The Spook House
by Ambrose Bierce | 
The Toughest Indian in the World
by Sherman Alexie | 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
by Stephen King | 
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore | 
Strange Pilgrims
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 
Exercises in Style
by Raymond Queneau | 
Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth |
In Search of Satisfaction
by J. California Cooper | 
A Manual for Cleaning Women
by Lucia Berlin |
Anything Is Possible
by Elizabeth Strout | 
A Piece of Mine
by J. California Cooper |
The Matter Is Life
by J. California Cooper | 
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
by Amy Hempel |
Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime
by J. California Cooper | 
Some Soul To Keep
by J. California Cooper | 
I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down
by William Gay | 
Thirteen Ways of Looking
by Colum McCann |
The Complete Stories
by Zora Neale Hurston | 
Something Rich and Strange
by Ron Rash | 
How to Breathe Underwater
by Julie Orringer |
Before he trailed off into the wilds of Mexico, never to be heard from again, Ambrose Bierce achieved a public persona as "bitter Bierce" and "the devil's lexicographer." He left behind a nasty reputation and more than ninety short stories that are perfect expressions of his sardonic genius. Brought together in this volume, these stories represent an unprecedented accomplishment in American literature. In their iconoclasm and needle-sharp irony, their formal and thematic ingenuity and element of surprise, they differ markedly from the fiction admired in Bierce's time. Readers familiar with the classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge will want to turn to Bierce's other Civil War stories. Also included here are his horror stories, among them The Death of Halpin Frayser and The Damned Thing, and such tall tales as Oil of Dog and A Cargo of Cat.