The story and its writer : an introduction to short fiction
(Book)

Brief contents: Introduction: The story and its writer

Part One. Stories : one hundred and twelve stories with accompanying biographical headnotes for each author

Part Two. Commentaries : Fifty commentaries by writers on their own work and the works of others

Part Three. Casebooks : six casebooks compiled of twenty-nine commentaries, images, and contextual documents, affording in-depth study of important authors and works

Part Four. Appendices : six helpful appendices focused on reading, thinking critically, and writing about short stories.

Introduction: Why read literature?

Part One: Stories. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven ; Sherwood Anderson, Hands ; Margaret Atwood, Happy endings ; Mary Austin, The return of Mr. Wills ; Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant ; James Baldwin, Sonny's blues ; Toni Cade Bambara, The lesson ; Lynda Barry, Two questions ; Donald Barthelme, The school ; Alison Bechdel, The fellowship ; Lucia Berlin, My jockey ; Ambrose Bierce, An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ; Roberto Bolano, The insufferable Gaucho ; Jorge Luis Borges, The south ; Ray Bradbury, August 2026: There will come soft rains ; Fredrick Busch, Ralph the duck, Alejo Carpentier, Journey to the seed ; Angela Carter, The company of wolves ; Raymond Carver, Cathedral ; Raymond Carver, Popular mechanics ; Raymond Carver, What we talk about when we talk about love ; Willa Cather, Paul's cause ; John Cheever, The swimmer ; Anton Chekhov, The darling ; Kate Chopin, Desiree's baby ; Kate Chopin, The story of an hour ; Sandra Cisneros, Barbie-Q ; Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The portable phonograph ; Julio Cortazar, A continuity of parks ; Stephen Crane, The open boat ; Lydia Davis, Pouchet's wife ; Lydia Davis, The funeral ; Lydia Davis, The mother ; Don DeLillo, Human Moments in World War III ; Junot Diaz, How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl and Halfie ; Anthony Doerr, The Deep ; Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal ; Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible ; William Faulkner, A rose for Emily ; William Faulkner, That evening sun ; Carolyn Forche, The colonel ; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A very old man with enormous wings ; Charlotte Perking Gilman, The yellow wallpaper ; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown ; Bessie Head, Looking for a rain-god ; Ernest Hemingway, Hills like white elephants ; Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat ; Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle ; Shirley Jackson, The lottery ; Sarah Orne Jewett, A white heron ; James Joyce, The dead ; Miranda July, The swim team ; Franz Kafka, A hunger artist ; Franz Kafka, The metamorphosis ; Yasunari Kawabata, The grasshopper and the bell cricket ; Jack Kerouac, October in the railroad earth - Jamaica Kincaid, Girl ; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of maladies ; D. H. Lawrence ; Odour of chrysanthemums ; D. H. Lawrence, The rocking-horse winner ; Ursula K. Le Guin, The ones who walk away from Omelas ; Clarice Lispector, The smallest woman in the world ; Jack London, To build a fire ; Guy de Maupassant, The necklace ; Herman Melville, Bartleby, the scrivener ; Lorrie Moore, How to become a writer ; Alice Munro, Dimensions ; Keiji Nakazawa, From barefoot Gen ; Joyce Carol Oates, The lady with the pet dog ; Tim O'Brian ; 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 ; Tillie Olsen, I stand here ironing ; Cynthia Ozick, The shawl ; ZZ Packer, Brownies ; Grace Paley, A conversation with my father ; Edgar Allen Poe, The cask of amontillado ; Edgar Allen Poe, The fall of the house of Usher ; William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), The gift of the Magi ; Annie Proulx, The blood bay ; Phillip Roth, The conversion of the Jews ; Joe Sacco, Palestine: "Regueeland" ; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: "The veil" ; George Sanders, Puppy ; Said Sayrafiezadeh, A brief encounter with the enemy ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow woman ; Zadie Smith, Crazy they call me ; Art Spiegelman, Prisoner on the hell planet: A case history ; John Steinbeck, The chrysanthemums ; Tatyana Tolstaya, Aspic ; Leo Tolstoy, The death of Ivan Ilych ; John Updike, A & P ; Luisa Valenzuela, Vision out of the corner of one eye ; Helena Maria Viramontes, The moths ; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harrison Bergeron ; Alice Walker, Everyday use ; David Foster Wallace, Everything is green ; Eudora Welty, A worn path ; William Carlos Williams, The use of force ; Tobias Wolff, Say yes ; Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens ; Richard Wright, The man who was almost a man ;

Part Two: Commentaries. Joan Acocella, How Angela Carter became feminism's great mythologist ; Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind man steals yellow woman ; Sherwood Anderson, Form, not plot, in the short story ; Margaret Atwood, Reading blind ; Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I ; Matthew C. Brennan, Plotting against Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates and "The lady with the dog" ; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Peen Warren, A new critical reading of "The fall of the house of Usher" ; Ann Charters, Translating Kafka ; John Cheever, Why I write short stories ; Anton Chekhov, Technique in writing the short story ; Kate Chopin, How I stumbled upon Maupassant ; Stephen Crane, The sinking of the Commodore ; Anthony Doerr, On reading the story and it's writer ; Terry Eagleton, How to read literature ; 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" ; Janice H. Harris, Levels of meaning in Lawrence's "The rocking-horse winner" ; Zora Neale Hurston, How it feels to be colored me ; Shirley Jackson, The morning of June 28, 2948 and "The lottery" ; Gustav Janouch, Kafka's view of "The metamorphosis" ; Sarah Orne Jewett, Looking back on girlhood ; Jack Kerouac, The essentials of spontaneous prose ; Jamaica Kincaid, On "Girl" ; D. H. Lawrence, On "The fall of the house of Usher" and "The cask of amontillado" ; Ursula K. Le Guin ; The scapegoat in Omelas ; Luis Leal, Magical realism in Spanish American literature ; Simon Lewis, Lahiri's "Interpreter of maladies" ; Mario Vargas Llosa, The prose style of Jorge Luis Borge and Gabriel Garcia Marquez ; Jack London, Letter to the editor on "To build a fire" ; Katherine Mansfield, Review of Woolf's "Kew gardens" ; Guy de Maupassant, The writer's goal ; Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" ; J. Hillis Miller, A deconstructive reading of Melville's "Bartleby the scrivener" ; Alice Munro, How I write short stories ; Vladimir Nabokov, A reading of Chekhov's "The lady with the little dog" ; J. C. C. Nachtigal, Peter Klaus the goatherd ; Tim O'Brian, Alpha Company ; Grace Paley, A conversation with Ann Charters ; Jay Parini, Lawrence's and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums" ; Sydney Plum, Reading "The veil" by Marjane Satrapi ; Edgar Allen Poe, The importance of the single effect in a prose tale ; Joe Sacco, Some reflections on Palestine ; George Saunders, The perfect gerbil: Reading Barthelme's "The School" ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective ; Matt Steinglass, Reading Tim O'Brian in Hanoi ; Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov's intent in "The darling" ; Leo Tolstoy, The works of Guy de Maupassant ; Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A cautionary tale and a partisan view ; Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? ;

Part Three: Casebooks. Casebook One: Short shorts or flash fiction. Aesop, The fox and the grapes ; Felix Feneon, To die like Joan of Arc! ; Felix Feneon, Discharged Tuesday ; Franz Kafka, The wish to become an American Indian ; John Barth, A few words About minimalism ; Charles Baxter, On the very short story ; Joyce Carol Oates, On very short fiction ; Lydia Davis, Reading short stories ; Casebook Two: James Baldwin's "Sonny's blues." James Baldwin, autobiographical notes ; Keith E Bryeman, Words and music: Narrative ambiguity in "Sonny's blues" ; Kenneth A. McClane, "Sonny's blues" saved my life ; Casebook Three: Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver, Creative writing 101 ; 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 Four: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The yellow wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" ; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration ; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A Feminist Reading of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" ; S. Weir Mitchell, From "The Evolution of the Rest Treatment" ; Casebook Five: Flannery O'Connor ; Flannery O'Connor, From letters ; Flannery O'Connor, Writing short stories ; Flannery O'Connor A reasonable use of the unreasonable ; Joyce Carol Oates, The parables of Flannery O'Connor ; Wayne C. Booth, A rhetorical reading of O'Connor's "Everything that rises must converge" ; Dorothy Tuck McFarland, On "Good country people" ; Casebook Six: Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?". Joyce Carol Oates, Stories that define me; The making of a writer ; Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth talk: Short story into film ; Don Moser, The pied piper of Tucson: He cruised in a golden car, looking for action ;

Part Four: Appendices. 1. Reading short stories ; Grace Paley, Samuel ; Close reading short fiction ; Guidelines for close reading short fiction ; Sample close reading : Grace Paley, Samuel, 1968 ; Critical thinking about short fiction ; 2. The elements of fiction ; Plot ; Character ; Setting ; Point of View ; Style ; Theme ; 3. A brief history of the short story ; 4. Writing about short stories ; Keeping a short story journal ; Using the commentaries and casebooks ; Writing the paper ; Types of literary papers ; Student essay: Explication: "The devil's tricks in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'" ; Student essay: Analysis: "The path toward evil" [on "Young Goodman Brown"] ; Student essay: Comparison and contrast: "Bringing fiction to life: From folktale to short story in 'Peter Klaus the goatherd' and 'Rip Van Winkle'" ; Writing about the context and the stories ; Other perspectives ; Student essay: "Anton Chekhov's 'The darling' in Russian and English translation ; Writing the research paper ; Student essay: Research paper: "Lost letters: Gilman's achievement in 'The yellow wallpaper' ; Revising your paper ; 5. Literary theory and critical perspectives ; Formalist criticism ; Biographical criticism ; Psychological criticism ; Historical criticism ; Reader-response criticism ; Poststructuralist and deconstructionist criticism ; Gender criticism.