The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Collection contains: Stories: Civil Peace / Chinua Achebe -- Silent Snow, Secret Snow / Conrad Aiken -- In a Bamboo Grove / Ryunosuke Akutagawa -- Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven / Sherman Alexie -- Act of Vengeance / Isabel Allende -- Hands / Sherwood Anderson -- Happy Endings / Margaret Atwood -- Sonny's Blues / James Baldwin -- Lesson / Toni Cade Bambara -- Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat / Russell Banks -- San Francisco / Lynda Barry -- Indian Uprising / Donald Barthelme -- Snow / Ann Beattie -- From Fun Home: Old Father, Old Artificer / Alison Bechdel -- Rememberer / Aimee Bender -- [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14863196W) / Ambrose Bierce -- Circular Ruins / Jorge Luis Borges -- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski -- Greasy Lake / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains / Ray Bradbury -- Guest / Albert Camus -- Werewolf / Angela Carter -- Cathedral; A Small, Good Thing ; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Raymond Carver -- Paul's Case / Willa Carter -- Water Names / Lan Samantha Chang -- Swimmer / John Cheever -- Darling ; Lady with the Little Dog / Anton Chekhov -- [Désiré́e's Baby](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20078777W); [Story of an Hour](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20078864W) / Kate Chopin -- Barbie-Q / Sandra Cisneros -- Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad -- Continuity of Parks / Julio Cortazar -- Open Boat / Stephen Crane -- Night Women / Edwidge Danticat -- Television / Lydia Davis -- How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie / Junot Diaz -- Battle Royal / Ralph Ellison -- Red Convertible / Louise Erdrich -- Rose for Emily ; That Evening Sun / William Faulkner -- Babylon Revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Very Old Man with Enormous Wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Look on the Bright Side / Dagoberto Gilb -- Yellow Wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Overcoat / Nikolai Gogol -- Homage / Nadine Gordimer -- Bride / Christine Granados -- Rappaccini's Daughter ; Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Hills Like White Elephants / Ernest Hemingway -- Church Cancels Cow ; In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried / Amy Hempel -- Things You Should Know / A.M. Homes -- Gilded Six-Bits ; Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston -- Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving -- Lottery / Shirley Jackson -- Real Thing / Henry James -- Who's Irish? / Gish Jen -- White Heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Saboteur / Ha Jin -- Dirty Wedding / Denis Johnson -- Bad Neighbors / Edward P. Jones -- Pugilist at Rest / Thom Jones -- Araby; Dead / James Joyce -- Hunger Artist; Metamorphosis / Franz Kafka -- Not Human Beings / Etgar Keret -- Girl / Jamaica Kincaid -- Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa / W.P. Kinsella -- Interpreter of Maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Odour of Chrysanthemums ; Rocking-Horse Winner / D.H. Lawrence -- Drover's Wife / Henry Lawson -- Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Woman on a Roof / Doris Lessing -- Build a Fire / Jack London -- Fly ; Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield -- Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Necklace / Guy de Maupassant -- Bartleby, the Scrivener / Herman Melville -- Invasion from Outer Space / Steven Millhauser -- Videos of the Dead / Rick Moody -- How to Become a Writer / Lorrie Moore -- Nawabdin Electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin -- Management of Grief / Bharati Mukherjee -- Dance of the Happy Shades / Alice Munro -- Toys of Peace / Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) -- Ice Man / Haruki Murakami -- Lady with the Pet Dog ; Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? / Joyce Carol Oates -- Things They Carried / Tim O'Brien -- Everything That Rises Must Converge; Good Country People; Good Man Is Hard to Find / Flannery O'Connor -- Guests of the Nation / Frank O'Connor -- I Stand Here Ironing / Tillie Olsen -- Shawl / Cynthia Ozick -- Brownies / ZZ Packer -- Escort / Chuck Palahniuk -- Conversation with My Father ; Mother / Grace Paley -- My Life with the Wave / Octavio Paz -- Stars / Jayne Anne Phillips -- Cask of Amontillado; Fall of the House of Usher ; Tell-Tale Heart / Edgar Allan Poe -- Jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter -- Gift of the Magi / William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) -- Job History / Annie Proulx -- Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- From Palestine: Refugeeland / Joe Sacco -- From Persepolis : The Veil / Marjane Satrapi -- Brad Carrigan, American / George Saunders -- Love So Fleeting, Love So Fine / Carol Shields -- Yellow Woman / Leslie Marmon Silko -- Homework / Helen Simpson -- Girl with Bangs / Zadie Smith -- Way We Live Now / Susan Sontag -- Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History / Art Spiegelman -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Two Kinds / Amy Tan -- Death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy -- Blood-Burning Moon / Jean Toomer -- A & P / John Updike -- Dreams / Jane Urquhart -- Moths / Helena Maria Viramontes -- Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -- Everyday Use / Alice Walker -- Good People / David Foster Wallace -- Seeing Eye / Brad Watson -- Why I Live at the P.O. ; Worn Path / Eudora Welty -- Roman Fever / Edith Wharton -- Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies ; Stories / John Edgar Wideman -- Use of Force / William Carlos Williams -- Powder ; Say Yes / Tobias Wolff -- Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf -- Man Who Was Almost a Man / Richard Wright -- Brown House / Hisaye Yamamoto. Commentaries: Image of Africa: Conrad's ''Heart of darkness'' / Chinua Achebe -- Superman and Me / Sherman Alexie -- Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman / Paula Gunn Allen -- Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story / Sherwood Anderson -- Reading Blind / Margaret Atwood -- Writing "Poes" / Russell Banks -- Borges and I / Jorge Luis Borges -- Plotting Against Chekhov: Joyce Carol Oates and "Lady with the Dog" / Matthew C. Brennan -- Translating Kafka / Ann Charters -- Why I Write Short Stories / John Cheever -- Technique in Writing the Short Story / Anton Chekhov -- How I Stumbled Upon Maupassant / Kate Chopin -- Private History of the "Jumping Frog" Story / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- Sinking of the Commodore / Stephen Crane -- Hunger Artist / R. Crumb; David Zane Mairowitz -- On the Short, Short Story / Lydia Davis -- Influence of Folklore on ''Battle Royal'' / Ralph Ellison -- Biographical Perspective on Joyce's "Dead" / Richard Ellmann -- Meaning of ''Rose for Emily'' / William Faulkner -- Why We Like Chekhov / Richard Ford -- Mexico, the United States, and the Multicultural Future / Carlos Fuentes -- On Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme / Vivian Gornick -- Levels of Meaning in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner" / Janice H. Harris -- How It Feels to Be Colored Me ; What White Publishers Won't Print / Zora Neale Hurston -- Morning of June 28,1948 and ''Lottery'' / Shirley Jackson -- Genesis of "Real Thing" / Henry James -- Kafka's View of "Metamorphosis" / Gustav Janouch -- Looking Back on Girlhood / Sarah Orne Jewett -- On ''Girl'' / Jamaica Kincaid -- Finding Your Voice / Anne Lamott -- Scapegoat in Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Letter to the Editor on "To Build a Fire" / Jack London -- Review of Woolf's "Kew Gardens" / Katherine Mansfield -- On Tim O'Brien's ''Things They Carried'' / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Writer's Goal / Guy de Maupassant -- Blackness in Hawthorne's ''Young Goodman Brown'' / Herman Melville -- Deconstructive Reading on Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" / J. Hillis Miller -- How I write Short Stories / Alice Munro -- On Ryunosuke Akutagawa / Haruki Murakami -- Gogol's Genius in "Overcoat" ; Reading of Chekhov's "Lady with the Little Dog" / Vladimir Nabokov -- Peter Klaus the Goatherd / J.C.C. Nachtigal -- Alpha Company / Tim O'Brien -- Nearest Thing to Lyric Poetry Is the Short Story ; Style and Form in Joyce's "Dead" / Frank O'Connor -- Conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley -- Lawrence's and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums" / Jay Parini -- Guided Tours of Time and Death / Jayne Anne Phillips -- Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road, and Stop for the Yard Sales / Annie Proulx -- Past and the Present: Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography / Edward W. Said -- Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko -- Writing as Reading / Susan Sontag -- In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons / Amy Tan -- Chekhov's Intent in ''Darling'' / Leo Tolstoy -- Greatness of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" / Lionel Trilling -- Zora Neale Hurston: Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View / Alice Walker -- Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed / David Foster Wallace -- Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead? / Eudora Welty -- Reading Fiction / Richard Wright. Casebooks: Casebook One: James Baldwin's "Sonny blues:" Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin -- Words and Music: Narrative Ambiguity in "Sonny's Blues" / Keith E. Byerman -- "Sonny Blues" Saved My Life / Kenneth A. McClane -- Casebook Two: Raymond Carver: On Writing; Creative Writing 101; Bath / Raymond Carver -- Origin of ''Cathedral'' / Tom Jenks -- Reading of ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'' / Arthur M. Saltzman -- Looking for Raymond Carver / A.O. Scott -- Casebook Three: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow wallpaper:" Why I Wrote "Yellow wallpaper ; Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Feminist Reading of Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar -- On "Yellow Wallpaper" / Elaine Showalter -- Casebook Four: Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies:" My Two Lives / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Jhumpa Lahiri / Sean Flynn -- Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" / Simon Lewis -- Casebook Five: Flannery O'Connor: From Letters, 1954-55 ; Writing Short Stories; Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor -- Parables of Flannery O'Connor / Joyce Carol Oates -- Rhetorical Reading of O'Connor's ''Everything That Rises Must Converge'' / Wayne C. Booth -- On ''Good Country People'' / Dorothy Tuck McFarland -- Casebook Six: Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?:" Stories That Define Me: Making of a Writer ; Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film / Joyce Carol Oates -- Pied Piper of Tucson: He Cruised in a Golden Car, Looking for the Action / Don Moser -- Casebook Seven: Edgar Allan Poe: Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale / Edgar Allan Poe -- On "Fall of the House of Usher" and "Cask of Amontillado" / D.H. Lawrence -- New Critical Reading of "Fall of the House of Usher" / Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren -- Under the Covers with Fortunato and Montresor / Jan Burke -- Fall of the House of Usher / Will Eisner -- Casebook Eight: Graphic Storytelling: What the Little Old Ladies Feel / Alison Bechdel -- From "Alternative Comics: Toward the Habit of Questioning" / Charles Hatfield -- Are Comics Serious Literature / Michael Kupperman -- From Understanding Comics: Invisible Art / Scott McCloud -- Reading "The Veil" by Marjane Satrapi / Sydney Plum -- Some Reflections on Palestine / Joe Sacco -- Homage to Joe Sacco / Edward W. Said. Appendices: Reading Short Stories (Includes Grace Paley, ''Samuel'') --