New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories

The last 50 years have proved a particularly lively period in the history of the short story form. This new collection gives a full picture of the richness and diversity of this most American of genres from its very beginnings to the present day. The collection offers a freshly stimulating combination of old favourites such as Mark Twain's 'Jim Smiley's Jumping Frog' and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart', unfamiliar works by well-known authors, such as Ernest Hemingway's 'Out of Season', Stephen Crane's 'An Episode of War' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Lost Decade' , and some remarkable stories by wonderful but less well known writers such as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charles W. Chestnutt who deserve a wider audience. It's a compact book but it covers a lot of ground. There are 31 stories, covering 199 years (that is, the first story was published in 1807; the last is from 2006). The final three authors are Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri and Lydia Davis.

Table of contents

Washington Irving - The Little Man in Black (1807)

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown (1835)

Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

Fanny Fern - Aunt Hetty on Matrimony (1851)

Mark Twain - Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865)

Joel Chandler Harris - The Tar Baby Story (1880)

Mary Wilkins Freeman - Two Friends (1887)

Charles W. Chesnutt - The Wife of his Youth (1898)

Henry James - The Real Right Thing (1899)

Stephen Crane - An Episode of War (1899)

O. Henry - Hearts and Hands (1903)

Sherwood Anderson - The Untold Lie (1917)

Ernest Hemingway - Out of Season (1923)

Edith Wharton - Atrophy (1927)

Dorothy Parker - New York to Detroit (1928)

Eudora Welty - The Whistle (1938)

William Faulkner - Barn Burning (1939)

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Lost Decade (1939)

Zora Neale Hurston - Now You Cookin' with Gas (1942)

Bernard Malamud - The First Seven Years (1950)

Flannery O'Connor - A Late Encounter with the Enemy (1953)

John Updike - Sunday Teasing (1956)

John Cheever - Reunion (1962)

Grace Paley - Wants (1971)

Alice Walker - The Flowers (1973)

Donald Barthelme - I Bought a Little City (1974)

Raymond Carver - Collectors (1975)

Richard Ford - Communist (1985)

Lorrie Moore - Starving Again (1990)

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Third and Final Continent (1999)

Lydia Davis - The Caterpillar (2006)