| Edition |
Compact tenth edition. |
| Description |
xxxi, 1013 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Summary |
"Read great fiction and discover what it takes to write it. This book is a treasury of short fiction by the best writers of the past and present. Their stories will transport you to other times and places, where you will be inspired to laugh, to question, and to think. Along with the stories are writers' own commentaries on their craft and the traditions of short fiction, offering you insight, inspiration, and plenty of support for discussion and writing."--taken from back cover. |
| Contents |
Brief contents: Introduction: The story and its writer -- Part One. Stories : one hundred and twelve stories with accompanying biographical headnotes for each author -- Part Two. Commentaries : Fifty commentaries by writers on their own work and the works of others -- Part Three. Casebooks : six casebooks compiled of twenty-nine commentaries, images, and contextual documents, affording in-depth study of important authors and works -- Part Four. Appendices : six helpful appendices focused on reading, thinking critically, and writing about short stories. |
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Introduction: Why read literature? -- Part One: Stories. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven ; Sherwood Anderson, Hands ; Margaret Atwood, Happy endings ; Mary Austin, The return of Mr. Wills ; Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant ; James Baldwin, Sonny's blues ; Toni Cade Bambara, The lesson ; Lynda Barry, Two questions ; Donald Barthelme, The school ; Alison Bechdel, The fellowship ; Lucia Berlin, My jockey ; Ambrose Bierce, An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ; Roberto Bolano, The insufferable Gaucho ; Jorge Luis Borges, The south ; Ray Bradbury, August 2026: There will come soft rains ; Fredrick Busch, Ralph the duck, Alejo Carpentier, Journey to the seed ; Angela Carter, The company of wolves ; Raymond Carver, Cathedral ; Raymond Carver, Popular mechanics ; Raymond Carver, What we talk about when we talk about love ; Willa Cather, Paul's cause ; John Cheever, The swimmer ; Anton Chekhov, The darling ; Kate Chopin, Desiree's baby ; Kate Chopin, The story of an hour ; Sandra Cisneros, Barbie-Q ; Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The portable phonograph ; Julio Cortazar, A continuity of parks ; Stephen Crane, The open boat ; Lydia Davis, Pouchet's wife ; Lydia Davis, The funeral ; Lydia Davis, The mother ; Don DeLillo, Human Moments in World War III ; Junot Diaz, How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl and Halfie ; Anthony Doerr, The Deep ; Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal ; Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible ; William Faulkner, A rose for Emily ; William Faulkner, That evening sun ; Carolyn Forche, The colonel ; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A very old man with enormous wings ; Charlotte Perking Gilman, The yellow wallpaper ; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown ; Bessie Head, Looking for a rain-god ; Ernest Hemingway, Hills like white elephants ; Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat ; Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle ; Shirley Jackson, The lottery ; Sarah Orne Jewett, A white heron ; James Joyce, The dead ; Miranda July, The swim team ; Franz Kafka, A hunger artist ; Franz Kafka, The metamorphosis ; Yasunari Kawabata, The grasshopper and the bell cricket ; Jack Kerouac, October in the railroad earth - Jamaica Kincaid, Girl ; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of maladies ; D. H. Lawrence ; Odour of chrysanthemums ; D. H. Lawrence, The rocking-horse winner ; Ursula K. Le Guin, The ones who walk away from Omelas ; Clarice Lispector, The smallest woman in the world ; Jack London, To build a fire ; Guy de Maupassant, The necklace ; Herman Melville, Bartleby, the scrivener ; Lorrie Moore, How to become a writer ; Alice Munro, Dimensions ; Keiji Nakazawa, From barefoot Gen ; Joyce Carol Oates, The lady with the pet dog ; Tim O'Brian ; The things they carried ; Flannery O'Connor, Everything that rises must converge ; Flannery O'Connor, Good country people ; Flannery O'Connor, A good man is hard to find ; Tillie Olsen, I stand here ironing ; Cynthia Ozick, The shawl ; ZZ Packer, Brownies ; Grace Paley, A conversation with my father ; Edgar Allen Poe, The cask of amontillado ; Edgar Allen Poe, The fall of the house of Usher ; William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), The gift of the Magi ; Annie Proulx, The blood bay ; Phillip Roth, The conversion of the Jews ; Joe Sacco, Palestine: "Regueeland" ; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: "The veil" ; George Sanders, Puppy ; Said Sayrafiezadeh, A brief encounter with the enemy ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow woman ; Zadie Smith, Crazy they call me ; Art Spiegelman, Prisoner on the hell planet: A case history ; John Steinbeck, The chrysanthemums ; Tatyana Tolstaya, Aspic ; Leo Tolstoy, The death of Ivan Ilych ; John Updike, A & P ; Luisa Valenzuela, Vision out of the corner of one eye ; Helena Maria Viramontes, The moths ; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harrison Bergeron ; Alice Walker, Everyday use ; David Foster Wallace, Everything is green ; Eudora Welty, A worn path ; William Carlos Williams, The use of force ; Tobias Wolff, Say yes ; Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens ; Richard Wright, The man who was almost a man ; |
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Part Two: Commentaries. Joan Acocella, How Angela Carter became feminism's great mythologist ; Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind man steals yellow woman ; Sherwood Anderson, Form, not plot, in the short story ; Margaret Atwood, Reading blind ; Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I ; Matthew C. Brennan, Plotting against Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates and "The lady with the dog" ; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Peen Warren, A new critical reading of "The fall of the house of Usher" ; Ann Charters, Translating Kafka ; John Cheever, Why I write short stories ; Anton Chekhov, Technique in writing the short story ; Kate Chopin, How I stumbled upon Maupassant ; Stephen Crane, The sinking of the Commodore ; Anthony Doerr, On reading the story and it's writer ; Terry Eagleton, How to read literature ; Ralph Ellison, The influence of folklore on "Battle royal" ; Richard Ellmann, A biographical perspective on Joyce's "The dead" ; William Faulkner, The meaning of "A rose for Emily" ; Janice H. Harris, Levels of meaning in Lawrence's "The rocking-horse winner" ; Zora Neale Hurston, How it feels to be colored me ; Shirley Jackson, The morning of June 28, 2948 and "The lottery" ; Gustav Janouch, Kafka's view of "The metamorphosis" ; Sarah Orne Jewett, Looking back on girlhood ; Jack Kerouac, The essentials of spontaneous prose ; Jamaica Kincaid, On "Girl" ; D. H. Lawrence, On "The fall of the house of Usher" and "The cask of amontillado" ; Ursula K. Le Guin ; The scapegoat in Omelas ; Luis Leal, Magical realism in Spanish American literature ; Simon Lewis, Lahiri's "Interpreter of maladies" ; Mario Vargas Llosa, The prose style of Jorge Luis Borge and Gabriel Garcia Marquez ; Jack London, Letter to the editor on "To build a fire" ; Katherine Mansfield, Review of Woolf's "Kew gardens" ; Guy de Maupassant, The writer's goal ; Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" ; J. Hillis Miller, A deconstructive reading of Melville's "Bartleby the scrivener" ; Alice Munro, How I write short stories ; Vladimir Nabokov, A reading of Chekhov's "The lady with the little dog" ; J. C. C. Nachtigal, Peter Klaus the goatherd ; Tim O'Brian, Alpha Company ; Grace Paley, A conversation with Ann Charters ; Jay Parini, Lawrence's and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums" ; Sydney Plum, Reading "The veil" by Marjane Satrapi ; Edgar Allen Poe, The importance of the single effect in a prose tale ; Joe Sacco, Some reflections on Palestine ; George Saunders, The perfect gerbil: Reading Barthelme's "The School" ; Leslie Marmon Silko, Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective ; Matt Steinglass, Reading Tim O'Brian in Hanoi ; Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov's intent in "The darling" ; Leo Tolstoy, The works of Guy de Maupassant ; Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A cautionary tale and a partisan view ; Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? ; |
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Part Three: Casebooks. Casebook One: Short shorts or flash fiction. Aesop, The fox and the grapes ; Felix Feneon, To die like Joan of Arc! ; Felix Feneon, Discharged Tuesday ; Franz Kafka, The wish to become an American Indian ; John Barth, A few words About minimalism ; Charles Baxter, On the very short story ; Joyce Carol Oates, On very short fiction ; Lydia Davis, Reading short stories ; Casebook Two: James Baldwin's "Sonny's blues." James Baldwin, autobiographical notes ; Keith E Bryeman, Words and music: Narrative ambiguity in "Sonny's blues" ; Kenneth A. McClane, "Sonny's blues" saved my life ; Casebook Three: Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver, Creative writing 101 ; Tom Jenks, The origin of "Cathedral" ; Arthur M. Saltzman, A reading of "What we talk about when we talk about love" ; A. O. Scott, Looking for Raymond Carver ; Casebook Four: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The yellow wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" ; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration ; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A Feminist Reading of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" ; S. Weir Mitchell, From "The Evolution of the Rest Treatment" ; Casebook Five: Flannery O'Connor ; Flannery O'Connor, From letters ; Flannery O'Connor, Writing short stories ; Flannery O'Connor A reasonable use of the unreasonable ; Joyce Carol Oates, The parables of Flannery O'Connor ; Wayne C. Booth, A rhetorical reading of O'Connor's "Everything that rises must converge" ; Dorothy Tuck McFarland, On "Good country people" ; Casebook Six: Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?". Joyce Carol Oates, Stories that define me; The making of a writer ; Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth talk: Short story into film ; Don Moser, The pied piper of Tucson: He cruised in a golden car, looking for action ; |
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Part Four: Appendices. 1. Reading short stories ; Grace Paley, Samuel ; Close reading short fiction ; Guidelines for close reading short fiction ; Sample close reading : Grace Paley, Samuel, 1968 ; Critical thinking about short fiction ; 2. The elements of fiction ; Plot ; Character ; Setting ; Point of View ; Style ; Theme ; 3. A brief history of the short story ; 4. Writing about short stories ; Keeping a short story journal ; Using the commentaries and casebooks ; Writing the paper ; Types of literary papers ; Student essay: Explication: "The devil's tricks in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'" ; Student essay: Analysis: "The path toward evil" [on "Young Goodman Brown"] ; Student essay: Comparison and contrast: "Bringing fiction to life: From folktale to short story in 'Peter Klaus the goatherd' and 'Rip Van Winkle'" ; Writing about the context and the stories ; Other perspectives ; Student essay: "Anton Chekhov's 'The darling' in Russian and English translation ; Writing the research paper ; Student essay: Research paper: "Lost letters: Gilman's achievement in 'The yellow wallpaper' ; Revising your paper ; 5. Literary theory and critical perspectives ; Formalist criticism ; Biographical criticism ; Psychological criticism ; Historical criticism ; Reader-response criticism ; Poststructuralist and deconstructionist criticism ; Gender criticism. |
| Subject |
Short stories.
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|
Short story.
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| Added Author |
Charters, Ann, 1936- editor.
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| ISBN |
9781319525422 |
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1319525423 |
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