OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH SHORT STORIES Essay - 1926 Words

OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH SHORT STORIES MARY MANN, LITTLE BROTHER The story portrays rural life in a little Norfolk village, in the 1890s. It describes the visit of a character (maybe spinster) to a woman who has just given birth to a stillborn baby. At first she visits the husband, Mr.Hodd, and she enters his world made up just of poverty: with his eldest boy he’s cutting turnips. The family already has twelve children, and they’re very poor. When the narrator visits Mrs.Hodd’s house, she finds out that the dead baby is not in his little bed, and his little brothers are playing with his corpse, like a doll. very attentive description, full of details (turnip-house), not useful for the story, they just portray the real aspect of†¦show more content†¦The short story IN another short story, like One Thousand and One Nights Magic atmosphere ALAN SILLITOE, ENOCH’S TWO LETTERS This short story narrates the unlucky adventure of an eight year-old boy. His parents decide to leave the house on the same day, without telling the other that they’re going away forever and thinking that the other will take care of the child. They don’t have anything in common anymore, so his father goes to live with his lover, and his mother moves to her sister’s house. After Enoch’s gone to school, they both leave a letter for the other on the mat. When he comes home from school, he thinks that his parents just went for a night out, he eats something and then sleeps on the floor, because he’s too scared to sleep in his room all alone. In the morning he decides to go to his grandmother and ask for help and advice. She accompanies him back home, they search the house and in the end they find the two letters. The most interesting part is the night that Enoch spends alone. All typical fears of childhood come to him; he’s afraid of the dark (he doesn’t want to go upstairs and sleep there), he starts to think that his parents are dead, he uses the mirror to distort his own face, to