The idea of a strange, perhaps untrustworthy housemaid is particularly discomfiting to a middle class who can afford such luxury; we hate to think that we invite our own evil into our comfortable homes. An untrustworthy woman let into the home is a familiar trope in horror stories, and is the basis of Mavis Gallant’s short…
The Stage Perspective books look almost as if we are looking at a story acted out on a stage. Cinematic picture books are influenced by film, and make use of various camera angles: high angle, low angle, worm’s eye view, establishing shot and so on.
The glance curve describes a Western reader’s tendency to read a picture from left to right. This affects how illustrators compose scenes. In relation to the perception of visual art, the German psychologist Mercedes Gaffron (1908-93) argued in 1950 that Western viewers unconsciously followed a basic perceptual path in looking at two-dimensional perspectival representations—a left-to-right…
In Rudie Nudie sister and brother have a bath together. Their mother towel dries them. Instead of getting dressed immediately, they take a few minutes to prance and leap and enjoy the way their textured environment feels against their skin. The story ends with their parents putting pyjamas on them and tucking them into bed.…
“Goodbye My Brother” is one of John Cheever’s best known short stories. In fact, it was this story which contributed to Cheever’s receiving his Guggenheim Scholarship. Cheever returned time and again to the dynamic of an uneasy relationship between two brothers. The relationship is always a metaphor for something bigger. I prefer the nihilist brother Lawrence, nick-named ‘Croaker’.…
What might the ‘inverse of a superhero story’ look like? What if superpowers are given to ordinary men who do nothing with them? You may know Christopher Isherwood’s name from the film A Single Man or Christopher and His Kind. I Am Waiting is one of two short stories Isherwood had published in The New…
No one really knows why Harry Potter became so popular. In fact, many academics find Harry Potter relatively poorly executed, first from a storytelling perspective. Talking about another, better book, Diane Purkiss says the following: There’s no info dump; there’s no narrator; there’s no Dumbledore figure who in the last chapter plods in and says…
Possum Magic is a classic Australian picture book by Mem Fox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BboBeS-vhjg WHAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY OF POSSUM MAGIC Grandma Poss uses bush magic to make a child possum (Hush) invisible so that Hush won’t be eaten by snakes. (I’m going to put aside the fact that snakes seem to ‘see’ via vibrations, so…
“Thieves and Rascals” (1956) by Mavis Gallant is a masterclass in keeping part of the main interest out of the frame. One of the central characters is portrayed as an interesting character and I would like to ‘meet’ her on the page. Instead, as the story ends, I realise we’re not going to meet her at…
Tough Boris is an Australian-American pirate picture book published in 1994. As fodder for stories, ocean piracy has never been out of fashion. Especially in stories with an implied readership of boys, the pirates of modern picture books are often comical rather than scary; jovial rather than evil. Pirate stories bear little to no resemblance…
Rosie’s Walk is an influential picture book by Pat Hutchins, first published in 1986. This book is notable for its large ironic gap between pictures and text: The text is a pedestrian story in which nothing remarkable happens. The pictures show several near death experiences. Separately, Rosie’s Walk is designed to teach young readers dimensional…
Some short stories exist mainly as character studies. Fun With A Stranger (1962) by American author Richard Yates is one example. The story paints a portrait of a particular kind of old-fashioned school teacher. The reader feels empathy for everyone involved, from the young pupils to the teacher herself.
Young readers love to hear about naughty children. If this were a story by Roald Dahl or Edward Gorey, the naughty Millie would definitely have met a nasty end, but this particular naughty child remains the apple of her parents’ eyes. Since all children have bad thoughts sometimes, this story is a comfort-read, and would…
“Autumn Day”, a short story by Mavis Gallant, is interesting for feminist reasons. Think of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; think of Mad Men’s Betty Draper and compare the idle, childlike helplessness of Cissy, the first person narrator in “Autumn Day”. This is a post WW2 picture of American housewives. The men had just saved everyone’s…