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…
"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Willa Cather's first story collection, The Troll Garden, which began her literary career. When the story was printed in McClure's magazine in May of the sa…
Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Se…
D.H. Lawrence's 'The Horse Dealer's Daughter' could be described as a story in which boy meets girl. Its plot, on the surface, resembles that of any number of traditionally romantic pastorals: a count…
"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…
“Death by Landscape” (1989) is a complex and multi-layered story that explores themes such as the unknown, memory and guilt, and coming of age. It also embodies many of Atwood’s theories of Canadian l…
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.
Diagnosed by her physician husband with a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” after the birth of her child, a woman is urged to rest for the summer in an old colonial mansion. …
For more than four decades, Doris Lessing's work has wittily and wryly observed the muddle and passion of human relations, unflinchingly dissected its truths and shown us the unique quality of her und…
Elisa Allen is tending her chrysanthemums. Strong, with a handsome face she skilfully and proudly cultivates the best in the valley. Tonight, her husband is taking her to town. While she works, a sque…
In a small American town, the local residents are abuzz with excitement and nervousness when they wake on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June. Everything has been prepared for the town’s annual …
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…
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams’ essay “The World I Live In.”
