Kasia Boddy 
New Penguin Book of American Short Stories, from Washington Irving to Lydia Davis 

The last 50 years have proved a particularly lively period in the history of the short story form. This new collection gives a full picture of the richness and diversity of this most American of genres from its very beginnings to the present day. The collection offers a freshly stimulating combination of old favourites such as Mark Twain’s ‘Jim Smiley’s Jumping Frog’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, unfamiliar works by well-known authors, such as Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season’, Stephen Crane’s ‘An Episode of War’ and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Lost Decade’ , and some remarkable stories by wonderful but less well known writers such as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charles W. Chestnutt who deserve a wider audience. It’s a compact book but it covers a lot of ground. There are 31 stories, covering 199 years (that is, the first story was published in 1807; the last is from 2006). The final three authors are Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri and Lydia Davis. Table of contents Washington Irving – The Little Man in Black (1807)Nathaniel Hawthorne – Young Goodman Brown (1835)Edgar Allan Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)Fanny Fern – Aunt Hetty on Matrimony (1851)Mark Twain – Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865)Joel Chandler Harris – The Tar Baby Story (1880)Mary Wilkins Freeman – Two Friends (1887)Charles W. Chesnutt – The Wife of his Youth (1898)Henry James – The Real Right Thing (1899)Stephen Crane – An Episode of War (1899)O. Henry – Hearts and Hands (1903)Sherwood Anderson – The Untold Lie (1917)Ernest Hemingway Out of Season (1923)Edith Wharton – Atrophy (1927)Dorothy Parker – New York to Detroit (1928)Eudora Welty – The Whistle (1938)William Faulkner – Barn Burning (1939)F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Lost Decade (1939)Zora Neale Hurston – Now You Cookin’ with Gas (1942)Bernard Malamud – The First Seven Years (1950)Flannery O’Connor – A Late Encounter with the Enemy (1953)John Updike – Sunday Teasing (1956)John Cheever – Reunion (1962)Grace Paley – Wants (1971)Alice Walker – The Flowers (1973)Donald Barthelme – I Bought a Little City (1974)Raymond Carver – Collectors (1975)Richard Ford – Communist (1985)Lorrie Moore – Starving Again (1990)Jhumpa Lahiri – The Third and Final Continent (1999)Lydia Davis – The Caterpillar (2006)