Short Story of the Week
The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde (1888)
Each week, I’m selecting a short story to share with you. No more than 15 or so pages, each think of them as bite-sized entrées into a genre, author, or style.
There are a couple of (very slightly) different versions of this story floating around online, and it’s hard to tell which is the original. I’ve picked this one because the formatting is the clearest, and it reads well – some of the others were pretty illegible. At the start, this one was a little bit of a slog for me. When I started reading, I was disappointed to realise it was playing on a fairytale. However, by the end (and especially with the final paragraph) it had won me over. Well done, Wilde, excellent as always.