Classic American Short

Unlike the other arts, American literature has been a powerful, influential, and leading aspect of American culture. By turns sedate and mercurial and possessing a moral mind set of various social values, the American short story reveals in its pages the psyche of a growing, sprawling nation whose sense of destiny has always been larger than life. Here are seven masterpieces that will make you smile, make you frown, and leave you pondering the mystery that surrounds the soul of a great nation.

The greatest short story writers strive to achieve a single, dramatic effect, a feature which the early masters of this genre perfected. Although the short story came from Europe, it was reborn in America and reached a pinnacle of superb form on these shores by the turn of the 20th century. In so many of our best writers, we hear echoes of a pioneer ethos that sustains the heart of a great literature. Here are 12 of America's best.

The American Classics Collection is a century-spanning collection of 17 classic novels, short stories, essay, and poetry by American authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Kobna Holdbrook-Smith; Nathan Osgood; Robert G. Slade; Jonathan Keeble, and more. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including Ernest Hemingway; Mark Twain; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edith Wharton; Frederick Douglass; and H.P. Lovecraft, amongst a host of others.

Represented here are 16 short stories by seven great American writers, dating from the 19th and 20th centuries. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly American.

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Mark Twains's greatest works: 12 novels; over 120 of his beloved short stories; Chapters From My Autobiography; 5 pieces of short non-fiction; and 6 pieces of his groundbreaking, wide-ranging travel writing.

A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman. IN THE PAST fifty...

No nation has ever achieved the literary diversity of America. From nativist humor to immigrant triumph, Americans have recorded their visions and hopes better than anyone

Five great American short story writers, dating from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, are represented here. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly American.

This carefully curated collection brings together some of the most influential and enduring works in American literature. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, these novels explore love and loss, identity and ambition, innocence and disillusionment—offering a powerful reflection of the American experience in all its complexity. Timeless in their themes and revolutionary in style, The Essential American Classics Collection is a must-have for readers seeking the heart and soul of American fiction.

Harper Lee's beloved classic, a masterpiece of American literature translated into 40 languages, has been simplified, abridged and edited by Angela T. Wesker in this completely revised new edition. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a timeless novel that features the complexities of human nature with humor and honesty. The story of Scout, Atticus and the Maycomb community will captivate and engage students , offering them a haunting portrait of race and class, innocence and injustice, hypocrisy and heroism, tradition and transformation in the Deep South of the US during the 1930s. The book comes ...

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

The definitive short story collection that established Ernest Hemingway's literary reputation, originally published in 1938. Ernest Hemingway is a cultural icon—an archetype of rugged masculinity, a romantic ideal of the intellectual in perpetual exile—but, to his countless readers...

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

A thoroughly engaging collection of great classic tales by the very best American authors. 1. 'From Beyond' by H. P. Lovecraft 2. 'The Mysterious Card and the Card Unveiled' by Cleveland Moffett 3. 'Pigs Is Pigs' by Ellis Parker Butler 4. 'The Club of One-Eyed Men' by Arthur Somers Roche 5. 'Afterward' by Edith Wharton 6. 'The Furnished Room' by O. Henry 7. 'A Descent into the Maelström' by Edgar Allan Poe 8. 'Regret' by Kate Chopin 9. 'The Terrible Old Man' by H. P. Lovecraft 10. 'The Dumb Man' by Sherwood Anderson

A collection of twenty classic short stories by Isaac Asimov, author of the Foundation series, featuring the definitive and only in-print version of “Nightfall” From one of history’s most influential writers of science fiction comes this collection of twenty short works of fiction...

One of the great overlooked voices of modern Irish literature, once hailed as “magnificent” by The New York Times, Mary Lavin’s fiction is now being revived for a new generation of readers in this definitive volume, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. During her lifetime, Irish...

Now available for the first time in audio as a digital download, a selection of stories from Grace Paley. Whether writing about relationships, little girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated job-seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play, GRACE PALEY...

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The 12 stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work.

A brilliant new short story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Madeline Miller—her first new work of fiction since the publication of Circe—that vibrantly reimagines the powerful and forgotten myth of Mestra. A cursed father, a gifted daughter Mestra, daughter of the King of...

On a snowy Christmas Eve in an unnamed American city, the archangel Michael wanders the streets. He is alone and hungry, his clothes tattered, and when he sees his face reflected in a store window, it is that of a young African American boy. Who will offer him food and shelter and who will turn him away? And when he becomes a blonde, freckle-faced child, is his fate different?