The story and its writer: an introduction to short fiction

Story and its writer

Stories: Civil peace / Chinua Achebe

Silent snow / Conrad Aiken

In a bamboo grove / Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven / Sherman Alexie

Act of vengeance / Isabel Allende

Hands / Sherwood Anderson

Happy endings / Margaret Atwood

Sonny's blues / James Baldwin

Lesson / Toni Cade Bambara

Black man and white woman in dark green boat / Russell Banks

San Francisco / Lynda Barry

Indian uprising / Donald Barthelme

Snow / Ann Beattie

From Fun Home: Old father, old artificer / Alison Bechdel

The rememberer / Aimee Bender

Occurrence at Owl Creek bridge / Ambrose Bierce

Circular ruins / Jorge Luis Borges

This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski

Greasy Lake / T. Coraghessan Boyle August 2026: There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury

Guest / Albert Camus

Werewolf / Angela Carter

Cathedral; A small, good thing ; What we talk about when we talk about love / Raymond Carver

Paul's case / Willa Carter

Water names / Lan Samantha Chang

Swimmer / John Cheever

Darling ; Lady with the little dog / Anton Chekhov

Désiré́e's baby; Story of an hour / Kate Chopin

Barbie-Q / Sandra Cisneros

Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad

Continuity of parks / Julio Cortazar

Open boat / Stephen Crane

Night women / Edwidge Danticat

Television / Lydia Davis

How to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie / Junot Diaz

Battle royal / Ralph Ellison

Red convertible / Louise Erdrich

Rose for Emily ; That evening sun / William Faulkner

Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Look on the bright side / Dagoberto Gilb

Yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Overcoat / Nikolai Gogol

Homage / Nadine Gordimer

Bride / Christine Granados

Rappaccini's daughter ; Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway

Church cancels cow ; In the cemetery where Al Jolson's is buried / Amy Hempel

Things you should know / A. M. Homes

Gilded six-bits ; Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving

Lottery / Shirley Jackson

Real thing / Henry James

Who's Irish? / Gish Jen

White heron / Sarah Orne Jewett

Saboteur / Ha Jin

Dirty wedding / Denis Johnson

Bad neighbors / Edward P. Jones

Pugilist at rest / Thom Jones

Araby; Dead / James Joyce

Hunger Artist; Metamorphosis / Franz Kafka

Not human beings / Etgar Keret

Girl / Jamaica Kincaid

Shoeless Joe Jackson comes to Iowa / W.P. Kinsella

Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri

Odour of chrysanthemums ; Rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence

Drover's wife / Henry Lawson

Ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin

Woman on a roof / Doris Lessing

Build a fire / Jack London

Fly ; Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield

Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason

Necklace / Guy de Maupassant

Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville

Invasion from outer space / Steven Millhauser

Videos of the dead / Rick Moody

How to become a writer / Lorrie Moore

Nawabdin electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin

Management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee

Dance of the happy shades / Alice Munro

Toys of peace / Hector Hugh Munro (Saki)

Ice man / Haruki Murakami

Lady with the pet dog ; Where are you going, where you have been? / Joyce Carol Oates

Things they carried / Tim O'Brien

Everything that rises must converge; Good country people; Good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor

Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor

I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen

Shawl / Cynthia Ozick

Brownies / ZZ Packer

Escort / Chuck Palahniuk

Conversation with my father ; Mother / Grace Paley

My life with the wave / Octavio Paz

Stars / Jayne Anne Phillips

Cask of Amontillado; Fall of the House of Usher ; Tell-tale heart / Edgar Allan Poe

Jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter

Gift of the Magi / William Sydney Porter (O. Henry)

Job history / Annie Proulx

Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth

From Palestine: Refugeeland / Joe Sacco

From Persepolis : The veil / Marjane Satrapi

Brad Carrigan, American / George Saunders

Love so fleeting, love so fine / Carol Shields

Yellow woman / Leslie Marmon Silko

Homework / Helen Simpson

Girl with bangs / Zadie Smith

Way we live now / Susan Sontag

Prisoner on the hell planet: a case history / Art Spiegelman

Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck

Two kinds / Amy Tan

Death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy

Blood-burning moon / Jean Toomer

A & P / John Updike

Dreams / Jane Urquhart

Moths / Helena Maria Viramontes

Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Everyday use / Alice Walker

Good people / David Foster Wallace

Seeing eye / Brad Watson

Why I live at the P.O. ; Worn path / Eudora Welty

Roman fever / Edith Wharton

Newborn thrown in trash and dies ; stories / John Edgar Wideman

Use of force / William Carlos Williams

Powder ; Say yes / Tobias Wolff

Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf

Man who was almost a man / Richard Wright

Brown house / Hisaye Yamamoto.

Commentaries: Image of Africa: Conrad's ''Heart of darkness'' / Chinua Achebe

Superman and me / Sherman Alexie

Whirlwind man steals yellow woman / Paula Gunn Allen

Form, not plot, in the short story / Sherwood Anderson

Reading blind / Margaret Atwood

Writing "Poes" / Russell Banks

Borges and I / Jorge Luis Borges

Plotting against Chekhov: Joyce Carol Oates and "Lady with the dog" / Matthew C. Brennan

Translating Kafka / Ann Charters

Why I write short stories / John Cheever

Technique in writing the short story / Anton Chekhov

How I stumbled upon Maupassant / Kate Chopin

Private history of the "Jumping Frog" story / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Sinking of the commodore / Stephen Crane

Hunger artist / R. Crumb; David Zane Mairowitz

On the short, short story / Lydia Davis

Influence of folklore on ''Battle royal'' / Ralph Ellison

Biographical perspective on Joyce's "Dead" / Richard Ellmann

Meaning of ''Rose for Emily'' / William Faulkner

Why we like Chekhov / Richard Ford

Mexico, the United States, and the multicultural future / Carlos Fuentes

On Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme / Vivian Gornick

Levels of meaning in Lawrence's "Rocking-horse winner" / Janice H. Harris

How it feels to be colored me ; What white publishers won't print / Zora Neale Hurston

Morning of June 28,1948 and ''Lottery'' / Shirley Jackson

Genesis of "Real thing" / Henry James

Kafka's view of "Metamorphosis" / Gustav Janouch

Looking back on girlhood / Sarah Orne Jewett

On ''Girl'' / Jamaica Kincaid

Finding your voice / Anne Lamott

Scapegoat in Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin

Letter to the editor on "To build a fire" / Jack London

Review of Woolf's "Kew Gardens" / Katherine Mansfield

On Tim O'Brien's ''Things they carried'' / Bobbie Ann Mason

Writer's goal / Guy de Maupassant

Blackness in Hawthorne's ''Young Goodman Brown'' / Herman Melville

Deconstructive reading on Melville's "Bartleby, the scrivener" / J. Hillis Miller

How I write short stories / Alice Munro

On Ryunosuke Akutagawa / Haruki Murakami

Gogol's genius in "Overcoat" ; Reading of Chekhov's "Lady with the little dog" / Vladimir Nabokov

Peter Klaus the goatherd / J.C.C. Nachtigal

Alpha company / Tim O'Brien

Nearest thing to lyric poetry is the short story ; Style and form in Joyce's "Dead" / Frank O'Connor

Conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley

Lawrence's and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums" / Jay Parini

Guided tours of time and death / Jayne Anne Phillips

Inspiration? Head down the back road, and stop for the yard sales / Annie Proulx

Past and the present: Joseph Conrad and the fiction of autobiography / Edward W. Said

Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko

Writing as reading / Susan Sontag

In the canon, for all the wrong reasons / Amy Tan

Chekhov's intent in ''Darling'' / Leo Tolstoy

Greatness of Conrad's "Heart of darkness" / Lionel Trilling

Zora Neale Hurston: Cautionary tale and a partisan view / Alice Walker

Some remarks on Kafka's funnieness from which probably not enough has been removed / David Foster Wallace

Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? / Eudora Welty

Reading fiction / Richard Wright

Casebooks: Casebook one: James Baldwin's "Sonny blues:" Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin

Words and music: narrative ambiguity in "Sonny's blues" / Keith E. Byerman

"Sonny blues" saved my life / Kenneth A. McClane

Casebook two: Raymond Carver: One writing; Creative writing 101; Bath / Raymond Carver

Origin of ''Cathedral'' / Tom Jenks

Reading of ''What we talk about when we talk about love'' / Arthur M. Saltzman

Looking for Raymond Carver / A.O. Scott

Casebook three: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow wallpaper:" Why I wrote "Yellow wallpaper ; Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Feminist reading of Gilman's "Yellow wallpaper" / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

On "Yellow wallpaper" / Elaine Showalter

Casebook four: Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies:" My two lives / Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri / Sean Flynn

Lahiri's "Interpreter of maladies" / Simon Lewis

Casebook five: Flannery O'Connor: From letters, 1954-55 ; Writing short stories; Reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor

Parables of Flannery O'Connor / Joyce Carol Oates

Rhetorical reading of O'Connor's ''Everything that rises must converge'' / Wayne C. Booth

On ''Good country people'' / Dorothy Tuck McFarland

Casebook six: Joyce Carol Oates's "Where are you going, where have you been?:" Stories that define me: making of a writer ; Smooth talk: short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates

Pied Piper of Tucson: he cruised in a golden car, looking for the action / Don Moser

Casebook seven: Edgar Allan Poe: Importance of the single effect in a prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe

On "Fall of the House of Usher" and "Cask of Amontillado" / D.H. Lawrence

New critical reading of "Fall of the House of Usher" / Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

Under the covers with fortunato and montresor / Jan Burke

Fall of the House of Usher / Will Eisner

Casebook eight: Graphic storytelling: What the little old ladies feel / Alison Bechdel

From "Alternative comics: toward the habit of questioning" / Charles Hatfield

Are comics serious literature / Michael Kupperman

From understanding comics: Invisible art / Scott McCloud

Reading "The Veil" by Marjane Satrapi / Sydney Plum

Some reflections on Palestine / Joe Sacco / Homage to Joe Sacco / Edward W. Said. Appendices: Reading short stories (Includes Grace Paley, ''Samuel'')

Elements of fiction

Brief history of the short story

Writing about short stories

Literary theory and critical perspectives

Glossary of literary terms

Chronological listing of authors' stories

Chronological listing of authors and stories

Index of authors and titles.

Civil peace / Chinua Achebe

The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven / Sherman Alexie

The Kugelmass episode / Woody Allen

And of clay are we created / Isabel Allende ; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

River of names / Dorothy Allison

The Immortals / Martin Amis

Death in the woods / Sherwood Anderson

Hands / Sherwood Anderson

Happy endings / Margaret Atwood

Rape fantasies / Margaret Atwood

My first goose / Isaac Babel ; translated by Walter Morison

Sonny's blues / James Baldwin

The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara

Black man and white woman in dark green rowboat / Russell Banks

Lost in the funhouse / John Barth

Me and Miss Mandible / Donald Barthelme

Find and replace / Ann Beattie

Who is it can tell me who I am? / Gina Berriault

An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce

The end of the duel / Jorge Luis Borges ; translated by Anthony Kerrigan

This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski ; translated by Barbara Vedder

Friendly skies / T. Coraghessan Boyle

The guest / Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien

The company of wolves / Angela Carter

The bath / Raymond Carver

A small, good thing / Raymond Carver

What we talk about when we talk about love / Raymond Carver

Paul's case / Willa Cather

The swimmer / John Cheever

Angel [The darling] / Anton Chekhov ; translated by Ronald Hingley

A blunder / Anton Chekhov ; translated by Constance Garnett

The lady with the little dog / Anton Chekhov ; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The wife of his youth / Charles W. Chesnutt

Désirée's baby / Kate Chopin

The story of an hour / Kate Chopin

The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros

The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad

A continuity of parks / Julio Cortázar ; translated by Paul Blackburn

The open boat : a tale intended to be after the fact, being the experience of four men from the sunk steamer Commodore / Stephen Crane

Night women / Edwidge Danticat

The sun, the moon, the stars / Junot Díaz

Sorrow-Acre / Isak Dinesen

Battle royal / Ralph Ellison

The red convertible : Lyman Lamartine / Louise Erdrich

A rose for Emily / William Faulkner

That evening sun / William Faulkner

Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald

A simple heart / Gustave Flaubert ; translated by Robert Baldick

The revolt of Mother / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Tiny, smiling Daddy / Mary Gaitskill

A very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Gregory Rabassa

The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The overcoat / Nikolai Gogol ; translated by Constance Garnett

The ultimate safari / Nadine Gordimer

The birthmark / Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne

Woman from America / Bessie Head

Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway

The gilded six-bits / Zora Neale Hurston

Spunk / Zora Neale Hurston

Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston

The chair carrier / Yusuf Idris

Rip Van Winkle : a posthumous writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker / Washington Irving

The lottery / Shirley Jackson

The real thing / Henry James

Who's Irish? / Gish Jen

A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett

The bridegroom / Ha Jin

Menagerie : a child's fable / Charles R. Johnson

Araby / James Joyce

The dead / James Joyce

A hunger artist / Franz Kafka ; translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

The metamorphosis / Franz Kafka ; translated by Stanley Corngold

Girl / Jamaica Kincaid

The white house / Ivan Klíma ; translated by Gerald Turner

Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri

The widow's son / Mary Lavin

Odour of chrysanthemums / D.H. Lawrence

The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence

The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin

A sunrise on the veld / Doris Lessing

The smallest woman in the world / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Elizabeth Bishop

To build a fire / Jack London

Bliss / Katherine Mansfield

The garden-party / Katherine Mansfield

Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason

The necklace / Guy de Maupassant ; translated by Marjorie Laurie

Clochette / Guy de Maupassant ; translated by David Coward

Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville

Lust / Susan Minot

Patriotism / Yukio Mishima ; translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent

Boys / Rick Moody

How to become a writer / Lorrie Moore

The management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee

Family furnishings / Alice Munro

The seventh man / Haruki Murakami ; translated by Jay Rubin

Where are you going, where have you been? : For Bob Dylan / Joyce Carol Oates

The things they carried / Tim O'Brien

Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor

Good country people / Flannery O'Connor

A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor

Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor

I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen

The shawl / Cynthia Ozick

A conversation with my father / Grace Paley

My life with the wave / Octavio Paz

The cask of amontillado / Edgar Allan Poe

The fall of the House of Usher / Edgar Allan Poe

The tell-tale heart / Edgar Allan Poe

The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter

The last leaf / William Sidney Porter

The blood bay / Annie Proulx

The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth

Yellow Woman / Leslie Marmon Silko

The way we live now / Susan Sontag

Miss Furr and Miss Skeene / Gertrude Stein

The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck

Two kinds / Amy Tan

The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber

The death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy ; translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude

Blood-burning moon / Jean Toomer

A & P / John Updike

The moths / Helena María Viramontes

Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Everyday use / Alice Walker

Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty

A worn path / Eudora Welty

Roman fever / Edith Wharton

Newborn thrown in trash and dies / John Edgar Wideman

The use of force / William Carlos Williams

The rich brother / Tobias Wolff

Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf

The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright

Wilshire bus / Hisaye Yamamoto

An image of Africa : Conrad's Heart of darkness / Chinua Achebe

Whirlwind Man steals Yellow Woman / Paula Gunn Allen

Form, not plot, in the short story / Sherwood Anderson

Reading blind / Margaret Atwood

Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin

Author's note / Russell Banks

On the meaning and form of The end of the duel / Jorge Luis Borges

The stories of Katherine Mansfield / Willa Cather

Why I write short stories / John Cheever

How I stumbled upon Maupassant / Kate Chopin

Private history of the Jumping frog story / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Tillie Olsen : the iron and the riddle / Robert Coles

The sinking of the Commodore / Stephen Crane

The influence of folklore on Battle royal / Ralph Ellison

A biographical perspective on Joyce's The dead / Richard Ellmann

The meaning of A rose for Emily / William Faulkner

Mexico, the United States, and the multicultural future / Carlos Fuentes

A feminist reading of Gilman's The yellow wallpaper / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Why I wrote The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Levels of meaning in Lawrence's The rocking-horse winner / Janice H. Harris

A feminist perspective on Katherine Anne Porter and The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Letter to Henry Brevoort, December 11, 1824 / Washington Irving

The morning of June 28, 1948, and The lottery / Shirley Jackson

The genesis of The real thing / Henry James

Kafka's view of The metamorphosis / Gustav Janouch ; translated by Goronwy Rees

Looking back on girlhood / Sarah Orne Jewett

Lynching in Tennessee / James Weldon Johnson

On Girl / Jamaica Kincaid

Draft passage from Odour of chrysanthemums / D.H. Lawrence

Scene from the screenplay of Almos' A man / Leslie Lee

The scapegoat in Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin

Letter to the editor on To build a fire / Jack London

On The garden party / Katherine Mansfield

Review of Woolf's Kew Gardens / Katherine Mansfield

On Tim O'Brien's The things they carried / Bobbie Ann Mason

The writer's goal / Guy de Maupassant ; translated by Mallay Charters

Blackness in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown / Herman Melville

A deconstructive reading of Melville's Bartleby, the scrivener / J. Hillis Miller

How I write short stories / Alice Munro

Gogol's genius in The overcoat / Vladimir Nabokov

Peter Klaus the goatherd / J.C.C. Nachtigal ; translated by Thomas Roscoe

Smooth talk : short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates

Alpha Company / Tim O'Brien

The nearest thing to lyric poetry is the short story / Frank O'Connor

Style and form in Joyce's The dead /

Frank O'Connor

A conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley

Lawrence's and Steinbeck's Chrysanthemums / Jay Parini

The bones of Muzhiks : Isaac Babel gets lost in translation / Francine Prose

Tolstoy's revisions in The death of Ivan Illych / Peter Rudy

On Angela Carter's The bloody chamber / Salman Rushdie

The past and the present : Joseph Conrad and the fiction of autobiography / Edward Said

Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko

Gregor : my life as a bug / Jane Smiley

In the canon, for all the wrong reasons / Amy Tan

The greatness of Conrad's Heart of darkness / Lionel Trilling

Kafka and The metamorphosis / John Updike

Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? / Eudora Welty

Every subject must contain within itself its own dimensions / Edith Wharton

On The rich brother / Tobias Wolff

Reading fiction / Richard Wright

U.S. Latino literature : history and development / Marc Zimmerman

On writing / Raymond Carver

Creative Writing 101 / Raymond Carver

The ashtray / Raymond Carver

As Raymond Carver muses, his stature grows / Jim Naughton

On The bath and A small, good thing / Kathleen Westfall Shute

A reading of What we talk about when we talk about love / Arthur M. Saltzman

Looking for Raymond Carver / A.O. Scott

Technique in writing the short story / Anton Chekhov ; translated by Constance Garnett

Why we like Chekhov / Richard Ford

Editor's note on A blunder /

Richard Ford

A reading of Chekhov's The lady with the little dog / Vladimir Nabokov

Chekhov's intent in The darling [Angel] / Leo Tolstoy ; translated by Constance Garnett

Plot and character in Chekhov's The darling [Angel] / Eudora Welty

How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston

What white publishers won't print / Zora Neale Hurston

A folkloric analysis of Hurston's Spunk / Robert Bone

The shape of Hurston's fiction / Rosalie Murphy Baum

Zora Neale Hurston : a cautionary tale and a partisan view / Alice Walker

From letters, 1954-1955 / Flannery O'Connor

Writing short stories / Flannery O'Connor

A reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor : Satan comes to Georgia / V.S. Pritchett

Flannery O'Connor and her readers / Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.

On Good country people / Dorothy Tuck McFarland

A rhetorical reading of O'Connor's Everything that rises must converge / Wayne C. Booth

Southern sources of A good man is hard to find / Sally Fitzgerald

The importance of the single effect in a prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe

On The fall of the House of Usher and The cask of amontillado / D.H. Lawrence

A new critical reading of The fall of the House of Usher / Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

The question of Poe's narrators in The tell-tale heart and The cask of amontillado / James W. Gargano

On The fall of the House of Usher / J. Gerald Kennedy

Poe's art of transformation in The cask of amontillado / David S. Reynolds

Amorous bondage : Poe, ladies, and slaves / Joan Dayan.