STORY 7: "THE HAPPY PRINCE" BY OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. 

In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays. 

Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase 'art for art's sake'. 

Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat. 

http://www.wilde-online.info/oscar-wilde-biography.htm

The story “The Happy Prince” has at least three themes. The first theme of the story is that outward beauty is nothing. It is just a show. The real beauties are love and sacrifices. The second theme is that love and sacrifice are two saving forces. The third theme is that there is great gap between the rich and the poor, the rulers and the masses.

http://englishnotesforba.blogspot.com.es/2010/10/happy-prince-by-oscar-wilde.html

STORY 6: "THE BULLY" BY ROGER DEAN KISER

Click HERE to read information about this author and "The Bully", based on his own experience as an orphan,

STORY 5: "MAN OVERBOARD" BY WINSTON CHURCHILL

Born to an aristocratic family in 1874, Winston Churchill served in the British military and worked as a writer before going into politics. After becoming prime minister in 1940, he helped lead a successful Allied strategy with the U.S. and Russia during WWII to defeat the Axis powers and craft post-war peace. Elected prime minister again in 1951, he introduced key domestic reforms. Churchill died at age 90 in 1965.

For more information and a short documentary about him click HERE. 

http://skullsinthestars.com/2010/02/02/which-winston-churchill-wrote-man-overboard/

“Man Overboard!” appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine at a turning point of Churchill’s career.  He had been in the military since 1895; he resigned in 1899 and had his first run for political office that same year. 

The story is marvelously short, just as it is marvelously uncanny. Despite its brevity, it presents amazingly complex questions concerning the character of nature, the problem of evil, and the nature of God. Although one opinion concerning the story’s tone and the narrator’s final observation may seem more likely than others, each remains a possibility, and God may not be the sadist he at first appears to be. Death by shark would be horrible, to be certain, but would drowning be any quicker, more merciful, or dignified? On the other hand, if God exists, maybe he is as capricious and even as sadistic as the story can be interpreted to imply. For that matter, why did the man fall overboard?

To universalize the question, we might ask, instead, Why did humanity, in the Garden of Eden, take a similar fall? Is there a grace behind both “falls,” discernable only to the eye of faith, as Job suggests? Is the fall overboard a test of one’s trust in God, even when one faces his own mortality? Is the story a repudiation of the very idea of a merciful and loving God? Is he, instead, merely just and inscrutable? Does he exist at all?

http://skullsinthestars.com/2010/02/02/which-winston-churchill-wrote-man-overboard/
http://writinghorrorfiction.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/man-overboard-questioning-nature-and.html

Story 4: Brokeback Mountain

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Proulx-E-Annie.html

E. Annie Proulx Biography

E. Annie Proulx won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Postcards and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her next novel, The Shipping News.

Early life and education 

E. Annie Proulx was born on August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut, the first of George Napoleon Proulx and Lois Nelly Gill Proulx's five children. Proulx's father was the vice president of a textile company. His family had come to the United States from Quebec, Canada. The family often moved to different places in New England and North Carolina because of her father's job. Her mother, a painter, encouraged her to notice everything around her. She was taught to observe the activities of ants and to notice every detail, the feeling of fabrics, and the unique parts of people's faces.

Proulx attended Colby College in Maine briefly in the 1950s but left to work different jobs, including waiting tables and working at the post office. She received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Vermont in 1969 and a master's degree from Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada, in 1973. She then began working toward her Ph.D. (an advanced degree beyond a master's degree), but in 1975 she abandoned the idea, thinking she would not be able to find a teaching job. Proulx told Contemporary Authors that she was "wild" during those years. Her third marriage broke up at around the same time. As a result, Proulx became a single parent to her three sons.

Writing career

In tiny towns in Vermont, Proulx spent her time fishing, hunting, and canoeing, and began working as a freelance (not under contract) journalist. She wrote articles for magazines on many different topics. Her work appeared in publications such as Country Journal, Organic Gardening; and Yankee. In the early 1980s Proulx produced a series of "how-to" books, including Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It; The Fine Art of Salad Gardening; and Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives. She also created her own newspaper, the Vershire Behind the Times, which existed from 1984 to 1986. She also found time to average two short stories a year, nearly all of which were published.

In 1983 Proulx's career as a fiction writer was boosted by a notice in Best American Short Stories, an honor that was repeated in 1987. Proulx published her first book, Heart Songs and Other Stories, in 1988. Against the beautiful backdrop of the New England countryside, her stories involve the struggles of people trying to cope with their complicated lives. Proulx illustrates the stories with sharp descriptions, such as a man who eats a fish "as he would a slice of watermelon" or a woman who is as "thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout."

Successful novels

Editors that worked with Proulx on her short stories suggested that she try to write a novel. She came up with Postcards (1992), the story of a man from New England who flees the family farm after accidentally killing his bride-to-be. The passages involving the man's wanderings across the country come from Proulx's own trip across America while doing research. The book was a professional and personal success. Proulx became the first woman to receive the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, which came with a fifteen thousand dollar bonus.

The very next year, Proulx capped this success by writing The Shipping News. A dark but comic tale set in Newfoundland, it is the story of an unlucky newspaper reporter named Quoyle. It is packed with details, all drawn in a vibrant (full of life) lively style. The book resulted in a steady stream of awards: first, the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune, followed by the Irish Times International Award, and the National Book Award. These honors were all topped by the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Later works

After becoming famous, Proulx found that she had less time to research and write. In 1994 she had short stories published in Atlantic Monthly and Esquire. She bought a second home in Newfoundland, and by the spring of 1995 she had moved to Wyoming. In researching her next novel, Proulx became an expert on accordion music. She studied not how to play the instrument, but how to take one apart and then rebuild it. Accordion Crimes, released in 1996, is about the music of immigrants and particularly about different kinds of accordion music.

In 1999 Proulx released Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which won a book award from The New Yorker for best work of fiction. In 2001 The Shipping News was released as a film.

Read more: http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Proulx-E-Annie.html#ixzz3d3e360Pi

"Brokeback Mountain" was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain" in 1998. Proulx won an O. Henry Award prize (third place) for her story in 1998.

The story was published in a slightly expanded version in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. This collection was named a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Brokeback Mountain became an an romantic drama film directed by Ang Lee in 2005. The film stars Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, and Randy Quaid, and depicts the complex emotional and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983.^[3]

Regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Brokeback Mountain was also a commercial success. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was honored with Best Picture and Best Director accolades from the British Academy Film Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Producers Guild of America Awards,Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and Independent Spirit Awards among many other organizations and festivals. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, the most nominations at the 78th Academy Awards, where it won three: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score, while controversially losing Best Picture.

Story 3: "The garden party" by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Katherine Mansfield
Born	14 October 1888 Wellington, New Zealand
Died	9 January 1923 (aged 34) Fontainebleau, France
Pen name	Katherine Mansfield
Nationality	New Zealand (British subject)
Literary movement	Modernism
Spouse	George Bowden, John Middleton Murry
Partner	Ida Constance Baker
Relatives	Arthur Beauchamp(grandfather) Harold Beauchamp (father) Elizabeth von Arnim (cousin)

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

Katherine Mansfield

Short Story Moderniser

STORY BY DAMIEN WILKINS

‘I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened.’Katherine Mansfield, letter to John Middleton Murry, 18 October 1920

Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

The Garden Party (short story)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Garden Party" is a 1922 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the Saturday Westminster Gazette on 4 February 1922, then in the Weekly Westminster Gazette on 18 February 1922. It later appeared in The Garden Party: and Other Stories.^[1] Its luxurious setting is based on Mansfield's childhood home at Tinakori Road,Wellington.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Plot summary
• 2 Characters in "The Garden Party"
• 3 Major themes
• 4 References to other works
• 5 Literary significance
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Plot summary[edit]

The Sheridan family is preparing to host a garden party. Laura is supposed to be in charge but has trouble with the workers who appear to know better, and her mother (Mrs. Sheridan) has ordered lilies to be delivered for the party without Laura's approval. Her sister Jose tests the piano, and then sings a song in case she is asked to do so again later. After the furniture is rearranged, they learn that their working-class neighbor Mr. Scott has died. While Laura believes the party should be called off, neither Jose nor their mother agree. The party is a success, and later Mrs. Sheridan decides it would be good to bring a basket full of leftovers to the Scotts' house. She summons Laura to do so. Laura is shown into the poor neighbors' house by Mrs. Scott's sister, then sees the widow and her late husband's corpse. She is enamored of the young man, finding him beautiful and compelling, and when she leaves to find her brother waiting for her she is unable to complete the sentence, "Isn't life..."

Characters in "The Garden Party"[edit]

• Mrs. Sheridan, Mr. Sheridan's wife and mother of Laura, Laurie, Meg, and, Jose. She is in charge of the household on a daily-basis.
• Laura Sheridan, Mrs. Sheridan's daughter (and the story's protagonist)
• The workers, who put up a marquee in the garden
• Mr. Sheridan, Mrs. Sheridan's husband and father of Laura, Laurie, Meg, and, Jose. On the day of the party, he goes to work but joins the party later that evening.
• Meg Sheridan, a second daughter
• Jose Sheridan, a third daughter
• Laurie Sheridan, a son, Laura's brother
• Kitty Maitland, a friend of Laura and a party guest
• Sadie, a female house servant
• Hans, a male house servant
• The florist, who delivers lilies ordered by Mrs. Sheridan
• Cook, a cook
• Godber's man, the delivery-man who brings in the cream puffs
• Mr. Scott, a lower-class neighbor who has just died
• Em Scott, the deceased's widow
• Em's sister

Major themes[edit]

Class consciousness. Laura feels a certain sense of kinship with the workers and again with the Scotts. An omniscient narrator also explains that, as children, Laura, Jose, Meg, and Laurie were not allowed to go near the poor neighbors' dwellings, which spoil their vista.

Illusion versus reality. Laura is stuck in a world of high-class housing, food, family, and garden parties. She then discovers her neighbour from a lower class has died and she clicks back to reality upon discovering death.

Sensitivity and insensitivity. The Sheridans hold their garden party, as planned, complete with a band playing music. Laura questions whether this is appropriate, given the death of their neighbor only a few hours earlier.

Death and life. The writer masterfully handles the theme of death and life in the short story. The realization of Laura that life is simply marvellous shows death of human beings in a positive light. Death and life co-exist and death seems to Laura merely a sound sleep far away from troubles in human life.

Story 2: "Tea" by Saki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Sake.

For other uses, see Saki (disambiguation).

Hector Hugh Munro
Hector Hugh Munro by E.O. Hoppé (1913)
Born	18 December 1870 Akyab, British Burma
Died	13 November 1916 (aged 45) Beaumont-Hamel, France
Pen name	Saki
Occupation	Author, Playwright
Nationality	British

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.^[1]

Besides his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study,The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain.

At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper. According to several sources, his last words were "Put that bloody cigarette out!"^[3]

Munro has no known grave. He is commemorated on Pier and Face 8C 9A and 16A of the Thiepval Memorial.^[4][5]

In 2003 English Heritage marked Munro's flat at 97 Mortimer Street, in Fitzrovia with a blue plaque.^[6]

After his death his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.

Munro may have been gay, but in Britain at that time sexual activity between men was a crime. The Cleveland Street scandal (1889), followed by the downfall of Oscar Wilde(1895), meant that if he was gay, "that side of [Munro's] life had to be secret".^[7]

Munro was a Tory and somewhat reactionary in his views.^[8]

Story 1. Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat

Roald Dahl, Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The story builds and expands while you are writing it. All the best stuff comes at the desk."

Roald Dahl 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and fighter pilot.
Born in Wales to Norwegian parents, Dahl served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence officer, rising to the rank of Acting wing commander. He rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults and became one of the world's best-selling authors.^[2][3] He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century".^[4] Among his awards for contribution to literature, he received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1983, and Children's Author of the Year from the British Book Awards in 1990. In 2008 The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[5]

Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour. His works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, My Uncle Oswald, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, Tales of the Unexpected, George's Marvellous Medicine, and The BFG.