Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.
A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith.
My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold th…
Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise th…
Part of the Penguin 60s series, issued to celebrate 60 years of Penguin books. This collects "Sonny's Blues", "The Rockpile" and "Previous Condition", all taken from Going to Meet the Man (Penguin, 19…
A Good Man Is Hard to Find is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most ofte…
The tale centers on two matters, a black cat and the deterioration of a man. The man is one who enjoyed family life with his wife and numerous pets, but…
"A & P" is a comic short story written by John Updike in 1961 in which the hero and first person narrator takes a stand for what is right and therefore has hope for a better future
A short story from James Joyce's Dubliners. The unnamed protagonist in "Araby" is a boy who is just starting to come into his sexual identity. Through his first-person narration, we are immersed at th…
"Barn Burning" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner which first appeared in Harper's in 1939 and has since been widely anthologized. The story deals with class conflicts, the influ…
In these four stories, Kate Chopin subtly captures the intricate interior lives of a generation of women. From the famous proto-feminist tale "The Story of an Hour" to the subtly sexy "A Respectable W…
In these ten glittering short stories, debut author Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here, wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns; a family makes its l…
The sixties and seventies witnessed the emergence of Joyce Carol Oates as one of America's foremost writers of the short story. In 1962, 'The Fine White Mist of Winter, ' composed when the author was …
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1933; it was also included in his collection Winner Take Nothing (1933).
