Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction : the story and its writer

Part I. Stories

The lone ranger and Tonton fistfight in heaven / Sherman Alexie

Hands / Sherwood Anderson

Happy endings / Margaret Atwood

Sonny's blues / James Baldwin

The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara

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

An occurrence at owl creek bridge / Ambrose Bierce

The end of the duel / Jorge Luis Borges

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

The lady with the little dog / Anton Chekhov

The story of an hour / Kate Chopin

The house of Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros

Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad

The open boat / Stephen Crane

Night women / Edwidge Danticat

Battle royal / Ralph Ellison

The red convertible / Louise Erdrich

A rose for Emily / William Faulkner

That evening sun / William Faulkner

Tiny, smiling daddy / Mary Gaitskill

A very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel García Márquez

The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The ultimate safari / Nadine Gordimer

Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemmingway

The gilded six-bits / Zora Neale Hurston

Spunk / Zora Neale Hurston

Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston

Rip Van Wrinkle / Washington Irving

The lottery / Shirley Jackson

A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett

Araby / James Yoyce

The dead / James Yoyce

The metamorphosis / Franz Kafka

Girl / Jamaica Kincaid

The widow's son / Mary Lavin

The rocking-horse winner / D. H. Lawrence

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

The garden-party / Katherine Mansfield

Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason

The necklace / Guy de Maupassant

Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville

Patriotism / Yukio Mishima

Boys / Rick Moody

The management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee

Family furnishings / Alice Munro

Where are you going, where have you been?

The things they carried / Tim O'Brien

Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor

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

I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen

A conversation with my father / Grace Paley

My life with the wave / Octavio Paz

The cask of amontillado / Edgar Allan Poe

The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter

The blood bay / Annie Proulx

The Steinbeck / John Steinbeck

Two kids / Amy Tan

The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thunber

The death of Ivan Ilyich / Leo Tolstoy

Blood-burning moon / Jean Toomer

A & P / John Updike

Everyday use / Alice Walker

A worn path / Eudora Welty

The use of force / William Carlos Williams

The rich brother / Tobias Wolff

The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright

Part II. Commentaries

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

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

Reading blind / Margaret Atwood

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

The sinking of the commodore / Stephen Crane

The influence of folklore on "Battle royal" / Ralph Ellison

The meaning of "A rose for Emily" / William Faulkner

Why we like Chekhov / Richard Ford

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 paper" / Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

Letter to Henry Brevoort, December 11, 1824

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

Looking back on girlhood / Sarah Orne Jewett

Lynching in Tennessee / James Weldon Johnson

On "Girl" / Jamaica Kincaid

The lust of hate in Poe's "The cask of amontillado" / D. H. Lawrence

On "The garden-party" / Katherine Mansfield

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

The writer's goal / Guy de Maupassant

Blackness in Hawthorne's "Young goodman brown" / Herman Melville

How I write short stories / Alice Munro

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

Smooth talk : short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates

A reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor

Writing short stories / Flannery O'Connor

Style and form in Joyce's "The dead" / Frank O'Connor

A conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley

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

Chekhov's intent in "The darling" ["Angel"] / Leo Tolstoy

The greatness of Conrad's "Hearth of darkness" / Lionel Trilling

Kafka and "the metamorphosis" / John Updike

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

On "the rich brother" / Tobias Wolf

Reading fiction / Richard Wright

Part III. Casebooks

On writing / Raymond Carver

Creative writing / 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

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