When the White family comes into the possession of a monkey’s paw that magically grant wishes, they do what many people would do—they succumb to vanity and wish for the unneeded. But every wish has a …
A Good Man Is Hard to Find is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most ofte…
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile is…
M. R. James was a prolific and hugely successful author, now credited with having redefined the ghost story for the 20th century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic cliches of his predecessors and…
This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost…
The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague known as the Red Death by hiding in his large converted abbey home. He and many other wealthy nobles, hold a masquerade ball us…
Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately thr…
This selection is fictional, but it is based on a real event. In 1985, a volcano erupted in Colombia. The heat of the volcano melted sheets of ice, resulting in mudslides. More than 23,000 people were…
Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an…
