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 contentsWashington 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 HemingwayOut 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)