Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary: Second Edition

by Charles H. Bohner (Editor)

Roses, rhododendron / A. Adams --
The egg ; I want to know why / S. Anderson --
Rape fantasies / M. Atwood --
The story of my dovecot / I. Babel --
Sonny's blues / J. Baldwin --
The lesson / T.C. Bambara --
My mother's memoirs, my father's lie, and other true stories / R. Banks --
Lost in the funhouse / J. Barth --
A city of churches / D. Barthelme --
An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / A. Bierce --
Like a bad dream / H. Böll --
The end of the duel / J.L. Borges --
Cathedral / R. Carver --
Paul's case / W. Cather --
The enormous radio ; The swimmer / J. Cheever --
The darling ; Gooseberies ; The lady with the dog / A. Chekhov --
The story of an hour / K. Chopin --
The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / S. Clemens (M. Twain) --
The secret sharer / J. Conrad --
The magic poker / R. Coover ; The blue hotel ; The open boat / S. Crane ; The way up to heaven / R. Dahl --
The red-headed league / A.C. Doyle --
The doctor / A. Dubus --
King of the bingo game / R. Ellison --
Dry September ; A rose for Emily ; That evening sun / W. Faulkner --
Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
Tuesday siesta / G.G. Márquez ; The yellow wallpaper / C.P. Gilman --
The overcoat / N. Gogol --
The life of the imagination / N. Gordimer --
Two gentle people / G. Greene --
Argument and persuasion / D. Hall --
Tony Kytes, the arch-deceiver / T. Hardy --
The birthmark ; Young Goodman Brown / N. Hawthorne --
A Vermont tale / M. Helprin --
Hills like white elephants / E. Hemingway --
The lottery / S. Jackson --
The real thing ; The tree of knowledge / H. James --
A white heron / S.O. Jewett --
Araby ; The dead / J. Joyce --
A hunger artist / F. Kafka --
The man who would be king ; Mary Postgate / R. Kipling --
Not a good girl / P. Klass --
Haircut / R. Lardner --
The horse-dealer's daughter ; The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence --
The professor's houses / U.K. LeGuin --
One off the short list ; A sunrise on the veld / D. Lessing --
To build a fire / J. London --
A tree, a rock, a cloud / C. McCullers --
The magic barrel / B. Malamud --
A dill pickle ; Miss Brill / K. Mansfield --
The outstation / W. Somerset Maugham --
The necklace / G. de Maupassant --
Bartleby the scrivener / H. Melville --
Patriotism / Y. Mishima --
Boys and girls / A. Munro --
The passenger / V. Nabokov --
The going-away party ; Where are you going, where have you been? / J.C. Oates --
The creature / E. O'Brien --
Everything that rises must converge ; A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor --
Guests of the nation ; My oedipus complex / Frank O'Connor --
Do you like it here? / J. O'Hara --
I stand here ironing / T. Olsen --
A conversation with my father / G. Paley --
War / L. Pirandello --
The cask of Amontilladl ; The fall of the House of Usher ; The purloined letter / E.A. Poe --
Flowering Judas ; The grave / K.A. Porter --
The valiant woman / J.F. Powers --
The diver / V.S. Pritchett --
The shot / A. Pushkin --
The conversion of the Jews / P. Roth --
I-80 Nebraska, M. 490-M. 205 / J. Sayles --
Gimpel the fool / I.B. Singer --
The chrysanthemums / J. Steinbeck --
The catbird seat / J. Thurber --
The death of Ivan Ilych / L. Tolstoy --
The tryst / I. Turgenev --
A & P ; The music school ; Made in heaven / J. Updike --
Roselily ; To hell with dying / A. Walker --
Blackberry winter ; The patented gate and the mean hamburger / R.P. Warren --
Petrified man ; A worn path / E. Welty --
The other two ; Roman fever / E. Wharton --
The use of force / W.C. Williams --
Smokers / T. Wolff --
The man who was almost a man / R. Wright --
Writers on writing: How to tell a story / S. Clemens (M. Twain) --
Stephen Crane's own story / S. Crane --
Biography of a story / S. Jackson --
On her own work / F. O'Connor --
The brief prose tale / E.A. Poe --
"Blackberry winter": a recollection / R.P. Warren --
Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? / E. Welty.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Textbooks

1180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[CHAVANIN PISANKUNAKIT · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is filled with so many great stories from various genres and periods. I only finished over 800 pages and although some of the stories are not that easy to read or interesting, it's overall delightful. This is the first time I have read something this long since I finished Harry Potter. My favorite story is "The Outstation", a short story by Somerset Maugham. The Outstation is set in the British colonial era, about Cooper, a young British man who's assigned to work at a remote outpost in Malaysia. Reading this book is like reading 100 books at the same time.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great resource for short story enthusiasts or Creative Writers. Overall, a good read.

[Jobie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book of short story. I appreciate how it has authors from multiple backgrounds, time periods, and countries. Two of my favorite stories are "the use of force" by Williams and "A good man is hard to find" by O'Connor, but I've read both of of those before. I had several that I loved from authors I never read stories that I had never read. "We can remember it for you wholesale" by Dick and "Johnny mnemonic" by Gibson both great science fiction short stories that were amazing to read. I have not seen either of the movies the stores were made into so that made the stories and even more pleasant find. I am a big fan of existentialist writing and had never read the "metamorphosis" by Kafka until this book. I really can't believe that I had not read it before now. Another Japanese writer I'll have to investigate is Mishima. "Patriotism" was a tale of love and duty. Also wanted to mention Isabel Allende, Julio Cortazar, Ralph Ellison - all new writers to me who I want to read more of. One of the last stories I read was "Newton" by Jeanette Winterson. It was an imaginative and compelling story about facade and neighborliness that I felt was really timely seeing as I've spent Christmas in a small Southern town. If you have a love short story and want to find some new diverse authors this is a jewel of a book. It's like a boxful of treasure and there's so many fine but maybe small precious and semi precious stones.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an anthology of nineteenth and twentieth century authors, and features short fiction of many different genres. One of my favorite works included in this collection is the tale of "Rip Van Winkle", by Washington Irving. This classic tale of a man who falls asleep for twenty years and awakens to a very different world, was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Another story which I appreciated was entitled "The Lady with the Dog", by Anton Chekhov. This tale involved an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young woman he meets while on vacation in Yalta.
I enjoyed this interesting collection of stories. It included a nice variety of tales from an eclectic mix of authors.

[Rebekah]

All the stories in this book were very interesting and thought provoking. My favorite story I read from this book was "Sonny's Blues". James Baldwin did an excellent job of describing the hardships that Sonny experienced in Urban Harlem. I am very grateful that Charles H. Bohner wrote this book.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short Fiction is a collection of classic and modern short stories. My favorite short story was My Mother's Memiors, Father's lies, and Other True Stories.

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I read of it was good.