The sacrificial egg / Chinua Achebe --
The bound man / Ilse Aichinger --
Little whale, varnisher of reality / Vasily Aksenov --
Hair jewellery / Margaret Atwood --
Everything / Ingeborg Bachman --
Going to meet the man / James Baldwin --
The child screams and looks back at you / Russell Banks --
Cortés and Montezuma / Donald Barthelme --
Jacklighting / Ann Beattie --
First love / Samuel Beckett --
Action will be taken / Heinrich Böll --
Do stay, giraffe / Wolfgang Borchert --
The aleph / Jorge Luis Borges --
This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski --
Cowardice / Abdeslam Boulaich --
A distant episode / Paul Bowles --
Greasy Lake / T. Coraghessan Boyle --
Ceil / Harold Brodkey --
Seven floors / Dino Buzzati --
The adventure of a traveler / Italo Calvino --
The adulterous woman / Albert Camus --
Children on their birthdays / Truman Capote --
Fat / Raymond Carver --
The country husband / John Cheever --
Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl / Robert Coover --
Bestiary / Julio. Cortázar --
The Heile Selassie funeral train / Guy Davenport --
The cloak / Isak Dinesen --
The hunter / E.L. Doctorow --
I look out for Ed Wolfe / Stanley Elkin --
Communist / Richard Ford --
The doll queen / Carlos Fuentes --
The chosen husband / Mavis Gallant --
Order of insects / William Gass --
The mother / Natalia Ginzberg --
The life of the imagination / Nadine Gordimer --
Two gentle people / Graham Greene --
Why I transformed myself into a nightingale / Wolfgang Hildescheimer --
One arm / Yasunari Kawabata --
Let the old dead make room for the young dead / Milan Kundera --
Gogol's wife / Tommaso Landolfi --
The habit of loving / Doris Lessing --
The challenge / Mario Vargas Llosa --
The conjurer made off with the disk / Naguib Mahfouz --
The last Mohican / Bernard Malamud --
Eye of a blue dog / Gabriel Carcia Marquez --
The pilgrimage / William Maxwell --
First love, last rites / Ian McEwan --
The deal / Leonard Michaels --
Patriotism / Yukio Mishima --
Jewellery / Alberto Moravia --
Doctor Safi / Mohammed Mrabet --
Spring in Fialta / Vladimir Nabokov --
Naga / R.K. Narayan --
The tryst / Joyce Carol Oates --
Sister Imelda / Edna O'Brien --
The artificial nigger / Frank O'Connor --
A set of variations on a borrowed theme / Frank O'Connor --
Nomad and viper / Amos Oz --
The suitcase / Cynthia Ozick --
The contest / Grace Paley --
Suicides / Cesare Pavese --
The saint / V.S. Pritchett --
Eventide / James Purdy --
The replacement / Alain Robbe-Grillet --
Rain / Mercé Rodoreda --
In the garden / Leon Rooke --
Talpa / Juan Rulfo --
XXII / Nathalie Sarraute --
Henne fire / Isaac Bashevis Singer --
Unguided tour / Susan Sontag --
Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford --
A friend and protector / Peter Taylor --
Death and the maiden / Michel Tournier --
Beyond the pale / William Trevor --
Separating / John Updike --
I'm your horse in the night / Luisa Valenzuela --
No place for you, my love / Eudora Welty --
Five-twenty / Patrick White --
Hunters in the snow / Tobias Wolff --
Big black good man / Richard Wright --
The best of everything / Richard. Yates.

The years since World War II have seen an exciting resurgence of the short story. From Albert Camus to William Maxwell, from Amos Oz to R.K. Narayan, from Ann Beattie to Yukio Mishima - this incomparably rich and diverse collection attests to the vigor and excellence of the modern short story throughout the world. Daniel Halpern's marvelous anthology offers not only European and American but also Third World literature of the first rank (fully a third of the works are translated); and of the English-language stories, a considerable number are by Australian, African, and Asian writers. The eighty-one masterpieces Halpern has chosen include traditional forms, both of classical realism and of the extended fairy tale or fable, as well as the gossipy village banter of the traditional folktale and the outer bounds of surrealist fiction. Many of the stories are cast against an exotic setting; others are humorous and matter-of-fact; some are political, others entirely absorbed with private themes of the heart.