By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘In Spite of Everything’ (or, as the poet himself has it, without capitals, ‘in spite o… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Under the Knife’, which was first published in the New Review in January 1896, is a short story by H. G… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ (1924) reinterprets a clas… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Old Aunt Peggy’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). She wrote the story on 8 January 1892 and it was a… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Aepyornis Island’, often styled as ‘Æpyornis Island’, is an 1894 short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). The stor… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Father’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories. It is more of a sketch or even, perhaps, a piece of ‘flash fic… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ is an oddity within the Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925-64). The shortest story in the… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) When I founded this blog back in 2012, it was with the principal aim of challenging misconceptions and taking a closer look at some of the thing… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Crazy Woman’ is a poem by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). It was published in her 1960 collection The Bean Eate… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Science fiction has reinvented the Robinsonade – a narrative based on the scenario described in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe &ndas… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Throughout various cultures and in numerous literary and mythological traditions, the butterfly represents life. In a range of ways, butterflies… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The most successful and satisfying period of H. G. Wells’s long writing career ran from around 1894 – something of an annus mirabili… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector (1920-77) has not had as much attention as her fellow titans of S… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What connects the tiger with Voldemort and with the alchemical metal of lead? Was Winnie the Pooh friends with a tiger or not? Let’s delve… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The English novelist, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is revered by many readers – and fellow… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The writer A. M. Burrage once claimed that he wished ‘to give the reader a pleasant shudder, in the hope that he will take a lighted candl… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Vision of Judgment’ was first published in Butterfly in September 1899. The tale is a light and humorous piece about the Day of J… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American poet who is best-known for one book of poetry: The Prophet. This 1923 book is one of the bests… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Popular Mechanics’ is one of Raymond Carver’s shortest stories, but although it is sometimes known by the alternative title … Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American-born poet, playwright, and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth cen… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘In the Waiting Room’ is one of the best-known poems by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79). Written in 1971 and published… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Doctor Chevalier’s Lie’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904), written in 1891 and published in Vog… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) French poetry is among the most romantic, the most innovative, and the most influential of all poetry. French poets – possibly influenced… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to s… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in the Pall Mall Budget on 2 Augu… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs t… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’ – or, more accurately, ‘Do not stand by my grave and weep’ – are the ope… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Hard Way is the quintessential Jack Reacher novel. When it was first published back in 2006, it was the tenth novel by Lee Child to feature… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), or H. D. as she chose to publish, was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’ by various critics and reviewers… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. Th… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story, which runs to just a few pag… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) I’m often surprised by how little serious critical attention some of the work of J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) has received. ‘Having a W… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Much Madness Is Divinest Sense’ is the unofficial title of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems (she tended not to give her poems t… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Electric Ant’ is a short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), written in 1968 and published in The Magazine o… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Of all of the short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), ‘The Apple’ is perhaps the most allegorical. First published in the Idler ma… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ was written in 1916, while Thomas was fighting in the trenches. ‘Rain’ is about Thomas… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Sharon Olds (born 1942) was born and raised in California and educated at Stanford, although she has spent much of her adult l… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Wind’ is, after ‘The Thought-Fox’, probably the most famous and most successful poem in Ted Hughes’ debut collect… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Roselily’ is the opening story of Alice Walker’s short-story collection In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Vietnamese-born American poet Ocean Vuong is one of the most exciting new poets to emerge in the last decade or so. His poetry deals with a… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Good Bones’ is the best-known poem by the contemporary American poet Maggie Smith (born 1977) and the title poem of her third full… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Valley of Spiders’ is a short story by the British science-fiction pioneer, H. G. Wells (1866-1946). First published in the Str… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was a fascinating man and poet, and his poetry remains much-loved and widely read around the world. But wh… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘They Shut Me up in Prose’, whilst not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems – it certainly isn’t up there wit… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Ripe Figs’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Subtitled ‘An Idyl’, the story is one of th… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The British author Colin Dexter (1930-2017) is responsible for creating one of the most iconic fictional detectives: Endeavour Morse, known to m… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘When in the chronicle of wasted time’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s cycle of 154 sonnets. In the sonnet, S… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Villager’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story explores themes of identity, longing, an… Read More

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The American poet Maggie Smith (born 1977) has become one of the most popular and most widely read contemporary poets, thanks to her poetry bein… Read More