By Courier, by O. Henry




SUMMARY

In this story, a young man starts a communication with a young woman of his acquaintance through a boy who acts as a messenger (or perhaps a bit more than a messenger). The woman is sitting on a bench in the park. The man arrives, sees her and calls a boy who is nearby. He asks him to deliver a message to the woman and gives him a tip. The woman answers the man’s message using the same way. But the messenger conveys the messages using very different words to the ones he gets. Anyhow, man and woman understand what he says. But at the end, the man thinks that, for an unmistakable understanding of the communication, it’s necessary a written message.



QUESTIONS

Why did the author make the messenger change the message’s language? 

What do you know about the Greek myth of Hermes?

What channels of communication do you use and what do you use them for? Do you still send letters or postcards by standard mail?

According to your view, jealousy: is it something genetic, or social? How can you stop being jealous (if you believe it is a negative feeling)?

What do you know about the expression "don't kill the messenger"?



VOCABULARY
striding, tagged, countenance, moose, sake, plaid bicycle cap, song and dance, paramount,
pleas, conservatory, propinquity, soft-soap, beat the band, ski-bunk, bum, sport


Hearts and Hands, by O. Henry

BIOGRAPHY

Oliver Henry, usually written O. Henry, was the pseudonym of William Sidney Porter. He started to use different pseudonyms when wanted to publish his stories while he was in prison. And as he liked O. Henry the best, he kept using it ever after, and we always speak of him as O. Henry. He was born in 1862, so in the middle of the American Civil War or Secession War, between the slavers confederates secessionists and the Yankees abolitionists unionists. His birthday was on the 11th of September, so we have to suppose that if he had known what were to happen, he would have written a story about it, because he liked the surprising ironies of life. He was born in North Carolina, but he went to live in Texas where he graduated as a chemist (or pharmacist, as he was American, not British). He was then 19 years old. When he was 25, he eloped with his girlfriend. They married and they had two children, a boy who died soon after his birth, and, later, a girl, Margaret. When he was 29, he started to work in a bank, and only 3 years later he was accused of misappropriation. In order to avoid the trial and being found guilty, he run away to Honduras. There he started a friendship with a famous train robber. Also, there he coined the expression “banana republic” that appeared in his book Cabbages and Kings. But when he knew his wife couldn’t come to Honduras (as they had planned) because she was dying of tuberculosis, he went back to the USA. He had spent six months in Honduras. Back in the USA, he was found guilty of misappropriation and got a penalty of 5 years in prison, but he went out after 3 years because of his good behaviour. Then he moved to New York, the setting of most of his stories. He died when he was only 48 years old of cirrhosis: as you can imagine, he was a heavy drinker. While he lived in New York, he was a very prolific author because he wrote a story every week for different magazines. He was a popular author; his stories are witty, funny and with a surprising ending, but he wasn’t very praised by critics, because they thought he wasn’t deep enough. His most known short stories are The Gift of the Magi (where a very poor marriage try to buy presents each other in secret), The Ransom of Great Chief (where two bandits kidnap a boy, and the things doesn’t go as easily as they thought), The Last Leaf (where and old artist helps, in a very special way, to spirit another young artist who doesn’t want to fight for her own life), Hearts and Hands (where a prisoner and his guard travel by train and there they find an old acquaintance), etc.


SUMMARY

The story takes place on a train. An elegant young woman is sitting in a coach when two men get up to the train, go into her coach and sit down in front of her. One of the men is nice and handsome; the other is an unpleasant sulky man with a disagreeable appearance. They are tied together by a pair of handcuffs. The worldly woman immediately recognizes the nicer man and greets him with a feeling. He can only give her his left hand, because his right one is handcuffed to the nasty man; this man, however, tells the girl that’s what a marshal has to do when he takes a wrongdoer to the prison. All the same, the young woman and the nice man start a lively and happy conversation. After a while, the ruffled man says it’s cruel for a prisoner not to have time for smoking: since the morning he hasn’t had any; the nice man understands the request, and they both go out to enjoy some tobacco. The other passengers make some remarks about the curious pair.


QUESTIONS 

What is the relation between the title and the story?
What kind of criminal do you think you could sympathize with?
Do you think the art of conversation can be learned? What are the features of a good conversation? Why do / don't you like chatting? Tell us ways to start a conversation, ways to "break the ice".

VOCABULARY
influx, handcuffed, forestalled, pen, counterfeiting, butterfly days, 

October and June, by O. Henry


SUMMARY, by J. Guiteras

The captain, who had kept his uniform worn out by time and service in a closet, was enchanted by the sweet and smiling lips of a woman.

He received a letter from this woman telling him that she would not marry him because of the age difference between them.

The captain, who was rich and handsome, did not resign himself to this refusal and took a train to see her so that she could reconsider.

She stood firm in her decision, arguing that within a few years one of them would want to be quiet at home and the other would be crazy about going out to parties.

The captain was sad because he had lost the battle and returned home.

The next day he reflected and came to the conclusion that Theo, the woman, was right, since one of them was 28 years old and the other was only 19 years old.

 

Reflection: I feel sorry for them because a younger person can always learn a lot from another one who is older and with experience and has a lot to teach to a youngster.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why was the age gap very important in the past, and now isn’t so?

-Do you think we’ll be able to overcome all the clichés? Are prejudices good or bad for daily life?

-In your opinion, what is the relation of the title with the story?

 

VOCABULARY

gloomily, rugged, squared, ‘Pon

BIOGRAPHY, by Begoña Devis

William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina in 1862 and died in New York in 1910. He was a great writer known as O. Henry after a cat he lived with for a time. He is considered one of the masters of the short story. His admirable treatment of surprise narrative endings popularized in English the expression "an O. Henry ending".
He had an eventful life. His mother died when he was three, and he and his father moved to his paternal grandmother's house. As a child he was a good student, and a great reader. He graduated from his aunt's school, who continued teaching him until he was 15. He then began working in his uncle's pharmacy and finally graduated as a pharmacist.
In 1882 he went to Texas, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his persistent cough. There he worked there as a ranch hand, as a cook and as a nanny. When his health improved, he went to Austin, where he worked as a pharmacist and where he began writing short stories. He was popular in the social life in Austin for his storytelling and musical talent. At this time, his problems with alcohol abuse began. In 1887, he eloped with the young Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1888 they have a child, who died. In 1889, a new daughter, Margaret, was born.
In 1894, Porter founded a humorous weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone.  Then that magazine collapsed, and he moved to Houston, where he was a journalist at the Houston Post.
The most transcendental event occurred in 1895, when he was accused by the First National Bank of appropriating money that he had under his responsibility. On the eve of the trial he sailed for Honduras, where he lived for seven months, and where he wrote several stories, many of which appear in the book Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term «banana republic», phrase subsequently used to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.
In 1897 he returned to Austin when he knew that his wife was dying, and after a few months he was arrested and convicted, spending three years in the Columbus (Ohio) prison. There he continued writing short stories to support his daughter. When he was released from prison, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York, where he lived until his death.
In New York, the city the writer loved and the setting for many of his stories, O. Henry gained public recognition, but he had a deep problem with his alcoholism. Indeed, there is an anecdote that his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", was written under the pressure of a deadline, in just three hours and accompanied by a whole bottle of whiskey.
From December 1903 to January 1906, he wrote a story a week for the New York World, his most prolific period. He remarried in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Colem, who left him in 1909.
O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was held in New York and he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.
In the United States, the O. Henry Award for short stories, one of the most important in the world, was created in his memory. Among other writers, it has been awarded to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.



Bedbugs, by Clive Sinclair


BIOGRAPHY
There is another famous Clive Sinclair, the one who was an entrepreneur and an inventor. He’s known for having produced the first pocket calculator, and then, the home computer ZX Spectrum.
But our Clive Sinclair is the author.
He was born in London in 1948. He was of Jewish origin, and his surname was Smolensky. He studied at different universities: East Anglia, California and Exeter.
He defined himself as a short stories’ writer. Even his first novel, Bibliosexuality, was originally a collection of short stories linked one to another.
He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981 for his collection Hearts of Gold.
Asked about what he wrote, his answer was “Sex, death and Jews”, but he was also fascinated with cowboys and the Far West, and True Tales of the Wild West is a collection of stories in the Western style.
He also was compared to Kafka, Borges and Nabokov. In 1983 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists alongside with Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift.
He died aged 70 in London.
 
SUMMARY
Joshua, a university English teacher with a marriage in failure, is offered to give a summer course in Cambridge about First World War Poets to a group of German students, mostly girls. He accepts the offer because of the money and also because, as he is a Jew, can avenge his people and forefathers calling mentally his course “Rosenberg’s Revenge”, being Rosenberg one of the poets who was Jewish. But, although Cambridge is only thirty miles from his place, Bury St Edmund, he has to sleep in the college because he is also going to provide the students some entertainment, not only lessons. But the rooms the university has provided for him and his students are infested with bedbugs coming from a nearby building, recently demolished.
So he starts the lessons, where he finds some unfriendly students and some acolytes. One night, for the evening entertainment, they went to the theatre where they could see The Lesson, by Ionesco, a controversial play since it’s an allegory against the Nazis. After the play, Inge, his main devotee, goes with him to a pub where she proposes to produce a similar play. Then, at the college, Inge goes to Joshua’s room with the excuse of exterminating his bedbugs, but there she has an accident going down the modernist stairs, and they get laid.
On the last Saturday, Joshua takes his students on a visit to Bury St Edmund, where he lives and where Rosenberg trained before going to the front. Inge has a minor accident, and he decides to take her home to cure the small scratching; there they find his wife, and, as if his wife doesn’t show any suspicion about their affair, they had a nice dinner.
On Tuesday they have the show, but before the performance, Joshua has a strange vision: he sees, or dreams to see, his wife dead in their kitchen with a knife stuck in her belly. The play is a very singular one: it’s similar to Ionesco’s because there are only three characters, but in our case, Joshua is dressed up as a woman, Inge as his husband, and another student is a TV set. The story ends when Joshua disguised as a housewife shoots her husband six blanks, shouting madly “Daughter of Germany!”
 
QUESTIONS
-What do you know about…?
            bedbugs, lice, fleas, ticks, mange
            Rosenberg (Great War Poet)
            Bury St Edmund
            The Lesson, by Ionesco
            Baader-Meinhof
            Martin Buber
-Do you think Germans are still anti-Semites?
-Anti-Semitism is something you find in a lot of countries and in a lot of epochs? What can be the reason?
-“Women not interested in War? What nonsense! War involves everybody.” Debate: do you think women have to be involved in military conflicts? Or: if you want to stop a military conflict, you mustn’t take part in it?

VOCABULARY
congress, bantam, looms, concerns, rubbed the cow’s nose, routed, phony, counterfeit, lop off, rash, hives, louse, prowler, spunk, pardon my French, Aussie, hatch, sulks, loony, crannies, Spreadeagled, supine, agape, gibbering, cavorts, comes, props, blanks


The Prophet's Hair, by Salman Rushdie

 

Analysis

Summary

Power Point

Another Power Point

Another analysis

Opinion

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

British writer of Indian origin, Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947 in Mumbai.
His father was Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a lawyer who graduated from Cambridge and a businessman, and Negin Bhatt was his mother, a teacher. He has three sisters.
Rushdie studied at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School in Warwickshire, and King’s College, University of Cambridge, where he graduated in History.
When Rushdie was a teenager, his family settled in England.
His first novel, Grimus, published in 1975, had no repercussions.  His next works were Midnight’s Children (1981), an allegory of modern India, and Shame (1983). Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981. He is also the author of a chronicle of his travels through Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile (1987), and in 1990, of a book for children entitled Haroun and the Sea of Stories published in November 2010 to great critical acclaim.
His memoirs were published in September 2012, under the title Joseph Anton, a Memoir.
In 2015, he presented the novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights; in 2017 he published The Golden House, a satirical novel, and, in 2019, his fourteenth novel, Quichotte, inspired by Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel, Victory City, was published in February 2023.
In 2024, his autobiographical book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which Rushdie writes about the attack and his recovery, was published. Salman Rushdie was attacked during a performance in upstate New York on August 12, 2022, at a Chautauqua Institution. As a consequence, he lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand, but survived the assassination attempt.
Salman Rushdie is an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His books are translated into more than 25 languages.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 for services to literature.
Salman Rushdie also became worldwide news in 1988 when he published The Satanic Verses. It was a very well-received novel in which fantasy was combined with philosophical reflection and a sense of humour. The work aroused the wrath of Shiite Muslims, who considered it an insult to the Koran, Muhammad and the Islamic faith.  It was banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini declared the work a blasphemy against Islam and decreed a fatwa against the writer, putting a price on his head worth $5,000,000 and offering the reward to whoever executed him as well as all those involved in the publication of the book. A fatwa is a religious ruling or opinion issued by an Islamic scholar or mufti. It is usually in response to a question posed by a Muslim concerning Islamic law or doctrine and is not legally binding. The word “fatwa” comes from the Arabic root f-t-y, which means “to decide” or “to give an opinion”. Despite Rushdie’s public retraction and drafting a statement expressing his adherence to Islam, the fatwa was not lifted.
Rushdie’s matrimonies:  He was married to Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987, with whom he had a son, Zafar, in 1979. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West, with whom he had his son Milan in 1999. In 2004, he married Padma Lakshmi, an actress, model, and host of the American television show Top Chef. They divorced in 2007.
Rushdie is one of the best-selling authors in the English language. Most of his works of fiction have generated several controversies for their criticism of different political and social ideologies. His work combines magical realism with historical fiction and is mainly concerned with the connections and influences between Eastern and Western civilizations. Much of his fiction takes place in the Indian subcontinent.
Some of the authors that Rushdie admired or influenced his literature are Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass, Dickens and Joyce.
Rushdie has permanently been very active in numerous academic activities, humanitarian associations, cinema and television 
 
“I grew up kissing books and bread... Since I kissed a woman, my activities with bread and books lost interest.”
 
SUMMARY
This Salman Rushdie story takes place in Srinagar at the beginning of the 20th century, and deals with an Indian Muslim family, dangerous thieves, the finding of a holy relic and the unexpected consequences that the possession of the relic brings over all those varied people.
The narrative explains terrible and dramatic facts in such a comical style, that moves the reader to laugh, besides suffering due to the fast progression of appalling events.
Although this is a short story, many characters take part in the narrative:
Hashim: a powerful moneylender, owning a fortune but not moral concern for his behaviour.  
Atta: Hashim's son.
Huma: Hashim's daughter.
Hashim’s wife: no name.
Sheik Sin: arrogant, bossy and fearless thief. He has a blind wife and four invalid sons.
The tale begins when young Atta entered a most dreadful and degraded quarter; there he asked where he could address to hire a professional thief, but he was immediately robbed of the significant amount of money he had taken along and was savagely beaten.
Next morning, a flower-vendor came across the body of the unfortunate Atta, covered by the frost, at the edge of a lake, and the vendor could learn the address of the dying young from his lips and, expecting a good tip, he decided to row Atta home.
The house was shown as a large mansion by the lake where his beautiful sister and his attractive mother, both evidently waiting in despair, received Atta, in that cold freezing winter morning. Soon Atta fell into a deep coma.
Incredible but true, that evening, Huma followed the steps of her brother through the alleys of the wretched, vile, quarter, asking the same question. Although she was so beautiful, the girl had visible wounds and bruises in her arms and forehead inflicted by her father. Huma made clear to the inhabitants of that neighbourhood she carried no money, her father would pay no ransom, and her uncle, the Commissioner of Police, was informed about her “tour”, just in case she would not come out of the place.  With this introduction Huma got to be taken through terrific, dark, narrow streets to a hidden house. A blind old woman directed the girl inside a darker room until Huma heard the voice of an enormous man sitting on the floor. The courageous girl tried to hide her fear, collecting enough voice to ask the mountain-like man if he was the thief she requested.
A curious conversation followed, as in an employment Office. Hume wanted to hire the most daring criminal, and the grey haired and scarred mountain-man revealed he was Sheikh Sin, the “Thief of the Thieves”, the most notorious criminal. They arrived at an agreement, and brave Huma explained her story, which began 6 days before.
Hashim, the money lender, had breakfast with his family, his wife, his son Atta and his daughter Huma. The atmosphere in the lake side residence was as always one of courtesy and tranquillity. Hashim felt proud of building a prosperous business “living honourably in the word” following virtues like prudence, perfect manners and independence of spirit, virtues that Hashim and his wife taught to their children. By the way, Hashim asked 71 per cent of interest to those who needed to borrow him some money.
Later on, Hashim was about to step inside his shikara, when he noticed a floating phial with an exquisite silver decoration, containing a single human hair. He immediately knew this was the holy hair of Prophet Muhammad, that had been stolen from the shrine, and which the police were furiously searching,
Hashim knew the relic should be returned to the mosque, but being a maniac collector, he easily convinced himself that he must keep the Prophet’s Hair.
He only explained the finding to Atta.
After that possession, a series of dramatic and unnatural events fell on the Hashim family and its members.
Hashim became swollen and spoke awful words, he explained he had a mistress and blamed his children. Driven by an increasing madness, Hashim obliged his family to pray five times a day and read the Quran, or he hit Atta and Huma or the debtors that arrived at the house.
Many other incredible facts happened, until Atta and Huma, overcome with horror, understood that the relic had brought disgrace to the family and decided the relic must be returned, and to get this aim, they should first steal the terrific hair. They should get rid of it at all costs.
That’s how Huma arrived at Sheik Sin house, after the failed attempt of her brother, and made a deal with the king of thieves. The thief should get the relic from Hashim's bedroom by night and he would get the jewellery owned by Huma and her mother.
When the night arrived, Huma opened the house door as arranged, and Sheik Sin entered Hashim's room. In that exact moment, Atta woke from the coma, crying, “Thief!!!”, and died. Her desperate mother began to cry loudly waking her husband in the other room. Hashim immediately grasped his sword and rushed out to the dark corridor, where he ran over a figure and, in a second, he thrust his sword into the figure’s heart. Turning up the light, Hashim discovered he had murdered Huma, and killed himself.
The only surviving member of the family from that dreadful night was the wife and mother, who became mad. Her brother, the Commissioner, had to take her to the asylum.
Sheik Sin got to leave the lake house with the phial but had to vanish to protect himself.
When the Commissioner knew about Huma’s death, opened the letter his niece had written and immediately organised the search for the thief. That enraged policeman shot the bullet into Sheik Sin’s stomach, and the phial with silver filigree rolled out from the pocket of the dead old ruined thief.
The Prophet’s hair was given back to the Hazratbal mosque, where it was guarded closer than any other place on earth to Paradise.
There were even more miraculous facts about that time, because the four crippled sons of Sheik Sin recuperated normal legs, but they got completely angry since they couldn’t beg any more, and so their earnings were reduced by 75 per cent.
The only person who felt grateful at the end of this story was the blind thief’s widow who got light in her eyes enjoying the beauties of the valley at the end of her miserable life.
In my opinion this short narrative, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, always fast and captivating, displays many themes that might be frequent in the author’s literature like fanaticism and the power of religion, superstition, hypocrisy, women domination, money, ambition and poverty, all that concerns Indian society.



 

Srinagar is a city in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir region and it’s its largest city. It lies in the Kashmir Valley along the banks of the Jhelum River, and the shores of Dal Lake and Anchar Lakes. The city is known for its natural environment, various gardens, waterfronts and houseboats. It is also known for its traditional Kashmiri handicrafts like the Kashmir shawl (made of pashmina and cashmere wool), papier-mâché, wood carving, carpet weaving, and jewel making, as well as for dried fruits. It is the second-largest metropolitan area in the Himalayas (after Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal). Srinagar too has a distinctive blend of cultural heritage. Holy places in and around the city depict the historical cultural and religious diversity of the city as well as the Kashmir valley.






The story has its origin in an actual theft of the relic from its location at the Hazratbal mosque in Kashmir in the early 1960s. The relic was subsequently recovered and restored to the shrine after authentication by the Muslim priests.

 



Prophet Muhammad was a religious, political, and military leader from Mecca who unified Arabia into a single religious polity under Islam. He is believed by Muslims to be a messenger and prophet of God. Muhammad is almost universally considered by Muslims as the last prophet sent by God for mankind, while non-Muslims regard Muhammad to have been only the founder of Islam. Born in about 570 CE in the Arabian city of Mecca, Muhammad was orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib. He later worked mostly as a merchant, as well as a shepherd, and was first married at the age of 25. Being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, at the age of 40 he reported that it was there that he received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that “God is One”, that complete “surrender” to Him is the only way acceptable to God, and that he himself was a prophet and messenger of God, in the same vein as other Islamic prophets.

QUESTIONS

-Do you think relics can be of any help in spiritual matters?

-Think about stories where someone hires a thief or a murder and tell us about them.

-What is blasphemy? In your opinion, Salman Rushdie story can be blasphemous for a Muslim?

-What do you have to do if you find lost property?

-“There are American millionaires who buy stolen paintings and hide them away.” Why would you buy or have a work of art?

-For you, what can be the goal of a collector?

-Do you think some objects can be a curse for someone?

-Are religions dangerous for the human being or is the human being dangerous per se?

 

VOCABULARY

shikara, moored, hawker, gullies, welts, crook, application, lavish, bogymen, ayah, goblins, backings-out, shikara, phial, hue and cry, ooze, gush, dope, raga, thugs, cracked, desecrated, djinn, crippling, bulbul, brain, charpoy, hatch