Short Fiction and Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader

Short Fiction and Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader provides college and university instructors and their students with a versatile, challenging, and engaging resource for the study of short fiction-all in a compact format. The book includes a mixture of older, 'classic' stories by acknowledged masters of the form, such as Poe, Joyce, and Mansfield, and newer, less-anthologized writers, such as Timothy Taylor, Richard Van Camp, and Shani Mootoo. The anthology represents a diversity of ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds and also highlights female and Canadian authors. The first half of the text presents 40 fiction selections spanning from 1842 to 2006 and arranged by order of publication. Each story is introduced by a headnote that provides a brief biography of the author, information on his or her approach to writing fiction, and information about the story itself. The second half of the text collects a variety of documents written on the topic of the short story, many by the authors anthologized in the first half of the text. This section engages the reader first-hand with the key ideas driving short fiction as well as examples of fiction's critical reception from 1850 to the present. Short Fiction and Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader is not only an ideal introduction to the formal study of the literary form, but also an engaging, readable, and enduring addition to any reader's bookshelf.