50 Great Short Stories

50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O’Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common—the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world’s fiction. Garden party / Katherine Mansfield — Three-day blow / Ernest Hemingway — Standard of living / Dorothy Parker — Saint / V.S. Pritchett — Other side of the hedge / E.M. Forster — Brooksmith / Henry James — Jockey / Carson McCullers — Courting of Dinah Shadd / Rudyard Kipling — Shot / Alexander Poushkin, translated by T. Keane — Graven Image / John O’Hara — Putois / Anatole France, translated by Frederic Chapman — Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe — A.V. Laider / Max Beerbohm — Lottery / Shirley Jackson — Masque of the Red Death / Edgar Allan Poe — Looking back / Guy de Maupassant, translated by H.N.P. Sloman — Man higher up / O. Henry — Summer of the beautiful white horse / William Saroyan — Other two / Edith Wharton — Theft / Katherine Anne Porter — Good man is hard to find / Flannery O’Connor — Man of the house / Frank O’Connor — Man who shot snapping turtles / Edmund Wilson — Gioconda smile / Aldous Huxley — Curfew tolls / Stephen Vincent Benet — Father wakes up the village / Clarence Day — Ivy Day in the committee room / James Joyce — Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck — Door / E.B. White — Upheaval / Anton Chekhov — How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele — Haunted house / Virginia Woolf — Catbird seat / James Thurber — Schartz-Metterklume method / H.H. Munro — Death of a Bachelor / Arthur Schnitzler — Apostate / George Milburn — Phoenix / Sylvia Townsend Warner — That evening sun / William Faulkner — Law / Robert M. Coates — Tale / Joseph Conrad — Girl from Red Lion, PA / H.L. Mencken — Main currents of American thought / Irwin Shaw — Ghosts / Lord Dunsany — Minister’s black veil / Nathaniel Hawthorne — String of beads / W. Somerset Maugham — Golden honeymoon / Ring Lardner — Man who could work miracles / H.G. Wells — Foreigner / Francis Steegmuller — Thrawn Janet / Robert Louis Stevenson — Chaser / John Collier