The Yellow Wallpaper

In his essay of 1919, Freud used the word ‘unheimlich’ to  describe the disquieting, unsettling short fiction of his time. As has been noted by the critic Mark Fisher and others however, he structured his inquiry into the unheimlich on the stories themselves, unable to create a theory which superseded them. These stories have endured. We have collected together the best of them — the funny, the horrific and the simply disturbing — to offer insight and commentary on the strange world we have been living in.

The real purpose of our confinement may be as hidden as we are. In this story, the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a woman’s growing obsession with the interior decor of a rented house, with heart breaking precision.