During her many years of teaching fiction, Ann Charters has honed her sense of which stories work best in the classroom while continually searching for exciting new stories to introduce to her students. Accordingly, since its first edition, the selection of fiction in The Story and Its Writer has been acclaimed for its quality, its range, and its classroom appeal.

In her teaching, Ann Charters also discovered that writers, not editors, say the most useful and interesting things about the making and the meaning of fiction. Therefore, since its first edition, The Story and Its Writer has always complemented its fiction with a rich array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story - a lasting innovation that changed the way fiction is taught.

The Story and Its Writer is the most comprehensive, most diverse, and most widely adopted introductory fiction anthology. Readers count on Ann Charters's ability to assemble an authoritative, engaging anthology and anticipate each new edition to see which writers and stories she will introduce.

In this seventh edition, Ann Charters continues to discover and to innovate, presenting her most adventurous selection of contemporary fiction yet and including a unique section on graphie storytelling.