"There was the raven, dusty and moth-eaten now, that was supposed to have inspired one of the writer’s most celebrated works. Busloads of tourists and prospective students came throughout the year to look through the glass into that room and at ...

It is generally agreed that the sources of Heinrich von Kleist's bloody tales are European, but Juan LePuen argues that, for those interested in the genesis of "Michael Kohlhaas" or "The Earthquake in Chile," such colonial American documents as He...

A high-school basketball game threatens to trigger a race riot in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Genre: short story Words: 2,525

Buenos Aires, in the latter years of the Menem presidency. Signs of an impending economic and social collapse are everywhere, but the self-styled consultant of "Ruphina," intent on his more personal concerns, pays them no heed. Genre: short story...

When the standoffish head of his department summons him to her office, "Professor" John Newhouse is sure it is to let him know that he has been given the annual award for the teacher who most clearly embodies the ideals of the department's illustr...

The mid-1980s in a moribund Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Two emissaries from a booming Japan meet unexpectedly vicious resistance from a class of ne'er-do-well high-school students. Genre: short story Words: 2,335

Barely four years removed from graduation, three friends from high school, now more interested in drink than in each other, recall the evening one of their number emerged suddenly sobered from the stranger's apartment he had disappeared into short...

In which the narrator recounts his experiences as a bag-boy at the neighborhood Albertsons. Genre: short story Words: 2,621

Juan LePuen draws on Primo Levi’s notions of purity and impurity to examine the work, both literary and extra-literary, of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro. He argues that Ribeyro’s work is characterized by its impurity and that this ...