The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction: Compact Fourth Edition

by Ann Charters

Civil peace / Chinua Achebe
The last lovely city / Alice Adams
Dominoes / Jack Agueros
The Kugelmass episode / Woody Allen
And of clay arewe created / Isabel Allende
Death in the woods ; Hands / Sherwood Anderson
Happy endings / Margaret Atwood
My first goose / Isaac Babel
Sonny's blues / James Baldwin
The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara
Lost in the funhouse / John Barth
The Indian uprising / Donald Barthelme
Janus / Ann Beattie
An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce
The garden of forking paths / Jorge Luis Borges
This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski
The eye / Paul Bowles
Black boy / Kay Boyle
Stones in my passway, hellhound on my trail / T. Coraghessan Boyle
A good scent from a strange mountain / Robert Olen Butler
The feathered ogre / Italo Calvio
The guest / Albert Camus
The erl-king / Angela Carter
Cathedral / Raymond Carver
Errand / Raymond Carver
What we talk about when we talk about love / Raymond Carver
Paul's case / Willa Cather
The swimmer / John Cheever
The darling / Anton Chekhov
The lady with the little dog / Anton Chekhov
The sheriff's children / Charles Chesnutt
Désirée's baby / Kate Chopin
The story of an hour / Kate Chopin
Little miracles, kept promises / Sandra Cisneros
Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad
Axolotl / Julio Cortázar
The open boat / Stephen Crane
The sailor-boy's tale / Isak Dinesen
Battle royal / Ralph Ellison
King of the bingo game / Ralph Ellison
The red convertible / Louise Erdrich
A rose for Emily / William Faulkner
That evening sun / William Faulkner
Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald
A simple heart / Gustave Flaubert
1933 / Mavis Gallant
A very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel García Márquez
The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The overcoat / Nikolai Gogol
Town and country lovers / Nadine Gordimer
My kinsman, Major Molineux / Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne
Life / Bessie Head
Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway
The gilded six-bits / Zora Neale Hurston
Spunk / Zora Neale Hurston
Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston
The lottery / Shirley Jackson
The beast in the jungle / Henry James
A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett
Menagerie, a child's fable / Charles Johnson
Araby / James Joyce
The dead / James Joyce
A hunger artist / Franz Kafka
The metamorphosis / Franz Kafka
Girl / Jamaica Kincaid
The hitchhiking game / Milan Kundera
Odour of chysanthemums / D.H. Lawrence
The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence
Braids / David Leavitt
The ones who walk away from the Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin
Debbie and Julie / Doris Lessing
Half a day / Naguib Mahfouz
Black is my favorite color / Bernard Malamud
Bliss / Katherine Mansfield
The garden-party / Katherine Mansfield
The dog of titwal / Saadat Hasan Manto
Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason
The necklace / Guy de Maupassant
Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville
Fountains in the rain / Yukio Mishima
How to become a writer / Lorrie Moore
Mrs. Plum / Es'kia Mphahlele
The management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee
Walker brothers cowboy / Alice Munro
Heat / Joyce Carol Oates
Where are you going, where have you been / Joyce Carol Oates
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien
Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor
Good country people / Flannery O'Connor
A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor
Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor
In the shadow of war / Ben Okri
I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen
The shawl / Cynthia Ozick
A conversation with my father / Grace Paley
My life with the wave / Octavio Paz
The cask of Amontillado / Edgar Allen Poe
The tell-tale heart / Edgar Allen Poe
He / Katherine Anne Porter
A great day / Frank Sargeson
Lullaby / Leslie Marmon Silko
Storyteller / Leslie Marmon Silko
Yellow woman / Leslie Marmon Silko
The Spinoza of Market Street / Isaac Bashevis Singer
Long distance / Jane Smiley
The way we live now / Susan Sontag
The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck
Two kinds / Amy Tan
The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber
Night / Tatyana Tolstaya
The death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy
A & P / John Updike
Roselily / Alice Walker
Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty
A worn path / Eudora Welty
Roman fever / Edith Wharton
The beginning of Homewood / John Edgar Wideman
Exchanging glances / Christa Wolf
Say yes / Tobias Wolff
Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf
The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright
The eskimo connection / Hisaye Yamamoto

Genres: Short Stories

926 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[marcel]

By rating this a 5, I don't mean to say I found every single story here amazing (though many, many of them legitimately are), but as an introduction to short fiction, this book knocks it out of the park. I found it used for $6 and have chipped away at it, among other reads, for the last three months. (The compact edition I have is printed with tiny font on Biblically thin paper, so it has been great value, weight- and volume-wise, to bring on my travels in S America, Europe, and SE Asia.) There are sixty short stories included, which span the first 80% of the book. This book introduced me to so many authors whose collections I want to look out for now. It also gave me a taste of different styles and genres of literary fiction, so I have a greater sense of what kind of stories I like to read. The second part, Commentaries, is also wonderful for fleshing out this canon of stories that Charters has established, since we get perspectives on the context behind the stories, sometimes from the author themself or from other short-story writers. I appreciated how page links were inserted before stories to their relevant commentaries, so that you can read the commentary with the story fresh in mind. This meant that I read a lot of this book out of order, leaving pencil checkmarks to indicate that I'd read a piece. I think this is the best way to consume the book, since going alphabetically, sometimes a story pops up that you're not in the mood for. But of course afterwards I had to do a left-to-right sweep of the rest of the book. Part Three is a case study of Raymond Carver's fiction, and it reads a lot like Part 2, mostly commentaries on his work by Carver himself and by other authors.

Then there are a bunch of appendices that are far less gripping but must be useful to a student (there is even an in-depth guide to writing essays about short stories). They were dry but I read them out of a sense of moral duty, and will put them to good use when I inevitably have a crisis and go back to school to study literature.