ENG 263: The Love Story

Elizabeth McCracken crafts a unique and intriguing love story in “It’s Bad Luck to Die” through her use of characterization, character relations, and the structure of the story. The story is structured in a way that engages the reader and keeps movement flowing throughout a story that wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of movement. Starting […]

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I read “Fatso” last spring semester, and what I often did not enjoy were the terse and direct lines. The protagonist is somewhat detached from his love interest and is aloof. He regards the intimate human interactions with his girlfriend and relationships in general in a formulaic manner. He says, “she’s just trying to test […]

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“Anna stared at him with a blush that started at her neck and crept up her cheeks. “‘His name is Hercules,’” she said quietly.” I found myself somewhat at a loss for words when entering into Karin Tidbeck’s “Beatrice.” She makes no hesitation in introducing this story as atypical and bizarre. “Franz Hiller, a physician, […]

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“Her smooth skin, her little gondola. How he wanted to climb into her little gondola.” – “Beatrice,” Karin Tedbeck The titular character Beatrice isn’t a human, but the ‘character’ is given qualities of a human woman. It, or rather she, is a prototype airship Franz Hiller sees in a Berlin fair. The attraction Hiller feels […]

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“Fatso” is an interesting direction to take a love story because, despite the fantastical element to the story, it is very blunt and unromantic. The narrator describes his relationship with the female that he is seeing in very curt terms; it is not flowers and rainbows but rather matinees and dinner dates. He doesn’t shy away […]

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Write a two-page (double-spaced) love story involving two of the characters below. Place your completed story by Monday at midnight in the Exercise 1 folder inside the class folder on Google Drive.  

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The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly… — Ted Hughes, “Wind” This poem is full of remarkable metaphors: a house “far out at sea all night,” the woods “crashing through darkness,” the “skyline a grimace,” the house ringing “like some fine green goblet in the […]

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I remember when, years ago, I would read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, imagining the sweet melancholy I would feel when I left my thirties behind and joined the legions of men who must, as Justice puts it, “learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they […]

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