An analysis of Kate Chopin's short story "A Pair of Silk Stockings" can be found here .

If there were ever a more trite statement made about literature, it would be that r eading stories from different literary cultures enriches p eople's experience of the world. However, " b ooks take you places " isn't just another platitude rehashed by publishers, Reading teachers or something you'd find pasted on a cardboard sign in a Fox Books megastore from Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail . It's a n o b servation , albeit somewhat hyperbolized due to its dependence on personifying books , founded on readers' e scapades with every book cover opened.  This feeling of being transported to a new kind of reali ty is what I sensed after reading Hwang S un-won 's "C o nversation in June about Mothers", a short story born out of the Cold War which present s facets of the m ystery that is motherhood. 

As you might have come to realize, short stories are my favorite literary genre because they are like little cans of double concentrated tomato paste that add that extra zing to narratives other genres are incapable of delivering. In fact, the shorter the story, the grander the zing.  Well, Kate Chopin's story is as short as good short stories come and she manages to deliver the goods quicker than the title she chose for her piece . The advan tage of such crisp little tales is that they're easier to dissect because of the limited number of words they contain. Every sentence and paragraph can be analyzed al most ad nausea m , a task too g ruelling to undertake when reading a novel. Because of this comprehensive examination, the full extent of an author's powers is appreciated and though ma ny would be prone to co nclude that restricted tales offer very few developments , angles and insights, the reader's knowledge that every word written was mindfully selected ...

Ferris Wheel is an unexpected play in that it seems too simple on the surface, but when you sit to analyze it, more things become evident about the characters, their background and the lives they lead: all this in the space of 10-15 pages. One could say this is a short story disguised as a play. The plot is basic, the dialogue is uncomplicated, the setting minimalist. But like the surface of a calm sea, what lies beneath is more than the eye can see at first glance.  So dive into the depths of this play and discover the lives that reside among the seaweed and coral reefs. This play is the new land and funfair version of ships th at pass in the night, fleeting , meeting, on their way again.

The short story An Intruder was incorporated in Nadine Gordimer's short story collection Livingston's Companions, published in 1970. As such, it must be read and viewed through the prism of her somewhat earlier works which dealt with South African society's inequality and the problems arising from the diseased status quo of the times. An Intruder focuses on relationships between characters and how perceptions of a situation differ in the eyes of each individual based on a combination of nature and nurture, or at the very least that is what Gordimer would have the reader gauge. What made James Seago what he is? Why is Mrs Clegg, Marie's mother, such a typical depthless wishful socialite with an exaggerated respect for higher social status? Couldn't Marie judge the merit of the man who treats her like a child or is she turning a blind eye to his behavior because it suits her? Whatever the answers to these questions, the one certainty we have is that the noti...