Introduction: Story and its writer -- Stories: Civil peace / Chinua Achebe -- Silent snow / Conrad Aiken -- In a bamboo grove / Ryunosuke Akutagawa -- Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven / Sherman Alexie -- Act of vengeance / Isabel Allende -- Hands / Sherwood Anderson -- Happy endings / Margaret Atwood -- Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- Lesson / Toni Cade Bambara -- Black man and white woman in dark green boat / Russell Banks -- San Francisco / Lynda Barry -- Indian uprising / Donald Barthelme -- Snow / Ann Beattie -- From Fun Home: Old father, old artificer / Alison Bechdel -- The rememberer / Aimee Bender -- Occurrence at Owl Creek bridge / Ambrose Bierce -- Circular ruins / Jorge Luis Borges --This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski -- Greasy Lake / T. Coraghessan Boyle August 2026: There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury -- Guest / Albert Camus -- Werewolf / Angela Carter -- Cathedral; A small, good thing ; What we talk about when we talk about love / Raymond Carver -- Paul's case / Willa Carter -- Water names / Lan Samantha Chang -- Swimmer / John Cheever -- Darling ; Lady with the little dog / Anton Chekhov -- Désiré́e's baby; Story of an hour / Kate Chopin -- Barbie-Q / Sandra Cisneros -- Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad -- Continuity of parks / Julio Cortazar -- Open boat / Stephen Crane -- Night women / Edwidge Danticat -- Television / Lydia Davis -- How to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie / Junot Diaz -- Battle royal / Ralph Ellison -- Red convertible / Louise Erdrich-- Rose for Emily ; That evening sun / William Faulkner -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Look on the bright side / Dagoberto Gilb -- Yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Overcoat / Nikolai Gogol -- Homage / Nadine Gordimer -- Bride / Christine Granados -- Rappaccini's daughter ; Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway -- Church cancels cow ; In the cemetery where Al Jolson's is buried / Amy Hempel -- Things you should know / A. M. Homes -- Gilded six-bits ; Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston -- Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving -- Lottery / Shirley Jackson -- Real thing / Henry James -- Who's Irish? / Gish Jen -- White heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Saboteur / Ha Jin -- Dirty wedding / Denis Johnson -- Bad neighbors / Edward P. Jones -- Pugilist at rest / Thom Jones -- Araby; Dead / James Joyce -- Hunger Artist; Metamorphosis / Franz Kafka -- Not human beings / Etgar Keret -- Girl / Jamaica Kincaid -- Shoeless Joe Jackson comes to Iowa / W.P. Kinsella -- Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Odour of chrysanthemums ; Rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence -- Drover's wife / Henry Lawson -- Ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Woman on a roof / Doris Lessing -- Build a fire / Jack London -- Fly ; Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield -- Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Necklace / Guy de Maupassant -- Bartleby, the scrivener / Herman Melville -- Invasion from outer space / Steven Millhauser -- Videos of the dead / Rick Moody -- How to become a writer / Lorrie Moore -- Nawabdin electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin -- Management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee -- Dance of the happy shades / Alice Munro -- Toys of peace / Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) -- Ice man / Haruki Murakami -- Lady with the pet dog ; Where are you going, where you have been? / Joyce Carol Oates -- Things they carried / Tim O'Brien -- Everything that rises must converge; Good country people; Good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor -- Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor -- I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen -- Shawl / Cynthia Ozick-- Brownies / ZZ Packer -- Escort / Chuck Palahniuk -- Conversation with my father ; Mother / Grace Paley -- My life with the wave / Octavio Paz -- Stars / Jayne Anne Phillips -- Cask of Amontillado; Fall of the House of Usher ; Tell-tale heart / Edgar Allan Poe -- Jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter -- Gift of the Magi / William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) -- Job history / Annie Proulx -- Conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth -- From Palestine: Refugeeland / Joe Sacco -- From Persepolis : The veil / Marjane Satrapi -- Brad Carrigan, American / George Saunders -- Love so fleeting, love so fine / Carol Shields -- Yellow woman / Leslie Marmon Silko -- Homework / Helen Simpson -- Girl with bangs / Zadie Smith -- Way we live now / Susan Sontag -- Prisoner on the hell planet: a case history / Art Spiegelman -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Two kinds / Amy Tan -- Death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy -- Blood-burning moon / Jean Toomer -- A & P / John Updike -- Dreams / Jane Urquhart -- Moths / Helena Maria Viramontes -- Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -- Everyday use / Alice Walker -- Good people / David Foster Wallace -- Seeing eye / Brad Watson -- Why I live at the P.O. ; Worn path / Eudora Welty -- Roman fever / Edith Wharton -- Newborn thrown in trash and dies ; stories / John Edgar Wideman -- Use of force / William Carlos Williams -- Powder ; Say yes / Tobias Wolff -- Kew Gardens / Virginia Woolf -- Man who was almost a man / Richard Wright -- Brown house / Hisaye Yamamoto. Commentaries: Image of Africa: Conrad's ''Heart of darkness'' / Chinua Achebe -- Superman and me / Sherman Alexie -- Whirlwind man steals yellow woman / Paula Gunn Allen -- Form, not plot, in the short story / Sherwood Anderson -- Reading blind / Margaret Atwood -- Writing "Poes" / Russell Banks -- Borges and I / Jorge Luis Borges -- Plotting against Chekhov: Joyce Carol Oates and "Lady with the dog" / Matthew C. Brennan -- Translating Kafka / Ann Charters -- Why I write short stories / John Cheever -- Technique in writing the short story / Anton Chekhov -- How I stumbled upon Maupassant / Kate Chopin -- Private history of the "Jumping Frog" story / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- Sinking of the commodore / Stephen Crane -- Hunger artist / R. Crumb; David Zane Mairowitz --On the short, short story / Lydia Davis -- Influence of folklore on ''Battle royal'' / Ralph Ellison -- Biographical perspective on Joyce's "Dead" / Richard Ellmann -- Meaning of ''Rose for Emily'' / William Faulkner -- Why we like Chekhov / Richard Ford -- Mexico, the United States, and the multicultural future / Carlos Fuentes -- On Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme / Vivian Gornick -- Levels of meaning in Lawrence's "Rocking-horse winner" / Janice H. Harris -- How it feels to be colored me ; What white publishers won't print / Zora Neale Hurston -- Morning of June 28,1948 and ''Lottery'' / Shirley Jackson -- Genesis of "Real thing" / Henry James -- Kafka's view of "Metamorphosis" / Gustav Janouch -- Looking back on girlhood / Sarah Orne Jewett -- On ''Girl'' / Jamaica Kincaid -- Finding your voice / Anne Lamott -- Scapegoat in Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Letter to the editor on "To build a fire" / Jack London -- Review of Woolf's "Kew Gardens" / Katherine Mansfield -- On Tim O'Brien's ''Things they carried'' / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Writer's goal / Guy de Maupassant -- Blackness in Hawthorne's ''Young Goodman Brown'' / Herman Melville -- Deconstructive reading on Melville's "Bartleby, the scrivener" / J. Hillis Miller -- How I write short stories / Alice Munro -- On Ryunosuke Akutagawa / Haruki Murakami -- Gogol's genius in "Overcoat" ; Reading of Chekhov's "Lady with the little dog" / Vladimir Nabokov -- Peter Klaus the goatherd / J.C.C. Nachtigal -- Alpha company / Tim O'Brien -- Nearest thing to lyric poetry is the short story ; Style and form in Joyce's "Dead" / Frank O'Connor -- Conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley -- Lawrence's and Steinbeck's "Chrysanthemums" / Jay Parini -- Guided tours of time and death / Jayne Anne Phillips -- Inspiration? Head down the back road, and stop for the yard sales / Annie Proulx -- Past and the present: Joseph Conrad and the fiction of autobiography / Edward W. Said -- Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko -- Writing as reading / Susan Sontag -- In the canon, for all the wrong reasons / Amy Tan -- Chekhov's intent in ''Darling'' / Leo Tolstoy -- Greatness of Conrad's "Heart of darkness" / Lionel Trilling -- Zora Neale Hurston: Cautionary tale and a partisan view / Alice Walker -- Some remarks on Kafka's funnieness from which probably not enough has been removed / David Foster Wallace -- Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? / Eudora Welty -- Reading fiction / Richard Wright -- Casebooks: Casebook one: James Baldwin's "Sonny blues:" Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin -- Words and music: narrative ambiguity in "Sonny's blues" / Keith E. Byerman -- "Sonny blues" saved my life / Kenneth A. McClane -- Casebook two: Raymond Carver: One writing; Creative writing 101; Bath / Raymond Carver -- Origin of ''Cathedral'' / Tom Jenks -- Reading of ''What we talk about when we talk about love'' / Arthur M. Saltzman -- Looking for Raymond Carver / A.O. Scott -- Casebook three: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow wallpaper:" Why I wrote "Yellow wallpaper ; Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Feminist reading of Gilman's "Yellow wallpaper" / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar -- On "Yellow wallpaper" / Elaine Showalter -- Casebook four: Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies:" My two lives / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Jhumpa Lahiri / Sean Flynn -- Lahiri's "Interpreter of maladies" / Simon Lewis -- Casebook five: Flannery O'Connor: From letters, 1954-55 ; Writing short stories; Reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor -- Parables of Flannery O'Connor / Joyce Carol Oates -- Rhetorical reading of O'Connor's ''Everything that rises must converge'' / Wayne C. Booth -- On ''Good country people'' / Dorothy Tuck McFarland -- Casebook six: Joyce Carol Oates's "Where are you going, where have you been?:" Stories that define me: making of a writer ; Smooth talk: short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates -- Pied Piper of Tucson: he cruised in a golden car, looking for the action / Don Moser -- Casebook seven: Edgar Allan Poe: Importance of the single effect in a prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe -- On "Fall of the House of Usher" and "Cask of Amontillado" / D.H. Lawrence -- New critical reading of "Fall of the House of Usher" / Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren -- Under the covers with fortunato and montresor / Jan Burke -- Fall of the House of Usher / Will Eisner -- Casebook eight: Graphic storytelling: What the little old ladies feel / Alison Bechdel -- From "Alternative comics: toward the habit of questioning" / Charles Hatfield -- Are comics serious literature / Michael Kupperman -- From understanding comics: Invisible art / Scott McCloud -- Reading "The Veil" by Marjane Satrapi / Sydney Plum -- Some reflections on Palestine / Joe Sacco / Homage to Joe Sacco / Edward W. Said. Appendices: Reading short stories (Includes Grace Paley, ''Samuel'') -- Elements of fiction -- Brief history of the short story -- Writing about short stories -- Literary theory and critical perspectives -- Glossary of literary terms -- Chronological listing of authors' stories -- Chronological listing of authors and stories -- Index of authors and titles.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.