Seventeen short masterpieces, chosen for their timeless relevance and enduring popularity, include Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," Herman Melville's "Bartleby," as well as works by O. Henry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Henry James, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin and more.
William Sydney Porter (1862 1910), better known as O. Henry, led a life similar to those of his own fictional characters. Convicted of embezzlement, he drew inspiration from his prison experiences. This volume includes "The Ransom of Red Chief," "The Last Leaf," the classic, "The Gift of the Magi" and 13 more.
Excerpt from Short Stories The series of collections of which this volume is a part is made up of representative work of the women of the State of New York in period ical literature. This literature has been classified under its conspicuous divisions - Poetry, Fiction, History, Art, Biography, Translation, Literary Criticism, and the like. A woman of eminent success in each depart ment has then been asked to make a collection of representative work in that department, to include in it an example of her own work, and to place her name upon the volume as its Editor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Excerpt from Some Short Stories There was a little boy whose name was Francis Corbett, he was about three years old, and he had a sister named Sophia, who was three years older than himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The ability to construct a nuanced narrative or complex character in the constrained form of the short story has sometimes been seen as the ultimate test of an author's creativity. Yet during the time when the short story was at its most popular - the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - even the greatest writers followed strict generic conventions that were far from subtle. This expanded and updated translation of Florence Goyet's influential La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Description d'un genre à son apogée (Paris, 1993) is the only study to focus exclusively on this classic period across different continents. Ranging through French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing - particularly the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ry?nosuke - Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple 'tools of brevity' of that period. In this challenging and far-reaching study, Goyet looks at classic short stories in the context in which they were read at the time: cheap newspapers and higher-end periodicals. She demonstrates that, despite the apparent intention of these stories to question bourgeois ideals, they mostly affirmed the prejudices of their readers. In doing so, her book forces us to re-think our preconceptions about this 'forgotten' genre.
