The Short Story: 30 Masterpieces

by Beverly Lawn (Editor)

Good reading copy. Some wear from normal use and age.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

474 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[H-zhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne 2
"The Ask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe 5
"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" by Herman Melville 3
"The Pupil" by Henry James 4
"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin 4
"The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad 4
"The Lady with the Dog" by Anton Chekov 4
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane 2
"Araby" by James Joyce 3
"A Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka 3
"The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence 4
The Grave" by Katherine Anne Porter 3
"Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald 3
"Barn Burning" by William Faulkner 3
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway 3
"The Secret Miracle" by Jorge Luis Borges 3
"The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck 2
"Gimpel the Fool" by Isaac Bashevis Singer 4
"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty 3
"The Country Husband" by John Cheever 2
"King of the Bingo Game" by Ralph Ellison 2
"The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud 4
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson 5
"Six Feet of the Country" by Nadine Gordimer 2
"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin 4
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor 3
"A Very old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3
"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme 1
"A & P" by John Updike 2
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oats 5

[Erin Schanz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Turns out short stories tend to be dark and depressing. Not my jam, not going to finish this one.

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good collection of stories, used mostly as an introduction to literature textbook in colleges. The book includes several major writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Atypically for literature textbooks, this book has no introduction explaining how to read, no study questions or essay prompts. It contains just the stories, with thumbnail biographies of the authors at the end of the book. As is the case with literature textbooks, the writers' most representative works are here, with a few outré selections for flavoring. The standard selections are very well known, and so need no real commentary. The outside selections are interesting in their own ways. Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" rather than "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" provides a more regional sensibility. The collection has enough stream of consciousness stories, so this choice offers a broader picture of rural life. "The Secret Miracle" by Jorge Luis Borges has more emotional impact than the usual literary puzzles that are the normal selections of his works. Of all the stories, the one that probably would not make it into an anthology for today's universities is Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon." What one might call the deconstructive method of storytelling that seemed to be The Future of fiction in the 1960s has lost most of its luster. This collection provides a reader with a solid introduction to major modes of modern fiction, and makes a good introduction to some of the major writers of 1830-1980.