary of Terms and Elements
• Elements of Literature (HRW Text)
• Short Stories Old and New (1916)