The short story is to-day our most common literary product. It is read by everyone. Not every boy or girl will read novels after leaving school, but every boy or girl is certain to read short stories. It is important in the high school to guide taste and appreciation in short story reading, so that the reading of days when school life is over will be healthful and upbuilding.
Here is a collection that is entirely modern. The authors represented are among the leading authors of the day, the stories are principally stories of present-day life, the themes are themes of present-day thought. The students who read this book will be more awake to the present, and will be better citizens of to-day.
The great number of stories presented has given opportunity to illustrate different types of short story writing:
Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle
Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders In The Rue Morgue
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From The Underground
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
Charles Dickens: The Chimes
Ivan Turgenev: Mumu
Francis Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
Joseph Conrad: Heart Of Darkness
Ambrose Bierce: Chickamauga
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study In Scarlet
H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Roger Malvin's Burial
Guy de Maupassant: Necklace
Leo Tolstoy: God Sees The Truth, But Waits
Anton Chekhov: The Lottery Ticket
Virginia Woolf: The Mark On The Wall
Katherine Mansfield: The Garden Party
H.G. Wells: The Star
Stendhal: Vanina Vanini
Honoré De Balzac: The Unknown Masterpiece
Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow
Ernest Hemingway: Up In Michigan
Nikolay Gogol: A May Night
O. Henry: The Ransom Of Red Chief
Jack London: To Build a Fire
