Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Fiction / Edition 13

by James Pickering

Overview

For Introduction to the Short Story and Introduction to Fiction. A collection of carefully chosen, interesting stories with literary merit, the best-selling text-anthology Fiction 100 continues to offer instructors the flexibility to organize their courses in a format that best suits their pedagogical needs. Intended to ignite students' curiosity, imagination, and intelligence, these selections represent a wide variety of subject matter, theme, literary technique, and style. International in scope, it illustrates the development of short fiction from the early 19th century to the present day, and features 128 traditional and contemporary works organized alphabetically by author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780205175413
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	06/23/2011
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	1328
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE:

PREFACE

With this ninth edition Fiction 100 passes yet another milestone. The eighth edition celebrated the fact that the book had been in print for 25 years, a full quarter of a century, a fact that surprised no one more than it did the editor. With the ninth edition comes yet another realization: Fiction 100 has now been available to college students and their teachers in four decades: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the new millennium. With that realization comes still another: that while the world has changed a great deal since 1974, the aims and structure of Fiction 100 on the whole have not. Then as now I have tried to produce a large book of representative-quality short fiction that could be used in a wide variety of course formats and to do so at a reasonable price.

Another thing that has not changed is the difficulty I have faced in trying to cull the increasingly rich world of short fiction to decide what selections to make. One would think that with a table of contents as large as Fiction 100's such decisions would be relatively easy. They are not. As I long ago discovered, the problem of choice is only multiplied by size. The larger the book, the greater, in fact, the need for principles of selection.

Those that govern Fiction 100 are easily explained. First of all, I have insisted that the stories included must not only have literary merit but must be interesting. Four decades of teaching the short story to college students has persuaded me that any story, if it is to "work" in the classroom, must engage the curiosity, imagination, and intelligence ofstudents and provide them with a reading experience they find pleasurable. In addition, I have tried to assemble a collection of stories, international in scope, that represents a wide variety of subject matter, theme, literary technique, and style, and that, at the same time, serves to illustrate the development of short fiction—its continuity, durability, and tradition—from its identifiable beginnings in the early years of the nineteenth century to the present. To the extent possible, I have also asked that the stories "speak to one another" to make possible classroom discussion having to do with comparison and contrast. Roughly a third of the anthology is reserved for older, well-established stories—the so-called classics. They are offered without apology; good stories, no matter how often anthologized, are a source of endless pleasure and discovery that no amount of rereading, classroom discussion, or critical analysis can ever exhaust. On the other hand, Fiction 100 tries to present a broad selection of newer and contemporary stories to suggest the direction in which short fiction is moving as one century gives way to the next.

The book's editorial apparatus remains unchanged. It has been kept to a minimum to make Fiction 100 as usable in as many different kinds of fiction courses as possible. There are, of course, the study questions that follow each story. But these are, by intent, neither complete nor comprehensive. Rather, they are designed to be suggestive, to help guide students in their own literary response, and to serve as a springboard for classroom discussion. In much the same way, the Biographical Notes, Short Story Handbook, and Chronological Table of Contents are intended to provide students with additional resources, tools, and information without getting in the way of their instructor's course format and design.

The most significant change over the four decades has been the book's contents. Of the 100 stories in the 1974 edition, only 34 remain. While the majority of these represent older, nineteenth-century classics, nearly half belong to the twentieth century, suggesting that our definition of the "classic" short story is an ever-expanding one. The other 95 stories—for there are 129 stories in the ninth edition of Fiction 100—reflect my own changing relationship with the genre and my response to the many good suggestions from reviewers, colleagues, and students, including my own most recent students in English 2305 at the University of Houston. Many of those students, I hasten to add, have long since become reviewers, colleagues, and friends—another legacy of these past four decades, and one that I value deeply. All of you have my thanks.

Thanks too go to Carrie Brandon, my editor at Prentice Hall, who, among her other virtues, has one that every author and editor deeply appreciates. She is always there when you need her. I need to also thank the enterprising Fred Courtright, who served as permissions editor during this revision cycle, and whose knowledge and expertise in dealing with the always intricate and time-consuming issue of clearing rights and permissions are simply remarkable. Thanks also go to Joe Barron of P. M. Gordon Associates, Inc., who skillfully guided this ninth edition of Fiction 100 through the various stages of the production process.

If a period crossing four decades—the considerable portion of an adult life-time—provides anything in the way of perspective and wisdom, it is this: that editing Fiction 100 through nine editions has been an extraordinary opportunity for which I will always be grateful. Each new edition has been a genuine labor of love.

James H. Pickering

Table of Contents

Louisa May Alcott, “Contraband”

Sherman Alexie, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”

Sherwood Anderson, “The Egg”

Margaret Atwood, “Rape Fantasies”

Mary Hunter Austin, “The Basket Maker”

James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson”

Andrea Barrett, “The Littoral Zone”

John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

Rick Bass, “Antlers” *

Ann Beattie, “Janus”

Alison Bechdel, From Fun Home *

Saul Bellow, “Looking for Mr. Green”

Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover”

Kay Boyle, “Astronomer’s Wife”

T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Greasy Lake” *

Ray Bradbury, “August 2002: Night Meeting”

Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”

John Cheever, “The Swimmer” *

Anton Chekhov, “The Darling”

Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

Kate Chopin, “The Storm”

Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”

Sandra Cisneros, “The House on Mango Street”

Samuel L. Clemens, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

Grace Stone Coates, “Wild Plums”

Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”

Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”

Charles Dickens, “The Signal-Man” *

E.L. Doctorow, "Wakefield"

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” *

Fedor Dostoevski, “The Grand Inquisitor”

Anne Enright, “Natalie” *

Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game”

Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”

William Faulkner, “Barn Burning”

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams”

E. M. Forster, “The Road from Colonus”

Mary Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “If I Were a Man”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers”

Nickolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”

Nadine Gordimer, “A Beneficiary”

Thomas Hardy, “The Three Strangers”

Bret Harte, “Tennessee’s Partner”

Nathaniel Hawthorne “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”

Pam Houston, “How to Talk to a Hunter”

Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw”

Henry James, “The Real Thing”

Gish Jen, “In the American Society”

Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron”

Ha Jin, “Saboteur”

James Joyce, “Araby”

James Joyce, “The Dead”

Bel Kaufman, “Sunday in the Park”

Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” *

W. P. Kinsella, “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa”

Rudyard Kipling, “They”

William Kittredge, “We Are Not in This Together”

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” *

D.H. Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” *

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Horse Camp”

Doris Lessing, “Wine”

Jack London, “To Build a Fire”

Katherine Mansfield, “Her First Ball”

Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill”

Bobbie-Ann Mason, “Shiloh” *

Guy De Maupassant, “The Necklace”

Guy De Maupassant, “Rust”

Maile Meloy, “Travis, B.”

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Alice Munro, “Passion” *

H. H. Munro (“Saki”), “The Open Window”

H.H. Munro (“Saki”), “Sredni Vashtar”

Joyce Carol Oates, “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” *

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried”

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Grave”

Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs” *

Annette Sanford, “Nobody Listens When I Talk”

George Saunders, “Puppy” *

Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Yellow Woman”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”

John Steinbeck, “The Chrysanthemums”

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Markheim”

Bram Stoker, “Dracula’s Guest” *

Amy Tan, “Two Kinds” *

Shaun Tan, From The Arrival *

James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat”

Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

Judy Troy, “The Order of Things” *

Ivan Turgenev, “The Country Doctor”

John Updike, “A&P” *

John Updike, “Separating”

Alice Walker, “Nineteen Fifty-Five” *

Eudora Welty, “A Worn Path”

Dorothy West, “My Baby”

Edith Wharton, “Roman Fever” *

William Carlos Williams, “The Use of Force”

Tobias Wolff, “Powder”

Richard Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”

Patricia Zelver, "Love Letters"

Biographical Notes

A Short Story Handbook

Credits

Preface

PREFACE

With this ninth edition Fiction 100 passes yet another milestone. The eighth edition celebrated the fact that the book had been in print for 25 years, a full quarter of a century, a fact that surprised no one more than it did the editor. With the ninth edition comes yet another realization: Fiction 100 has now been available to college students and their teachers in four decades: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the new millennium. With that realization comes still another: that while the world has changed a great deal since 1974, the aims and structure of Fiction 100 on the whole have not. Then as now I have tried to produce a large book of representative-quality short fiction that could be used in a wide variety of course formats and to do so at a reasonable price.

Another thing that has not changed is the difficulty I have faced in trying to cull the increasingly rich world of short fiction to decide what selections to make. One would think that with a table of contents as large as Fiction 100's such decisions would be relatively easy. They are not. As I long ago discovered, the problem of choice is only multiplied by size. The larger the book, the greater, in fact, the need for principles of selection.

Those that govern Fiction 100 are easily explained. First of all, I have insisted that the stories included must not only have literary merit but must be interesting. Four decades of teaching the short story to college students has persuaded me that any story, if it is to "work" in the classroom, must engage the curiosity, imagination, and intelligence of studentsand provide them with a reading experience they find pleasurable. In addition, I have tried to assemble a collection of stories, international in scope, that represents a wide variety of subject matter, theme, literary technique, and style, and that, at the same time, serves to illustrate the development of short fiction—its continuity, durability, and tradition—from its identifiable beginnings in the early years of the nineteenth century to the present. To the extent possible, I have also asked that the stories "speak to one another" to make possible classroom discussion having to do with comparison and contrast. Roughly a third of the anthology is reserved for older, well-established stories—the so-called classics. They are offered without apology; good stories, no matter how often anthologized, are a source of endless pleasure and discovery that no amount of rereading, classroom discussion, or critical analysis can ever exhaust. On the other hand, Fiction 100 tries to present a broad selection of newer and contemporary stories to suggest the direction in which short fiction is moving as one century gives way to the next.

The book's editorial apparatus remains unchanged. It has been kept to a minimum to make Fiction 100 as usable in as many different kinds of fiction courses as possible. There are, of course, the study questions that follow each story. But these are, by intent, neither complete nor comprehensive. Rather, they are designed to be suggestive, to help guide students in their own literary response, and to serve as a springboard for classroom discussion. In much the same way, the Biographical Notes, Short Story Handbook, and Chronological Table of Contents are intended to provide students with additional resources, tools, and information without getting in the way of their instructor's course format and design.

The most significant change over the four decades has been the book's contents. Of the 100 stories in the 1974 edition, only 34 remain. While the majority of these represent older, nineteenth-century classics, nearly half belong to the twentieth century, suggesting that our definition of the "classic" short story is an ever-expanding one. The other 95 stories—for there are 129 stories in the ninth edition of Fiction 100—reflect my own changing relationship with the genre and my response to the many good suggestions from reviewers, colleagues, and students, including my own most recent students in English 2305 at the University of Houston. Many of those students, I hasten to add, have long since become reviewers, colleagues, and friends—another legacy of these past four decades, and one that I value deeply. All of you have my thanks.

Thanks too go to Carrie Brandon, my editor at Prentice Hall, who, among her other virtues, has one that every author and editor deeply appreciates. She is always there when you need her. I need to also thank the enterprising Fred Courtright, who served as permissions editor during this revision cycle, and whose knowledge and expertise in dealing with the always intricate and time-consuming issue of clearing rights and permissions are simply remarkable. Thanks also go to Joe Barron of P. M. Gordon Associates, Inc., who skillfully guided this ninth edition of Fiction 100 through the various stages of the production process.

If a period crossing four decades—the considerable portion of an adult life-time—provides anything in the way of perspective and wisdom, it is this: that editing Fiction 100 through nine editions has been an extraordinary opportunity for which I will always be grateful. Each new edition has been a genuine labor of love.

James H. Pickering