Collection contains:
Stories: Civil peace / Chinua Achebe --
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 boat / Russell Banks --
Snow / Ann Beattie --
From Fun Home: Old father, old artificer / Alison Bechdel --
The rememberer / Aimee Bender --
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce --
Circular ruins / Jorge Luis Borges --
August 2026: There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury --
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 / Anton Chekhov --
Désiré́e's baby; Story of an hour / Kate Chopin --
Barbie-Q / Sandra Cisneros --
Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad --
Open boat / Stephen Crane --
How to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie / Junot Diaz --
Battle royal / Ralph Ellison --
The red convertible / Louise Erdrich --
Rose for Emily; That evening sun / William Faulkner --
Very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez --
Yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --
Homage / Nadine Gordimer --
Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne --
Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway --
Church cancels cow / Amy Hempel --
Things you should know / A. M. Homes --
Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston --
Lottery / Shirley Jackson --
Who's Irish? / Gish Jen --
White heron / Sarah Orne Jewett --
Bad neighbors / Edward P. Jones --
Araby; Dead / James Joyce --
Hunger Artist; Metamorphosis / Franz Kafka --
Girl / Jamaica Kincaid --
Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri --
Rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence --
Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield --
Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason --
Necklace / Guy de Maupassant --
Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville --
Nawabdin electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin --
Management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee --
Dance of the happy shades / Alice Munro --
Where are you going, where you have 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 --
I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen --
The shawl / Cynthia Ozick --
Brownies / ZZ Packer --
Conversation with my father / Grace Paley --
Cask of Amontillado; Tell-tale Heart/ Edgar Allan Poe --
The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter --
Job history / Annie Proulx --
From Palestine: Refugeeland / Joe Sacco --
From Persepolis : The veil / Marjane Satrapi --
Yellow woman / Leslie Marmon Silko --
Homework / Helen Simpson --
Prisoner on the hell planet: a case history / Art Spiegelman --
Two kinds / Amy Tan --
Death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy --
A&P / John Updike --
The moths / Helena Maria Viramontes --
Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. --
Everyday use / Alice Walker --
Good people / David Foster Wallace --
Worn path / Eudora Welty --
Say yes / Tobias Wolf --
Man who was almost a man / Richard Wright --
Commentaries: Image of Africa: Conrad's ''Heart of darkness'' / Chinua Achebe --
Superman and me / Sherman Alexie --
Form, not plot, in the short story / Sherwood Anderson --
Reading blind / Margaret Atwood --
Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin --
Writing "Poes" / Russell Banks --
Borges and I / Jorge Luis Borges --
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 --
Sinking of the commodore / Stephen Crane --
A huger artist / R. Crumb; David Zane Mairowitz --
Influence of folklore on ''Battle royal'' / Ralph Ellison --
Meaning of ''Rose for Emily'' / William Faulkner --
Feminist reading of Gilman's ''Yellow wallpaper'' / Sandra M. Gilbert; Susan Gubar --
Why I wrote ''Yellow wallpaper''; Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --
Morning of June 28,1948 and ''Lottery'' / Shirley Jackson --
On ''Girl'' / Jamaica Kincaid --
Finding your voice / Anne Lamott --
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 --
How I write short stories / Alice Munro --
Stories that define me: Making of a writer; Smooth talk: Short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates --
Alpha company / Tim O'Brien --
Conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley --
Importance of the single effect in a prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe --
Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko --
In the canon, for all the wrong reasons / Amy Tan --
Chekhov's intent in ''Darling'' / Leo Tolstoy --
Zora Neale Hurston: Cautionary tale and a partisan view / Alice Walker --
Some remarks on Kafka's funnieness 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: Raymond Carver: One writing; Creative writing 101; The 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 two: Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies": My two lives / Jhumpa Lahiri --
Jhumpa Lahiri / Sean Flynn --
Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" / Simon Lewis --
Casebook three: Flannery O'Connor: From ''Letters 1954-55''; Writing short stories; Reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor --
Rhetorical reading of O'Connor's ''Everything that rises must converge'' / Wayne C. Booth --
On ''Good country people'' / Dorothy Tuck McFarland --
Casebook four: 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'') --
Elements of fiction --
Brief history of the short story --
Writing about short stories --
Literary theory and critical perspectives --
Glossary of literary terms --
Chronological listing of authors' stories --
Chronological listing of authors and stories --
Index of authors and titles