Our Town
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy American science fiction and weird short stories and want a short, complete reading experience
- Literature lovers who want to understand twentieth-century American genre fiction narrative through public-domain electronic texts
- Self-learners who need English short-story material for close reading or language study
- Research-oriented readers interested in Project Gutenberg texts and accustomed to e-reading
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer long development and complex character arcs may find it too short
- Readers uninterested in genre-fiction reversal conventions and seeking realistic depiction
- Readers who rely entirely on Chinese translations and are unwilling to engage with the English original
Reading tips
- Read it through in one sitting without looking up words, preserving the full effect of the ending's reversal
- On a second pass, revisit the opening details and mark the foreshadowing and shifts in tone the author planted
- If using it for language study, excerpt dialogue passages and compare colloquial expression with narrative language
- After reading, consult other Bixby stories and compare the common features of his reversal technique
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Jerome Bixby (1923–1998) was an American science fiction writer, though public information about him is limited. Nine of his works are held in this collection, including The Draw, Where There's Hope, The God-Plllnk, Zen, The Holes Around Mars, Little Boy, Laboratory and Our Town. Judging from these titles, he wrote mainly short science fiction, often building his imaginative premises around space exploration, strange devices and everyday settings. His titles tend to carry an ironic or suspenseful edge, and his narratives are concise, frequently closing with an unexpected twist. Among his stories, It's a Good Life became widely known through its television adaptation, but since that piece is not included here, it is not discussed further. On the whole, Bixby belonged to the mid-twentieth-century circle of American short science fiction writers; his output was modest, yet he was noted for ingenious conceptions and clean, brisk storytelling, and he exerted some influence on later short science fiction.
