The Story and Its Writer (edited by Ann Charters) is America's most comprehensive, diverse — and bestselling — college anthology of the short fiction of the world. It is notable for its student appeal as well as its quality and range. Ann Charters has an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also knows that writers, not critics, have the most interesting things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. So, to complement these stories, she includes a selection of the writers' own
commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. Most of the stories are accompanied by one or more commentaries — writen by the writers themselves or other writers. Before each story, there is a small biography of the writer (about 3/4 of a page), often informing the reader about the origin of the story that follows. (This is the “Compact” Edition:
1128 pages)
Level: Gymnasiet A/Linjefag
Authors represented (1-3 stories each): Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Tolstoy, Bierce, Jewett, de Maupassant, Chopin, Conrad, Chekhov, Perkins Gilman, Crane, Cather, Sherwood Anderson, London, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Mansfield, Porter, Hurston, Faulkner, Borges, Hemingway, Frank O'Connor, Wright, Welty, Cheever, Olsen, Ellsion, Shirley Jackson, Paley, Gordimer, Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Márquez, Achebe, Rifaat, Munro, Updike, Mohr, Carver, Oates, Atwood, Bambara, Banks, Mukherjee, Allende, Bobbie Ann Mason, Walker, Tin O'Brien, Silko, Kincaid, Amy Tan, Cisneros, Erdrich, Gish Jen, Ha Jin, Divakaruni, David Foster Wallace, Alexie, Lahiri, Díaz, ZZ Packer.
Casebooks: Raymond Carver (essays by and about Raymond Carver); Flannery O'Connor (essays by and about Flannery O'Connor); Graphic Storytelling.
Appendices: Reading Short Stories, The Elements of Fiction, A Brief History of the Short Story, Writing About Short Stories, Literary Theory and Critical Perspectives, Glossary of Literary Terms, Chronological Listing of Authors and Stories.