Famous Short Story

In my first-ever job, I sat in front of a computer teaching English over the internet to a group of students in South Korea. I would introduce the students to new vocabulary words, correct their grammar and monitor their progress. Overall, it was a low-stress job I felt indifferent toward, and maybe, at the time, it was enough. My then-employer was part of the growing education industry in the Philippines. Over the past decade or so, the Philippines has seen an explosion of language schools that attract students from around the world, but, mainly in East Asia, online tutoring companies that specialize in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) have also emerged, recruiting Filipinos to teach students who can't travel abroad to study or who want extra lessons to supplement their English-language classes in traditional schools back home. Likewise, this trend took off in China and grew to be worth many billions of dollars, thanks to companies like VIPKid that eventually hired upward of 100...

Karin Slaughter's 2018 thriller, "Pieces of Her," is nearly impossible to put down, but that doesn't mean it's a natural fit for an adaptation. While the novel opens with a riveting scene involving a nice suburban mom dispatching an active shooter with the dexterity of a trained assassin, much of the story unfolds in the mind of her daughter, 31-year-old Andy, as she embarks on a road trip to solve the puzzle of her mother's fractured past. As Andy learns, Laura Oliver, the protective speech pathologist who raised her, has a lot to hide. Netflix's new eight-episode adaptation, starring Toni Colette as Laura and Bella Heathcote as Andy, departs regularly from the source material: The grisly encounter that sets the plot in motion is mercifully less nauseating than the novel; one major character is added; and one villain, securely incarcerated in the book, instead remains at large. But, as Slaughter explained a couple days before the series premiered on Frida...

As a child, the difference between biography and autobiography is laid out in basic library classifications. One is a book about a person written by someone else. Autobiographies, on the other hand, are books about a person written by the subject themselves. Whatever happened to autobiography? How did we end up with memoir?  Biographers are figures of stature akin to historians. They possessed gravitas. Their work required the skills of detective and an archivist. Professionalism marks their studies and publications. Readers are familiar with the role and occupation. By turn, no one assumes the title of autobiographer. A slippery role, it assumes that only the subject could tell the complete story of their life. Objectivity is secondary to capturing essence and intention. It's a curious occupation with a charged mission.  Circling these forms, one begins to wonder: do they share the same goal? What does it mean to write about a person's life? Is there mo...

Fantasy is the oldest genre of literature, pre-dating the invention of bound books by thousands of years thanks to mythology and folklore. Yet even now, readers and critics can't always agree on what fantasy is and what it isn't. For some, ancient poetry like Beowulf, The Odyssey, and The Epic of Gilgamesh is fair game. For others, the modern genre for adults began with George MacDonald's Phantastes in 1858, the story of a thirsty 21-year-old who wakes up in Fairy Land and falls in love with a marble statue sculpted by Pygmalion. Origins aside, most scholars agree on a basic definition: fantasy is when something we consider supernatural occurs that can't be explained by technology (as in science fiction) or the macabre (as in horror). Of course, there are no strict borders between these genres, and many books could be reasonably shelved under all three. But for this list, we concentrated on novels that are primarily fantasy, which is why you won't see genre-stra...