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 HemingwayOut 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)