You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe

Thirty-four of America's most distinguished fiction writers--including Oscar Hijuelos, John Irving, and Joyce Carol Oates--introduce the short stories that inspired them most.A mother's tale / James Agee --Guy de Maupassant / Isaac Babel --Sonny's blues / James Baldwin --The school / Donald Barthelme --The Aleph / Jorge Luis Borges --A day in the open / Jane Bowles --A distant episode / Paul Bowles --The Star Cafe / Mary Caponegro --Reflections / Angela Carter --Cathedral / Raymond Carver --Goodbye, my brother / John Cleever --Gooseberries / Anton Chekhov --A Christmas carol / Charles Dickens --Pie dance / Molly Giles --Greatness strikes where it pleases / Lars Gustafsson --The interview / Ruth Prawer Jlabvala --The dead / James Joyce. In the penal colony / Franz Kafka --Girl / Jamaica Kincaid --The smallest woman in the world / Clarice Lispector --The daughters of the late colonel / Katherine Mansfield --Labor day dinner / Alice Munro --Spring in Fialta / Vladimir Nabokov --The things they carried / Tim O'Brien --A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor --I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen --Wants / Grace Paley --In dreams begin responsibilities / Delmore Schwartz --The man to send rain clouds / Leslie Marmon Silko --Helping / Robert Stone --Master and man / Leo Tolstoy. Packed dirt, churchgoing, a dying cat, a traded car / John Updike --The flowers / Alice Walker --No place for you, my love / Eudora Welty --Paper garden / Jerome Wilson