Tess Gallagher

Reunion An Analysis of Tess Gallagher’s “Under Stars” “Under Stars” seems lifeless at first glance; however there's more than meets the eye since Tess Gallagher buries the deeper meanings under ambiguous words and lines to create a dramatic effect when the poem is broken down through diction and other literary devices. “Under Stars”, the title alone, automatically paints an image of a dark night with clear skies with an air of despair and desire in the reader's mind. Tess Gallagher cleverly sets…

A cathedral is a large church from the Gothic period, but in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral”, a cathedral represents much more than that. The story of Cathedral is about an unknown man whose wife invites a long-standing friend over to stay, who happens to be blind. The unknown man, who is the narrator, is unhappy about the blind man’s visit for he has prejudices against blind people, as he has never met a blind person before. In the end, he overcomes his prejudices and everyone has a…

Often barriers withhold us from pursuing what we truly love, however, our ambition allows us to overcome these barriers and achieve a sense freedom. This precise course of action occurs in Tess Gallagher’s short story “The Lover of Horses”. “The Lover of Horses" concerns a woman, the narrator, who responds to her mother 's request to help bring her father home; he is drinking and gambling beyond reason. Instead of stopping him, she assists and encourages him. His obsessive nature is compared…

a mirror image of his life. “His style has also been described as Dirty realism, which connected him with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s. …These were writers who focused on sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people” (Gallagher). The short stories, “Fat”, “Neighbors”, and “The Idea”, have similarities based on one’s fascination over someone else’s life, sexual…

Raymond Carver was born on May 25th, 1938, into a middle-class working family in Oregon. Nobody, not even himself, would have known he would become one of the most distinctive and influential short story writers and poets of the late-twentieth century and the key component of the revival of the American short story. His life-works often consists of stories of average, working-class people, dealing with different life situations that resembles Carver’s own life. That is what makes Carver’s…