Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist and contributing editor of The Alaska Quarterly Review. She had written four volumes of short stories which are entitled as: At the Gates of Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, Reasons to Live and Dog of the Marriages. Amy Hempel was ranked among those American writers who secured an international literary stature. Her literary contributions are indeed highly significant. Her book The Collected Stories is considered as the best book by New York Times. Her eloquent prose style has given her country the symbols to recognize the problems of their area. Her literary style has served as a model for subsequent American writers.
The researcher aims at exploring the “contemporary reflections” in the short stories of Amy Hempel, for it contains all the short stories in a single book known as The Collected Stories. Contemporary reflections include all the chaotic issues rising in the existing modern societies. Contemporary reflections and metropolitan theory are the two non identical terms for an identical phenomenon. The term metropolitan theory refers to all the problems which are existing in all the metropolitan areas of the present age. This theory includes all the problems like increase in crime rate, drug addiction, illegal relationships, abortions, lack of human rights and values and lack of awareness and education. Metropolitan areas are those areas which consists of densely populated urban core. So metropolitan theory highlights all the problems which are rising because of the dense population of the area. This metropolitan theory can be easily implemented on Amy Hempel’s short stories.
Short story merely belongs to the genre of fiction in which written narratives are comparatively not much lengthy and they can be easily finished only in one single sitting. Generally compared to drama, short
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