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.

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)
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'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.
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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.
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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.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a case of putting one foot in front of the other in a bleak new world or do we need something more? Reeling with grief after the sudden death of her father, Helen Macdonald found herself turning to the wild for comfort. With breathtaking honesty and insight, she recounts her months spent taming a goshawk and how, finally, this strange kinship led her to the first tentative steps to recovery.


Selected from H is for Hawk VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis 'Head Space' series:
Therapy by Stephen Grosz Family by Mark Haddon
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'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 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.

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.

Now celebrating its centenary, this prestigious annual anthology gathers the twenty best new short stories published in the previous year. An Anchor Books Original. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019 --continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. The winning writers are an impressive mix of celebrated names and new, emerging voices. Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Columbian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit. The uniformly breathtaking stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.
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The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. Fuelled by a large new magazine readership and vigorous competition to acquire new stories and develop the careers of some of our greatest writers, these years were ones where the normal rule-of-thumb (novels sell, short stories don''t) was inverted.This was the era of Sherlock Holmes, of Kipling''s most famous stories, of M. R. James, Katherine Mansfield and Joyce''s Dubliners. Some of the greatest writers of the period - particularly Conrad and James - found that the effort that went into their shorter works was more rewarded during their lifetimes than their now famous novels. Writers such as Mansfield, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Lawrence and Saki produced some of their greatest work.Short stories also provided a brilliant medium for experiment, and this generous and endlessly entertaining anthology includes fascinating examples of writers as varied as Rebecca West, James Joyce, H.G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis experimenting with what it was acceptable to write and how you could write it.>
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GRACE WALES BONNER is a 28 year old fashion designer from south-east London. She has been feted by the worlds of both serious culture and high glamour, but heres the unusual part: her clothes come with reading lists. Interviewed by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri for this Happy Reader cover story, Grace explains how she sees herself on some level as a researcher. She visits libraries, digests acres of complex ideas about politics and identity, and expresses them, among other things, via the realm of clothes.

From Daniel Defoe to John Buchan

A rich array of twenty-nine short stories that capture the stylistic diversity of American short fiction features contributions by Rick Bass, David Foster Wallace, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mary Gaitskill, Anthony Doerr, Kate Braverman, A. M. Homes, Sam Lipsyte, Anne Carson, and other notable authors. Original. 30,000 first printing.

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.
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