Kasia Boddy 
New Penguin Book of American Short Stories, from Washington Irving to Lydia Davis [EPUB ebook] 

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)