THANKS FOR SUPPORTING STORYBITES!

Six years ago I started this site with some short story commentaries and a goal -- to help people understand the stories they read, and in the process, learn to appreciate and love short stories as a unique window on the world. As the site has grown and expanded, I've never ceased to be amazed at the positive and enthusiastic reader response.

I've had other supporters too. Early on, I formed an affiliate relationship with Amazon, which essentially means that every time you click on a hyperlink that takes you directly from a Storybites page to an Amazon one, you're supporting this site. Other affiliate relationships have followed as well, offering services from language instruction to online college classes to tutoring.

This year, I've formed an affiliate relationship with BookRags, which offers both paid and free research content, some of it academic, some user-generated. Should you elect to use BookRags, please cite their content as respectfully as you do the articles you find here. And again, thank you so much! Storybites wouldn't exist without you!

STORYBITES GOES TO COLLEGE!

Many people ask whether Storybites articles can be used as credible academic sources. Obviously faculty at the following institutions think so! Here is a list of colleges and school districts who currently use or have used our commentaries as a teaching tool in their classes:

Henderson State University (AK)
Long Island University (NY)
California State Univeristy, Stanislaus (CA)
Minnesota State University, Mankato (MN)
Sacramento State University (CA)
Centenary College of Louisiana (LA)
Wayland Baptist University (TX)
Ankara University, Tomer (Turkey)
Illinois Valley Community College (IL)
University of Houston (TX)
Magnolia Independent School District (Magnolia, TX)
Nashua School District (Nashua, NH)

In addition, the article "Kate Chopin's 'A Respectable Woman'" was used as a source to explicate Chopin's work during an Arizona Department of Education professional development training, and faculty in the Bedford County (Virginia) Public Schools recently used Storybites commentaries to develop test questions for quarterly benchmark tests.

If you're a faculty member interested in using a Storybites article in your classes, let me know. And if you're a faculty member already using one of our articles, I'd love to know that too!

COMPILING A WORKS CITED PAGE

Many of my readers are confused about the correct way to compile a works cited page. And how do you properly cite a website? This Empire State College site gives a great general comparison of MLA and APA: http://www.esc.edu/htmlpages/writerold/formats.htm. I've noticed, though, that some of the links in that site are dead. Here's one from the Modern Language Association (the MLA people) that can help you: http://www.mla.org/publications/style/style_faq/style_faq4. If you're formatting your citations in APA, try this site: http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html.

As I find more sites like these, I'll post them on Storybites to help you out.  

I’m delighted that so many of my readers are college students. Many of you read my site in order to learn more about authors or stories you’ve been assigned in class, and I hope my articles help you. But since my Storybites articles are copyrighted and I own the copyright, I’ve asked my readers to email me before they cite anything I’ve written in these pages. I’ve received many, many letters from students doing just that (and also from professors commending me for my stand as well as my work). I’m really proud of you for writing your own papers in an era when so much bad press is given to students who choose to plagiarize. And I love hearing from my readers, so don't be afraid to write to me!

 B. Head: "Looking for a Rain God"
B. Head: "The Collector of Treasures"
  E. Hemingway: "A Cat in the Rain"
  E. Hemingway: "Hills Like White Elephants"
  E. Hemingway: "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"
  E. Hemingway: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" 
    E. Hemingway: "Soldier's Home"
  W.D. Howells: "Christmas Every Day"
W.D. Howells: "Editha"
  Henry James: "Daisy Miller"
 Henry James: "The Real Thing"
  Henry James: "The Ghostly Rental"
  Henry James: "The Turn of the Screw"
James Joyce: "Araby"
 James Joyce: "The Boarding House"
 James Joyce: "The Dead"
Franz Kafka: "The Country Doctor"
Franz Kafka: "The Hunter Gracchus"
Franz Kafka: "The Metamorphosis"
    Margaret Laurence: "A Bird in the House"
 D.H. Lawrence: "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter"
D.H. Lawrence: "The Odour of Chrysanthemums"
Clarice Lispector: "The Chicken"
Clarice Lispector: "The Fifth Story"
H.P. Lovecraft: "The Colour out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft: "The Shadow out of Time"
  Bobbie Ann Mason: "Drawing Names"
 Bobbie Ann Mason: "Shiloh"
Guy de Maupassant: "Boule de Suif"
 Guy de Maupassant: "Mademoiselle Fifi"
Guy de Maupassant: "The Necklace"
 Herman Melville: "Bartleby the Scrivener" 
 Flannery O'Connor: "Greenleaf"
 Flannery O'Connor: "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
 Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"
 Flannery O'Connor: "Revelation"
 Flannery O'Connor: "The River"
 Cynthia Ozick: "The Shawl"
 E.A. Poe: "The Cask of Amontillado"
 E.A. Poe: "The Tell-Tale Heart"
 E.A. Poe: "Ligeia"
 E.A. Poe: "Murders on the Rue Morgue"
 E.A. Poe: "The Purloined Letter"
 E.A. Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher"
 E.A. Poe: "William Wilson"
 Saki (H.H. Munro): "The Open Window"
 Saki (H.H. Munro): "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger"
 Saki (H.H. Munro): "Adrian"
 J.P. Sartre: "The Wall"
 J. Thurber: "The Catbird Seat"
 J. Thurber: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"
 J. Thurber: "The Unicorn in the Garden"
 L. Tolstoy: "God Sees the Truth, but Waits"
 L. Tolstoy: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"
 John Updike: "A & P"
 John Updike: "Wife Wooing"
 E. Welty: "Death of a Traveling Salesman"
 E. Welty: "Why I Live at the P.O." 
  E. Welty: "A Worn Path"
   Tobias Wolff: "Hunters in the Snow"

Looking for very recent commentaries?
Check my blog!

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FINDING SOURCES ON THE INTERNET

I'm frequently asked how to find reliable sources on the Internet. That's something that will take you quite a while to master (it took me years, honestly) but here are a couple of tips. 

• To begin with, I choose my search engines carefully. Some search engines just don't produce enough results, others are great for finding the latest articles on pop stars but not so good for academic subjects, and others aren't easy to fine-tune. My favorite engine for research is AltaVista (www.altavista.com), because it makes refining your search simple. (There are other excellent search engines, but since they all have their peculiarities, we'll just deal with AltaVista for now.) 

• If my search term is composed of more than one word -- in other words, if it's a title or phrase -- I use quotes to force AltaVista to see those words as a unit rather than individually. For example, if I just typed A Tale Of Two Cities into my search box, I might get reviews of A Knight's Tale or an encyclopedia article on cities -- just because one of the words in each of those subjects matches one word in my search term. Typing quotes around the whole phrase -- "A Tale of Two Cities" forces AltaVista to look for those five words together. This gives you fewer results, but the results are more accurate.

• Here's another important tip: if you want to hunt for multiple search terms -- like "A Tale of Two Cities" and knitting -- put a plus sign right before each term: +"A Tale of Two Cities" + knitting. Doing this narrows AltaVista's search down to websites that include BOTH those search terms in them. 

• Your public or school library probably subscribes to a number of restricted-access databases, online journals, and periodicals -- so if you have borrowing privileges at that library, you should be able to access those online materials for free. You'll be really surprised at the amount and range of material just waiting for you to use. Ask your librarian for further information.

• And finally, if you're trying to impress professors, be careful of user-generated content such as blogs or wikis written by people whose background you don't know. Because they are often written in a very accessible style, material like that can help you get a general overview of the subject while giving you an idea of what the average person on the street is saying about it. But stay clear of using user-generated content in an academic paper; you don't want to cite websites that were obviously written by people who know less about the subject than you do!

HELPFUL LINKS

Some of the sites listed below are official links to a living author; some are sponsored by academics who have taken a special interest in a particular writer; a few are commercial sites sponsored by publishers; and others are professionally constructed and researched by fans. Regardless of the source, please give their creators the respect you have always given me, and cite them properly in your research papers. (If you have any question on how to do this, email me and I’ll help.)

 
Sherwood Anderson site
Margaret Atwood site
 Isaac Babel site
  James Baldwin site
 Ann Beattie site
 Ambrose Bierce site
  Heinrich Böll site
  Raymond Carver site
 Willa Cather site
  Geoffrey Chaucer site
  John Cheever site
 Kate Chopin site
  Colette site
  A. C. Doyle site
  Joseph Conrad site
 Stephen Crane site
  Charles Dickens site
 Fyodor Dostoevsky site
  William Faulkner site
 F. Scott Fitzgerald site
Nathaniel Hawthorne site
  Bessie Head site
  Ernest Hemingway site
  W.D. Howells site
  Henry James site
 James Joyce site
  Franz Kafka site
   D.H. Lawrence site
Clarice Lispector site
  H.P. Lovecraft site
  Bobbie Ann Mason site
  Guy de Maupassant site
 Flannery O'Connor site
 Edgar Allen Poe site
  Saki (H.H. Munro) site
 James Thurber site
 Leo Tolstoy site
 John Updike site
 Eudora Welty site

Who is this nutty woman
reviewing short stories?
Click here to find out!

THIS SITE WAS LAST UPDATED

IN JANUARY 2009

ASSORTED 
LITERARY
TERMS

WHO WROTE ALL THIS?!?

Originally every commentary you could access on this site was written by me. As the site has evolved, though, I've begun to link to sites featuring outside content, such as those listed under Helpful Links (upper right) and those sponsored by BookRags, a paid sponsor. (You'd have to click on a BookRags link to get to those.)

But how can you tell the difference? As a general rule of thumb -- if I wrote a literary commentary, the top of the page will say "Commentary by Karen Bernardo," or just "By Karen Bernardo." All the entries on my blog were also written by me, unless they are clearly, clearly responses to an earlier post. Everything on this home page was written by me as well. But if you're not absolutely sure about a source, email me and I'll help you. I'm happy to hear from you any time, and I promise to write back. It's important to me for you to have accurate information you can actually use.

EVEN MORE LITERARY TERMS!

Here are some external sites that may give you more help with basic (and not-so-basic) literary terminology. Note, however, that I did not write the following content, so you will need to cite their authors as respectfully as you do me. Email me if you have questions on how to do this.

Virtual Salt's Glossary of Literary Terms

Virtual Classroom's Glossary of Literary Terms

Literary Terms and Definitions

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