Kasia Boddy 
The 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)