The major themes of this story by Chinua Achebe are political hypocrisy, class conflict, and education as a pathway out of poverty in postcolonial Africa. Other themes include exploitation, child labor and city vs. country life. A government introduces free education for all as an election ploy, but later abandons the policy due to its cost and resultant cheap-labor shortages. The vengeful creditor is a ten-year-old girl subsequently employed by a rich family as a baby-nurse. When they are too slow keeping what she thought was a promise to pay for her schooling, she decides to impose a heavy penalty. More…
The Imp of the Perverse
Like two of our earlier Edgar Allan Poe tales (The Back Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart), this story involves an unreliable, unhinged narrator facing execution for murder trying to account for his crime. He blames his actions on an agent he claims to be in all of us called the “Imp of the Perverse”. The Imp, he argues, is an urge that drives people to do things they shouldn’t for the simple reason that they know it to be wrong. Ironically, the Imp that drove him to murder also drove him to confess. Themes include perverseness, obsession, madness, self-destruction. More…
The Guilty Party – An East Side Tragedy
This story by O. Henry takes recent events in America, where parents have been found partly responsible when their child commits murder, to a new level. A young man boasts to friends that he will teach his fiancée a lesson by taking another girl to a dance. The fiancée makes good her promise to kill him if he does, then flees and commits suicide. A heavenly court absolves her of the crime, blaming a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by a window reading while his children play in the streets.. Themes include guilt and innocence, parental neglect, love, betrayal, redemption. More…
Naming the Names
Set during the Irish Troubles, the major themes of his story by Anne Devlin are love, loyalty and betrayal. Other themes include identity, the cyclical nature of violence, urban change/devastation, taking responsibility for one’s actions, and the humanization of terrorism. The plot is non-linear, with regular flashbacks to earlier times. An insecure woman who has been indoctrinated in the Republican cause since childhood joins the IRA. She plays a minor role until a decision is made to target a prominent British official, and finds herself perfectly placed to lure his son (who is also her lover!) into a deadly trap.
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Answer
A goodreads.com reviewer aptly describes Answer by Fredric Brown as one of the most concise SciFi horror stories I have ever read. There are uncanny similarities between the new supercomputer’s response to the first question asked of it and the final sentence of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Both stories were published in the mid-1950s and reflect concerns about the future influence of computers on society. Some reviewers suggest that Brown’s one cybernetics machine that combines all the knowledge of all the galaxies already exists… it’s called the Internet! Themes include scientific hubris, the dangers of technology, unintended consequences. More…