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)