Contemporary writers arrive on the literary scene with a force of history behind them. They arrive after major literary movements and eras and are sometimes compared to the romantics, the humanists, the southern school, or the Victorians. Sometimes a writer fits neatly into a category or the melding of a few categories. Anne Tyler, in…
Tag: Analysis
Average Waves in Unprotected Waters – Essay
Like most of her short stories, Anne Tyler’s ‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ has been largely ignored by literary critics. Though very little has been written about the text, the story does encapsulate the Tyler reading experience as it focuses on themes of family, self-discovery, and the elevation of the ordinary to writers’ material. Broad…
The Aleph – Analysis
In 1995, Bill Gates, the world-renowned founder of Microsoft and personal computing visionary, published The Road Ahead, his study of computing history and examination of the ways in which computers will transform the lives of people all over the world. His enthusiasm for what is now commonly called the Information Age is found on every…
What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence – Analysis
John Edgar Wideman took the title of his story, “What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence,” from the last line of a work by an Austrian philosopher: Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). A possible interpretation of Wittgenstein’s sentence and the argument that leads up to it is that the…
Someone to Talk To by Deborah Eisenberg – Analysis
A reviewer from Kirkus Reviews calls the story “superb,” and R. Z. Sheppard, in a review for magazine, specifically praises the character Beale: “In ‘Someone to Talk To,’ a journalist who won’t stop gabbing about himself long enough to ask a question is worthy of Evelyn Waugh.” Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe , however,…
Paris 1991 – Analysis
In her short story “Paris 1991,” Kate Walbert immediately contrasts light and dark. The story opens with Rebecca’s arrival by plane “into the city of light [where] she descends in darkness.” This first juxtaposition of light and dark imagery illustrates the tension between illusion and reality in the story, as Rebecca’s fanciful imagination clashes with…
The Necessary Grace to Fall – Analysis
Although Ochsner’s first collection of stories, Necessary Grace to Fall , won literary awards, it attracted little attention from reviewers. This is not unusual for a first collection from a young, unknown writer. However, Ochsner’s second collection of stories, People I Wanted to Be (2005), did attract some notice. Interestingly, many of the comments of…
The Middleman by Bharti Mukherjee – Analysis
Bharati Mukherjee is known for her compelling stories about the experience of recent immigrants to the United States from the Third World. Although “The Middleman” takes place not in the United States but in an unnamed Central American country, it features the same theme. Alfie Judah is a naturalized American citizen who found his way…
Melon by Julian Barnes – Analysis
Julian Barnes’s short story “Melon” has many political implications. It is the tale of an English nobleman’s encounters with French culture at three distinct times in his life, giving readers his view of that country before, during, and after what is arguably the most significant event of the country’s history, the revolution that transformed it…
Meeting Mrinal – Analysis
The award-winning poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s first collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage , was published in 1995, and in 1996, it won the American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction. The collection was well received by the public, quickly becoming a…