Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past.

Contains twenty short stories by twenty contemporary authors choosen by The Paris Review as prime examples of the literary technique, each with an introduction discussing the story and the author's technique.

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The twelve stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work and "overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. . . .

From America's favorite storyteller: A rich selection of twenty-five tales by the author of "The Gift of the Magi." Writing under the pseudonym O. Henry, William Sydney Porter was an incredibly prolific and popular master of the short story in the early twentieth century. His stories are known for being witty, playful, full of plot twists, and marked by surprise endings. The author had a special fondness for New York City and a deep interest and appreciation...

Sea Prayer is composed in the form of a letter, from a father to his son, on the eve of their journey. Watching over his sleeping son, the father reflects on the dangerous sea-crossing that lies before them. It is also a vivid portrait of their life in Homs, Syria, before the war, and of that city's swift transformation from a home into a deadly war zone. Impelled to write this story by the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian...

Presents the collected short stories of twentieth-century American writer Eudora Welty, and includes a selection of nine literary and personal essays, as well as a memoir of the author's childhood.