The incomparable John Updike selects the 55 finest short stories from America's bestselling anthology, published since 1915.

Featuring 30 of the greatest short stories from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new anthology begins with Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" and ranges across more than one hundred years of storytelling, concluding with F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "Winter Dreams." Other selections include Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, "The Middle Years" by Henry James, plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of short stories will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.

This illustrated anthology spans more than a century and a half to introduce readers to 17 American literary gems.

Offering diverse perspectives on the black experience, this anthology of short fiction spotlights works by influential African-American authors. Nearly 30 outstanding stories include tales by W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jamaica Kincaid. From the turn of the twentieth century come Alice Ruth Moore's "A Carnival Jangle," Charles W. Chesnutt's "Uncle Wellington’s Wives," and Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Scapegoat." Other stories include "Becky" by Jean Toomer; "Afternoon" by Ralph Ellison; Langston Hughes's "Feet Live Their Own Life"; and "Jesus Christ in Texas" by W. E. B. Du Bois. Samples of more recent fiction include tales by Jervey Tervalon, Alice Walker, and Edwidge Danticat. Ideal for browsing, this collection is also suitable for courses in African-American studies and American literature.

Stories by a wide range of modern authors includes Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa, and John M. Oskison, as well as writers who came to prominence in the decades following World War II.

It includes introductions to the life and work of female authors who are not very well known in the Anglophone world due to the lack of translations of their works. This critical work with a feminist focus will provide a helpful framework for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK and US. A wide-ranging bibliography will be of great assistance to those looking to pursue research on the fantastic or on any of the specific writers and texts. This book is endorsed by the British Academy as part of the project Gender and the Fantastic in Hispanic Studies, and by an established international network, namely the Grupo de Estudios sobre lo Fantástico, based in the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman In the past fifty years, the American short story has changed dramatically. New voices, forms, and mixtures of styles have brought this unique genre a thrilling burst of energy. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story celebrates this avalanche of talent. This rich anthology begins in 1970 and brings together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including—for the first time in a collection of this scale—science fiction, horror, and fantasy, placing writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Stephen King next to some beloved greats of the literary form: Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Denis Johnson. Culling widely, John Freeman, the former editor of Granta and now editor of his own literary annual, brings forward some astonishing work to be regarded in a new light. Often overlooked tales by Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson will recast the shape and texture of today’s enlarging atmosphere of literary dialogue. Stories by Lauren Groff and Ted Chiang raise the specter of engagement in ecocidal times. Short tales by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis rub shoulders with near novellas by Susan Sontag and Andrew Holleran. This book will be a treasure trove for readers, writers, and teachers alike.

Miss Chloe Fong has plans for her life, lists for her days, and absolutely no time for nonsense. Three years ago, she told her childhood sweetheart that he could talk to her once he planned to be serious. He disappeared that very night. Except now he’s back. Jeremy Wentworth, the Duke of Lansing, has returned to the tiny village he once visited with the hope of wooing Chloe. In his defense, it took him years of attempting to be serious to realize that the endeavor was incompatible with his personality. All he has to do is convince Chloe to make room for a mischievous trickster in her life, then disclose that in all the years they’ve known each other, he’s failed to mention his real name, his title… and the minor fact that he owns her entire village. Only one thing can go wrong: Everything.

America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland S. A. Cosby; the timeless, previously unpublished short story that led Tina Brown to sign Frances Park's When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon; and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin's heartfelt rendering of married life that apparently was too startling for the editors of several university-affiliated literary magazines. And since interesting storytelling―rather than a list of publishing credits―matters most to story-hungry readers, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 also includes a page-turner about dating in Hollywood written by MFA student Megan Ritchie; Brooklyn native D.Z. Stone's very first published fiction, a hilarious love story that celebrates the power of women; a heartbreaking account of adult siblinghood authored by David Ebenbach―among others in this treasure trove of unputdownable, sharply written, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening, always suspenseful stories loaded with twists and turns. "Coolest American Stories 2022 is a helluva lot of fun. These stories bump and brim with rambunctious energy and show that the American short story is alive and well. Many thanks to Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey for this breath―or let's call it a gale―of fresh literary air." --Ben Fountain, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk "Extraordinarily rich storytelling from fresh, vibrant voices―Coolest American Stories promises to be an annual force." --Laura McHugh, internationally bestselling author of The Weight of Blood and What’s Done in Darkness "Love short stories? This collection is for you. Not yet sure how to feel about short stories? This collection is definitely for you. Whoever you are, wherever you are: read these stories!" --Lori Ostlund, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World