The Story and Its Writer: an Introduction to Short Fiction (Compact Seventh Edition)

Table of Contents:

Introduction

PART ONE: STORIES

Chinua Achebe, Civil Peace

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Woody Allen, The Kugelmass Episode

*Isabelle Allende, An Act of Vengeance

Sherwood Anderson, Death in the Woods

Sherwood Anderson, Hands

Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings

James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

Russell Banks, Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat

John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

* Donald Barthelme, The Indian Uprising

* Ann Beattie, Snow

*Gina Berriault, The Overcoat

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

*Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

*T. Corraghesan Boyle, Greasy Lake

*Ray Bradbury, August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains

Albert Camus, The Guest

*Raymond Carver, Cathedral

*Raymond Carver, Errand

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Willa Cather, Paul's Case

John Cheever, The Swimmer

Anton Chekhov, The Darling [Garnett translation]

Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog

Kate Chopin, Désirée's Baby

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Julio Cortázar, A Continuity of Parks

Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

Edwidge Danticat, Night Women

*Junot Diaz, How to Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie

*Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner, That Evening Sun

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited

Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart

*Richard Ford, Under the Radar

Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat

*Nadine Gordimer, Some Are Born to Sweet Delight

*Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Minister's Black Veil

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Bessie Head, Woman from America

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

*Oscar Hijuelos, Lunch at the Biltmore

Zora Neale Hurston, The Gilded Six-Bits

Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk

Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Henry James, The Real Thing

Gish Jen, Whose Irish?

Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron

*Ha Jin, Saboteur

*Denis Johnson, Car Crash While Hitchhiking

James Joyce, Araby

James Joyce, The Dead

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

*Jhumpa Lahiri, When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine

Mary Lavin, The Widow's Son

D. H. Lawrence, Odour of Chrysanthemums

D. H. Lawrence, The Rocking-Horse Winner

*David Leavitt, Gravity

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Doris Lessing, Sunrise on the Veld

Clarice Lispector, The Smallest Woman in the World

Jack London, To Build a Fire

Katherine Mansfield, Bliss

*Katherine Mansfield, The Fly

Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener

*Arthur Miller, The Performance

*Steven Millhauser, Cat 'N' Mouse

*Nicholasa Mohr, Tell the Truth

Rick Moody, Boys

Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer

Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief

*Alice Munro, Miles City, Montana

*Haruki Murakami, Landscape with Flatiron

*Joyce Carol Oates, The Lady with the Pet Dog

*Joyce Carol Oates, Three Girls

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge

Flannery O'Connor, Good Country People

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Frank O'Connor, Guests of the Nation

Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing

Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

*ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Grace Paley, A Conversation with My Father

Octavio Paz, My Life with the Wave

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

*Katherine Anne Porter, He

*William Sidney Porter (O. Henry), The Gift of the Magi

Annie Proulx, The Blood Bay

*Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret

Philip Roth, The Conversion of the Jews

*George Saunders, Brad Carrigan, American

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman

*Helen Simpson, Café Society

Susan Sontag, The Way We Live Now

Gertrude Stein, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

*Susan Straight, Mines

Amy Tan, Two Kinds

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Jean Toomer, Blood Burning Moon

John Updike, A & P

*Luisa Valenzuela, The Place of Its Quietude

Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harrison Bergeron

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

*David Foster Wallace, Incarnation of Burned Children

Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the P.O.

Eudora Welty, A Worn Path

Edith Wharton, Roman Fever

John Edgar Wideman, newborn thrown in trash and dies

William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force

*Tobias Wolff, Say Yes

Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens

Richard Wright, The Man Who Was Almost a Man

*Gao Xingjian, The Accident

Hisaye Yamamoto, Wilshire Bus

PART TWO: COMMENTARIES

Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Conrad's Heart of Darkness

*Sherman Alexie, Superman and Me

Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman

*Isabel Allende, Short Stories by Latin American Women

Sherwood Anderson, Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story

Margaret Atwood, Reading Blind

James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes

Russell Banks, Author's Note

Willa Cather, The Stories of Katherine Mansfield

*Ann Charters, Translating Kafka

Anton Chekov, Technique in Writing the Short Story

John Cheever, Why I Write Short Stories

Kate Chopin, How I Stumbled upon Maupassant

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Private History of "The Jumping Frog" Story

Robert Coles, Tillie Olsen: The Iron and the Riddle

*Julio Cortazar, On the Short Story and Its Environs

Stephen Crane, The Sinking of the Commodore

Ralph Ellison, The Influence of Folklore on Battle Royal

Richard Ellmann, A Biographical Perspective on Joyce's The Dead

William Faulkner, The Meaning of "A Rose for Emily"

Richard Ford, Why We Like Chekov

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, The United States, and the Multicultural Future

*Gabriel Garcia Marquez- The Challenge

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A Feminist Reading of Gilman's" The Yellow Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Janice H. Harris, Levels of Meaning in Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Washington Irving, Washington Irving, Letter to Henry Brevoort, December 11, 1824

Shirley Jackson, The Morning of June 28, 1948, and "The Lottery"

Henry James, The Genesis of "The Real Thing"

Gustav Janouch, Kafka's View of The Metamorphosis

*Gish Jen, On Ethnicity and Writing

Sarah Orne Jewett, Looking Back on Girlhood

James Weldon Johnson, Lynching in Tennessee

Jamaica Kincaid, On "Girl"

D. H. Lawrence, Draft Passage from "Odour of Chrysanthemums"

Leslie Lee, Scene from the Screenplay of Almos' a Man

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Scapegoat in Omelas

Jack London, Jack London, Letter to the Editor on "To Build a Fire"

Katherine Mansfield, Review of Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

Bobbie Ann Mason, On Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

Guy de Maupassant, The Writer's Goal

Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

*Louis Menand, True Story: The Art of Short Fiction

J. Hillis Miller, Who Is He? Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Alice Munro, How I Write Short Stories

Vladimir Nabokov, Gogol's Genius in "The Overcoat"

Vladimir Nabokov, A Reading of Chekov's "The Lady with the Little Dog"

J. C. C. Nachtigal, Peter Klaus the Goatherd

Tim O'Brien, Alpha Company

Frank O'Connor, The Nearest Thing to Lyric Poetry Is the Short Story

Frank O'Connor, Style and Form in Joyce's The Dead

Grace Paley, A Conversation with Ann Charters

Jay Parini, Lawrence and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums"

*Annie Proulx, Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road, and Stop for the Garage Sales

Peter Rudy, Tolstoy's Revisions in The Death of Ivan Illych

Edward Said, The Past and the Present: Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography

*Joan Silber, Long Times in Short Stories, or Why Can't a Story Be More Like a Novel?

Leslie Marmon Silko, Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective

*Susan Sontag, Writing as Reading

Amy Tan, In the Canon, For All the Wrong Reasons

*Leo Tolstoy, Chekov's Intent in "The Darling"

Lionel Trilling, The Greatness of Conrad's Heart of Darkness

*Cheryl B. Torsney, "Everyday Use": My Sojourn at Parchman Farm

John Updike, Kafka and The Metamorphosis

Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?

Eudora Welty, Plot and Character in Chekov's "The Darling"

Edith Wharton, Every Subject Must Contain within Itself Its Own Dimensions

Richard Wright, Reading Fiction

PART THREE: CASEBOOKS

CASEBOOK 1: RAYMOND CARVER

Raymond Carver, On Writing

Raymond Carver, Creative Writing 101

Raymond Carver, The Ashtray

*Raymond Carver, On Errand

*Olga Knipper, Remembering Chekhov

*Henry Troyat, Chekhov's Last Days

*Tom Jenks, The Origin of "Cathedral"

Arthur M. Saltzman, A Reading of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

A.O. Scott, Looking for Raymond Carver

CASEBOOK 2: ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston, What White Publishers Won't Print

*Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem Slanguage

Robert Bone, A Folkloric Analysis of Hurston's "Spunk" and "The Gilded Six-Bits"

Rosalie Murphy Baum, The Shape of Hurston's Fiction

Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View

CASEBOOK 3: FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Flannery O'Connor, From Letters 1954-1955

Flannery O'Connor, Writing Short Stories

Flannery O'Connor, A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable

V. S. Pritchett, Flannery O'Connor: Satan Comes to Georgia

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Flannery O'Connor and Her Readers

Dorothy Tuck McFarland, On Good Country People

Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetorical Reading of O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge Sally Fitzgerald, Southern Sources of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

*CASEBOOK 4: JOYCE CAROL OATES

*Joyce Carol Oates, from "Stories that Define Me: The Making of a Writer"

Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film

*Don Moser, The Pied Piper of Tuscon

*Matthew C. Brennan, Chekov's and Oates' "Lady with Dog"

*Publishers Weekly, Review of I Am No One You Know

*John Schwartz, Oates' I Am No One You Know

CASEBOOK 5: EDGAR ALLAN POE

Edgar Allan Poe, The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale

D. H. Lawrence, On "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado"

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, A New Critical Reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher"

James W. Gargano, The Question of Poe's Narrators in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado"

J. Gerald Kennedy, On "The Fall of the House of Usher"

David S. Reynolds, Poe's Art of Transformation in "The Cask of Amontillado"

Joan Dayan, Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves

*CASEBOOK 6: GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

new Scott McCloud, from Understanding Comics

*Will Eisner, from "Hamlet on a Rooftop"

* R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz, "A Hunger Artist"

*Art Spiegelman, from Maus

*Marjane Satrapi, from Persepolis

*Gilbert Hernandez, "The Mystery Wen"

* Jiro Taniguchi, "A Blanket of Cherry Blossoms"

*Lynda Barry, "Two Questions"

PART FOUR: APPENDICES

*1. READING SHORT STORIES [includes Grace Paley, "Samuel"]

2. THE ELEMENTS OF FICTION

3. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SHORT STORY

4. WRITING ABOUT SHORT STORIES

*5. LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

6. GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS

7. CHRONOLOGICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS AND STORIES

* new to this edition