Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary: Fifth Edition

by Charles H. Bohner

I. Introduction to short fiction
II. Reading fiction
III. Short fiction. Chinua Achebe ; Iqbal Ahmad ; Sherman Alexie ; Isabel Allende ; Dorothy Allison ; Sherwood Anderson ; Margaret Atwood ; Isaac Babel ; James Baldwin ; Honoré de Balzac ; Toni Cade Bambara ; John Barth ; Donald Barthelme ; Ann Beattie ; Ambrose Bierce ; Jorge Luis Borges ; Angela Carter ; Raymond Carver ; Ana Castillo ; Willa Cather ; John Cheever ; Anton Chekhov ; Kate Chopin ; Sandra Cisneros ; Samuel Clemens ; Colette ; Joseph Conrad ; Julio Cortázar ; Stephen Crane ; Charles D'Ambrosio ; Leslie Dick ; Isak Dinesen ; Ralph Ellison ; William Faulkner ; Ida Fink ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Mary Wilkins Freeman ; Carlos Fuentes ; Ernest J. Gaines ; Mary Gaitskill ; Gabriel García Márquez ; Dagoberto Gilb ; Charlotte Perkins Gilman ; Susan Glaspell ; Nikolai Gogol ; Nadine Gordimer ; Graham Greene ; Nathaniel Hawthorne ; Bessie Head ; Ernest Hemingway ; Zora Neale Hurston ; Shirley Jackson ; Henry James ; Gish Jen ; Denis Johnson ; James Joyce ; Franz Kafka ; Jamaica Kincaid ; Perri Klass ; Milan Kundera ; Hanif Kureishi ; Ring Lardner ; Mary Lavin ; D.H. Lawrence ; David Leavitt ; Ursula K. Le Guin ; Doris Lessing ; Primo Levi ; Jack London ; Naguib Mahfouz ; Bernard Malamud ; Katherine Mansfield ; Bobbie Ann Mason ; Somerset Maugham ; Guy de Maupassant ; Herman Melville ; Yukio Mishima ; Bharati Mukherjee ; Alice Munro. Vladimir Nabokov ; Joyce Carol Oates ; Edna O'Brien ; Tim O'Brien ; Flannery O'Connor ; Frank O'Connor ; Tillie Olsen ; Grace Paley ; Edgar Allan Poe ; Katherine Anne Porter ; Reynolds Price ; Tomás Rivera ; Philip Roth ; Salman Rushdie ; Donatien Alphonse Francois compte de Sade ; Jean Paul Sartre ; John Sayles ; Mary Shelley ; Leslie Marmon Silko ; Isaac Bashevis Singer ; Susan Sontag ; John Steinbeck ; Amy Tan ; Leo Tolstoy ; John Updike ; Luisa Valenzuela ; Helena María Viramontes ; Alice Walker ; David Foster Wallace ; Eudora Welty ; Edith Wharton ; John Edgar Wideman ; William Carlos Williams ; Jeanette Winterson ; Virginia Woolf ; Richard Wright ; Mary-Kim Arnold & Matthew Derby ; Michael Joyce ; Deena Larsen
IV. Context: Writers on writing. Dorothy Allison ; Kim Barnes ; Harold Bloom ; Jorge Luis Borges ; Anton Chekhov ; Kate Chopin ; Sandra Cisneros ; Stephen Crane ; Ralph Ellison ; F. Scott Fitzgerald ; Bessie Head ; Shirley Jackson ; Michael Joyce ; Milan Kundera ; Ursula LeGuin ; Primo Levi ; Katherine Mansfield ; Vladimir Nabokov ; Joyce Carol Oates ; Flannery O'Connor ; Frank O'Connor ; Edgar Allan Poe ; Katherine Anne Porter ; Tomás Rivera ; Salman Rushdie ; Jean Paul Sartre ; Leslie Marmon Silko ; Susan Sontag ; Alice Walker ; David Foster Wallace ; Eudora Welty ; Jeanette Winterson ; Virginia Woolf
V. Approaching fiction critically
VI. Writing about fiction

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Textbooks

1430 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.