‘‘Aunty Misery’’ begins with these words: ‘‘This is a story.’’ This self-conscious opening seems redundant; readers are aware they are reading a story and hardly need to be reminded of that. However, the statement is effective in that it serves to elevate the fictional quality of the tale that ensues. No claim as to the…
Tag: Summary
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Summary
The action of the story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” takes place over the course of an evening, in which two couples, Nick and Laura, and Mel and Terri McGinnis, sit around the kitchen table at the McGinnis’ apartment, drinking gin and talking, before they all go out to dinner together….
That Evening Sun – Summary
“That Evening Sun” opens as a reminiscence: the narrator, whose identity is unknown at first, reports that in Jefferson, ”the streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees.” The time is approximately the turn of the century. The narrator first introduces Nancy, a…
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers – Summary
“Suspicion” opens with Mr. Mummery, who, on his way to work, increasingly feels a stomachache. He tries to ignore it and continues to browse the paper, reading about, among other items, a cook who poisoned a nearby family. At the office, he works with his partner, Mr. Brookes. At one point, Mr. Brookes asks if…
The Spinoza of Market Street – Summary
Dr. Nahum Fischelson, a philosopher, has devoted the last thirty years to studying and writing a commentary on the Dutch-German philosopher Benedict de Spinoza’s (1632-1677) central text, Ethics. Dr. Fischelson has spent years at this task, but has never actually completed his work. Nevertheless, he attempts to live by Spinoza’s rationalist philosophy, and often quotes…
The Pagan Rabbi – Summary
In “The Pagan Rabbi,” The narrator, an unnamed Jewish man in his mid-thirties, hears that Isaac Kornfeld, a childhood friend, has committed suicide at the age of thirty-six. The narrator’s father, a rabbi, and Isaac’s father, also a rabbi, had been friends as well as professional rivals. The narrator had been in rabbinical school with…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Summary
Part I As the story opens, Gregor Samsa has already turned into a gigantic insect. He notices this, but does not seem to find it horrifying or even that unusual, merely an inconvenience or perhaps a delusion. He worries mainly that he has overslept and will be late for work. He also thinks to himself…
The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara – Summary
In “The Lesson,” Miss Moore has moved into the narrator’s—Sylvia’s—neighborhood recently. Miss Moore is unlike the other African Americans in the neighborhood. She wears her hair in its natural curls, she speaks proper English, she goes by her last name, she has attended college, and she wants to teach the neighborhood children about the world…
Leaving the Yellow House – Summary
As the story opens, seventy-two-year-old Hattie has lived in the old yellow house in the practically deserted community of Sego Desert Lake, Utah, for years. Born and bred on the East Coast, Hattie came out West after a failed marriage to a Philadelphia blueblood. She used to have a lover named Wicks. He was a…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Summary
The story begins by setting the garden scene: a mild, breezy, summer day in July with ”perhaps a hundred stalks” of colorful flowers, petals unfurled to meet the sunlight. The light hits not only the flowers in an “oval-shaped flower-bed” but the brown earth from which they spring and across which a small snail is…