A comprehensive anthology gathers classic short stories by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Anton Chekhov, among other notables. Reissue.
A family sets out on a road trip in the American South. The grandmother suggests they change course in order to avoid "The Misfit", an escaped convict who's reportedly heading towards Florida. But when their car turns over in a ditch, who should they flag down for help but the very man whose picture they recognise from the paper . . . Flannery O'Connor's famous fifties story evokes heat and dust, family and feuding, God and grace - and is utterly uncompromising in its brutality.
The short story is one of the most varied and exciting genres in American literature. This collection brings together many of its finest examples from the early nineteenth century to the present. It contains a richly diverse cast of characters, including convicts, artists, farm labourers, slaves, soldiers and salesmen, witches and ghosts, families and lovers. Their stories are told by some of America's most celebrated writers (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver) and a few, like Fanny Fern or Charles W. Chestnutt, who may be less familiar. The collection offers a stimulating combination of acknowledged classics, including Mark Twain's hilarious 'Jim Smiley's Jumping Frog' and Edgar Allan Poe's chilling 'The Tell-Tale Heart', and some remarkable pieces that deserve a wider audience, such as Ernest Hemingway's story of miscommunication, 'Out of Season', or Lorrie Moore's tale of modern love and wit, 'Starving Again'. Kasia Boddy's introduction traces the history of the American short story and explores the changes and continuities in its forms and preoccupations. This edition also contains a chronology, explanatory and biographical notes and suggestions for further reading. Table of contents Washington Irving - The Little Man in Black (1807) Nathaniel Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown (1835) Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Fanny Fern - Aunt Hetty on Matrimony (1851) Mark Twain - Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865) Joel Chandler Harris - The Tar Baby Story (1880) Mary Wilkins Freeman - Two Friends (1887) Charles W. Chesnutt - The Wife of his Youth (1898) Henry James - The Real Right Thing (1899) Stephen Crane - An Episode of War (1899) O. Henry - Hearts and Hands (1903) Sherwood Anderson - The Untold Lie (1917) Ernest HemingwayOut of Season (1923) Edith Wharton - Atrophy (1927) Dorothy Parker - New York to Detroit (1928) Eudora Welty - The Whistle (1938) William Faulkner - Barn Burning (1939) F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Lost Decade (1939) Zora Neale Hurston - Now You Cookin' with Gas (1942) Bernard Malamud - The First Seven Years (1950) Flannery O'Connor - A Late Encounter with the Enemy (1953) John Updike - Sunday Teasing (1956) John Cheever - Reunion (1962) Grace Paley - Wants (1971) Alice Walker - The Flowers (1973) Donald Barthelme - I Bought a Little City (1974) Raymond Carver - Collectors (1975) Richard Ford - Communist (1985) Lorrie Moore - Starving Again (1990) Jhumpa Lahiri - The Third and Final Continent (1999) Lydia Davis - The Caterpillar (2006)
An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich. 'How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds.' Each day, while the others are out at sea, she is taught to swim. Eventually, she will be expected to perform. The pressure mounts; it is only a matter of time before she snaps. Edna O'Brien crafts a quietly horrifying scene of eroticism and insecurity, and makes one woman's near-fatal discomfort stand for society's larger trap.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that saw an explosion of Black art, music and writing, yet few female creatives are remembered alongside their male counterparts. Part of the Macmillan Collector''s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Women of the Harlem Renaissance is edited by Marissa Constantinou and introduced by Professor Kate Dossett. Exploring subjects from love, loss and motherhood to jazz, passing and Jim Crow law, the poems and stories collected in this anthology celebrate the women of colour at the heart of the movement. Alice Dunbar-Nelson parades through New Orleans in ''A Carnival Jangle'' whilst Carrie Williams Clifford takes to Fifth Avenue in ''Silent Protest Parade'', and Nella Larsen seeks a mother''s protection in ''Sanctuary''. Showcasing popular authors alongside writers you might discover for the first time, this collection of daring and disruptive writing encapsulates early twentieth-century America in surprising and beautiful ways.
VALERIA LUISELLI was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She is the author of two essay collections and the novels Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and The Lost Children Archive. The recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award, she has also been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award and three times for the Kirkus Prize. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.br>br> JENNY MINTON QUIGLEY is the author of a memoir, The Early Birds, and editor of the anthology Lolita in the Afterlife. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her husband, sons, and dogs.
'American literature and the short story might be said to have come of age at about the same time, and this, along with something in the bustling and energetic American temperament, might go some way towards explaining why the two go together as well as they do.' Twenty-one short stories from some of the best American writers over the last two hundred years provide a mesmerizing, multi-faceted portrait of a country, a people and the unique literature produced by this most exuberant of nations.
'Sometimes - not often - a book comes along that feels like Christmas. Philip Hensher's timely, but timeless, selection of the best short stories from the past 20 years is that kind of book. His introduction is as enriching as anything that has been published this year' Sunday Times A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories , has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day. Includes short stories by A.L. Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Graham Swift, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Martin Amis, China Mieville, Peter Hobbs, Thomas Morris, David Rose, David Szalay, Irvine Welsh, Lucy Caldwell, Rose Tremain, Helen Oyeyemi, Leone Ross, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Gerard Woodward, James Kelman, Lucy Wood, Hilary Mantel, Eley Williams, Sarah Hall, Mark Haddon and Helen Dunmore.
B>The prestigious annual story anthology now has a new title, a new package, and a new guest editor format to reinvigorate it as it enters its second century. AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL./b>br>br>The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners--continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen by guest editor Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Chimamanda has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting an impressively diverse array of stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and young emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Chimamanda, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.
'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression - in some ways the most modern of them all.' The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form.
Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored collection is a brilliant portrait of the generation of writers who have immediately influenced the brightest, sharpest and most intriguing writers who continue to emerge today.
The first global anthology of migration literature featuring works by Mohsin Hamid, Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Salman Rushdie, and Warsan Shire, with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside A Penguin Classic Every year, three to four million people move to a new country. From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. This selection of works collected together for the first time brings together the most compelling literary depictions of migration. Organized in four parts (Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature conveys the intricacy of worldwide migration patterns, the diversity of immigrant experiences, and the commonalities among many of those diverse experiences. Ranging widely across the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, across every continent of the earth, and across multiple literary genres, the anthology gives readers an understanding of our rapidly changing world, through the eyes of those at the center of that change. With thirty carefully selected poems, short stories, and excerpts spanning three hundred years and twenty-five countries, the collection brings together luminaries, emerging writers, and others who have earned a wide following in their home countries but have been less recognized in the Anglophone world. Editor of the volume Dohra Ahmad provides a contextual introduction, notes, and suggestions for further exploration.
The Golden Age of the English short story lies from its first wide acceptance in the middle of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, a period when there were a great many outlets in Britain for shorter fictions.
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories celebrates this period through some of the most widely known writers of the time. Though many of the chosen authors are more generally known for their novels, here they provide some perfect examples of much shorter work.
Each of these concise, evocative, subtle and satisfying stories is a little jewel, providing a small window into another world.
The sixteenth issue of The Happy Reader, the bookish bi-annual published by Penguin Classics in collaboration with Fantastic Man For avid readers and the uninitiated alike, this is a chance to reengage with classic literature and to stay inspired and entertained.
The concept of the magazine is simple- the first half is a long-form interview with a notable book fanatic and the second half explores one classic work of literature from an array of surprising and invigorating angles.
Truman Capote makes whiskey-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo Calvino take a cynical view of the season and Selma Lagerlof and Angela Carter celebrate its miracles. Ranging from Cork to Lagos to the Wild West, and from Paris to San Paolo to outer space, this is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short story writers of all time.
Le concept du magazine Happy Reader est simple: la première moitié est consacrée à une longue interview avec un/e fanatique de livres et la seconde moitié explore une oeuvre classique de la littérature sous un éventail d'angles surprenants et revigorants. Pour ce quinzième numéro, l'actrice Sarah Jessica Parker se livre sur ses lectures, suivie par les Japanese Ghost Stories de Lafcadio Hearn.
Truman Capote makes whiskey-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo Calvino take a cynical view of the season and Selma Lagerlof and Angela Carter celebrate its miracles. Ranging from Cork to Lagos to the Wild West, and from Paris to San Paolo to outer space, this is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short story writers of all time.
