Includes index.

Dead men's path / Chinua Achebe -- Roses, rhododendron / Alice Adams -- A bicycle / Iqbal Ahmad -- I'm working on my charm / Dorothy Allison -- I want to know why / Sherwood Anderson -- Seeing Mrs. Landers / Thea Astley -- Rape fantasies ; Hairball ; Gertrude talks back ; The little red hen tells all / Margaret Atwood -- Awakening / Isaac Babel -- Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara -- My mother's memoirs, my father's lie, and other true stories / Russell Banks -- III from "Three simple stories" / Julian Barnes -- Lost in the funhouse / John Barth -- A city of churches / Donald Barthelme -- The chosen vessel / Barbara Baynton -- What was mine / Ann Beattie -- An occurrence at Owl Creek bridge / Ambrose Bierce -- The end of the duel / Jorge Luis Borges -- The werewolf / Angela Carter -- Cathedral / Raymond Carver -- Paul's case / Willa Cather -- The swimmer / John Cheever -- The darling ; Gooseberries ; The lady with the dog ; The death of the civil servant / Anton Chekhov -- The story of an hour ; Regret ; A respectable woman / Kate Chopin -- The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Samuel Clemens -- The other wife / Colette -- The secret sharer / Joseph Conrad -- The magic poker / Robert Coover -- The blue hotel ; The open boat ; The lover and the tell-tale / Stephen Crane -- The blue jar / Isak Dinesen -- The red-headed league / Arthur Conan Doyle -- The doctor / Andre Dubus -- King of the bingo game / Ralph Ellison -- Dry September ; A rose for Emily / William Faulkner -- A scrap of time / Ida Fink -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Silence dogood, no. 1 / Benjamin Franklin -- April fish / Mavis Gallant -- Tuesday siesta / Gabriel García Márquez -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The overcoat / Nikolai Gogol -- The life of the imagination / Nadine Gordimer -- Two gentle people / Graham Greene -- Argument and persuasion / Donald Hall -- The birthmark ; Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Looking for a rain god / Bessie Head -- A Vermont tale / Mark Helprin -- Hills like white elephants ; Indian camp / Ernest Hemingway -- Who's passing for who? / Langston Hughes -- Spunk / Zora Neale Hurston -- Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving -- The lottery / Shirley Jackson -- The real thing / Henry James -- A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Araby / James Joyce -- The metamorphosis / Franz Kafka -- Search and destroy / Wayne Karlin -- The circling hand ; Girl / Jamaica Kincaid -- Not a good girl / Perri Klass -- Haircut / Ring Lardner -- My vocation / Mary Lavin -- The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence -- A place of safety / Halldór Laxness -- The professor's houses / Ursula K. Le Guin -- A sunrise on the veld / Doris Lessing -- Small causes / Primo Levi -- To build a fire / Jack London -- Half a day / Naguib Mahfouz -- The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- A dill pickle ; Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield -- Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason -- The outstation / W. Somerset Maugham -- The necklace / Guy de Maupassant -- Bartleby the scrivener / Herman Melville -- Patriotism / Yukio Mishima -- A father / Bharati Mukherjee -- Friend of my youth ; Boys and girls / Alice Munro. The passenger / Vladimir Nabokov -- Where are you going, where have you been? ; Shopping / Joyce Carol Oates -- The creature / Edna O'Brien -- The things they carried / Tim O'Brien -- Everything that rises must converge ; A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor -- Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor -- Do you like it here? / John O'Hara -- I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen -- A conversation with my father / Grace Paley -- War / Luigi Pirandello -- The cask of amontillado ; The fall of the house of Usher ; Hop-frog / Edgar Allan Poe -- Flowering Judas ; The grave / Katherine Anne Porter -- The valiant woman / J.F. Powers -- The diver / V.S. Pritchett -- The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- I-80 Nebraska, M.490-M.205 / John Sayles -- Gimpel the fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- No one's a mystery / Elizabeth Tallent -- A pair of tickets / Amy Tan -- Souvenir / John Tavela -- The catbird seat / James Thurber -- The death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy -- The tryst / Ivan Turgenev -- A & P / John Updike -- The verb to kill / Luisa Valenzuela -- The moths / Helena María Viramontes -- Roselily ; To hell with dying ; The welcome table / Alice Walker -- Blackberry winter / Robert Penn Warren -- Petrified man ; A worn path / Eudora Welty -- Roman fever / Edith Wharton -- Damballah / John Edgar Wideman -- The use of force / William Carlos Williams -- Smokers / Tobias Wolff -- Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf -- The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright -- from "Dissecting the way a writer works": an interview by Graeme Gibson ; "My mother would rather skate than scrub floors": an interview by Joyce Carol Oates ; from Survival ; Witches / Margaret Atwood -- from his letters / Anton Chekhov -- On Stephen Crane and "The blue hotel, " by Alfred Kazin ; On his life ; Stephen Crane's own story ; A letter to John Hilliard / Stephen Crane -- Let me tell a story now / Bessie Head -- Biography of a story / Shirley Jackson -- To a young reader / Primo Levi -- A letter to Richard Murray / Katherine Mansfield -- On her own work / Flannery O'Connor -- The brief prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe -- The writing of "Flowering Judas" / Katherine Anne Porter -- The old artist: notes on Mr. Sweet ; An interview with Eudora Welty ; from "Beyond the peacock" / Alice Walker -- "Blackberry winter": a recollection / Robert Penn Warren --"Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead?" / Eudora Welty.

"This exceptionally wide-ranging alphabetically arranged collection of stories includes writers of the 19th and 20th centuries as spans all genres of short fiction - myth, fairy tale, humor, western, detective, science fiction, gothic, fantasy, and folktale. The selections include both acclaimed masterpieces, as well as stories by highly regarded contemporary authors."(Back cover.)

In English.