UNITED STATES AUTHOR · SHORT · FICTION
Ambrose Bierce
Also known as: Ambrose Bierce, Dod Grile
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist.
Read literature for the pleasure of it, Ernest Hemingway once told an interviewer, adding, "Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading."
— from The story and its writer
Most acclaimed
The story and its writer
Ann Charters has an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom and knows that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Instructors look forward to every new edition of her bestselling anthology to see what stories her constant search for new fiction and neglected classics will turn up. To complement the stories, Charters includes her signature innovation: an array of the writers’ own commentaries on the craft and traditions of fiction. For in-depth, illustrated studies of particular writers or genres, her Casebooks provide unparalleled opportunities for discussion and writing.
The Story and Its Writer -- Compact Eighth Edition
Collection contains: Stories: Civil peace / Chinua Achebe -- Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven / Sherman Alexie -- Act of vengeance / Isabel Allende -- Hands / Sherwood Anderson -- Happy endings / Margaret Atwood -- Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- Lesson / Toni Cade Bambara -- Black man and white woman in dark green boat / Russell Banks -- Snow / Ann Beattie -- From Fun Home: Old father, old artificer / Alison Bechdel -- The rememberer / Aimee Bender -- [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( / Ambrose Bierce -- Circular ruins / Jorge Luis Borges -- August 2026: There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury -- Cathedral; A small, good thing ; What we talk about when we talk about love / Raymond Carver -- Paul's case / Willa Carter -- Water names / Lan Samantha Chang -- Swimmer / John Cheever -- Darling / Anton Chekhov -- [Désiré́e's baby]( [Story of an hour]( / Kate Chopin -- Barbie-Q / Sandra Cisneros -- Heart of darkness / Joseph Conrad -- Open boat / Stephen Crane -- How to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie / Junot Diaz -- Battle royal / Ralph Ellison -- The red convertible / Louise Erdrich -- [Rose for Emily]( [That evening sun]( / William Faulkner -- Very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Homage / Nadine Gordimer -- [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Hills like white elephants / Ernest Hemingway -- Church cancels cow / Amy Hempel -- Things you should know / A. M. Homes -- Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston -- Lottery / Shirley Jackson -- Who's Irish? / Gish Jen -- White heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Bad neighbors / Edward P. Jones -- [Araby]( [Dead]( / James Joyce -- Hunger Artist; Metamorphosis / Franz Kafka -- Girl / Jamaica Kincaid -- Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence -- Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield -- Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Necklace / Guy de Maupassant -- [Bartleby, the scrivener]( / Herman Melville -- Nawabdin electrician / Daniyal Mueenuddin -- Management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee -- Dance of the happy shades / Alice Munro -- Where are you going, where you have been? / Joyce Carol Oates -- Things they carried / Tim O'Brien -- Everything that rises must converge; Good country people; Good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor -- I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen -- The shawl / Cynthia Ozick -- Brownies / ZZ Packer -- Conversation with my father / Grace Paley -- [Cask of Amontillado]( [Tell-tale Heart]( Edgar Allan Poe -- The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter -- Job history / Annie Proulx -- From Palestine: Refugeeland / Joe Sacco -- From Persepolis : The veil / Marjane Satrapi -- Yellow woman / Leslie Marmon Silko -- Homework / Helen Simpson -- Prisoner on the hell planet: a case history / Art Spiegelman -- Two kinds / Amy Tan -- Death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy -- A&P / John Updike -- The moths / Helena Maria Viramontes -- Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -- Everyday use / Alice Walker -- Good people / David Foster Wallace -- Worn path / Eudora Welty -- Say yes / Tobias Wolf -- Man who was almost a man / Richard Wright -- Commentaries: Image of Africa: Conrad's ''Heart of darkness'' / Chinua Achebe -- Superman and me / Sherman Alexie -- Form, not plot, in the short story / Sherwood Anderson -- Reading blind / Margaret Atwood -- Autobiographical notes / James Baldwin -- Writing "Poes" / Russell Banks -- Borges and I / Jorge Luis Borges -- Translating Kafka / Ann Charters -- Why I write short stories / John Cheever -- Technique in writing the short story / Anton Chekhov -- How I stumbled upon Maupassant / Kate Chopin -- Sinking of the commodore / Stephen Crane -- A huger artist / R. Crumb; David Zane Mairowitz -- Influence of folklore on ''Battle royal'' / Ralph Ellison -- Meaning of ''Rose for Emily'' / William Faulkner -- Feminist reading of Gilman's ''Yellow wallpaper'' / Sandra M. Gilbert; Susan Gubar -- Why I wrote ''Yellow wallpaper''; Undergoing the cure for nervous prostration / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston -- Morning of June 28,1948 and ''Lottery'' / Shirley Jackson -- On ''Girl'' / Jamaica Kincaid -- Finding your voice / Anne Lamott -- On Tim O'Brien's ''Things they carried'' / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Writer's goal / Guy de Maupassant -- Blackness in Hawthorne's ''Young Goodman Brown'' / Herman Melville -- How I write short stories / Alice Munro -- Stories that define me: Making of a writer; Smooth talk: Short story into film / Joyce Carol Oates -- Alpha company / Tim O'Brien -- Conversation with Ann Charters / Grace Paley -- Importance of the single effect in a prose tale / Edgar Allan Poe -- Language and literature from a Pueblo Indian perspective / Leslie Marmon Silko -- In the canon, for all the wrong reasons / Amy Tan -- Chekhov's intent in ''Darling'' / Leo Tolstoy -- Zora Neale Hurston: Cautionary tale and a partisan view / Alice Walker -- Some remarks on Kafka's funnieness from which probably not enough has been removed / David Foster Wallace -- Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead? / Eudora Welty -- Reading fiction / Richard Wright -- Casebooks: Casebook one: Raymond Carver: One writing; Creative writing 101; The bath / Raymond Carver -- Origin of ''Cathedral'' / Tom Jenks -- Reading of ''What we talk about when we talk about love'' / Arthur M. Saltzman -- Looking for Raymond Carver / A.O. Scott -- Casebook two: Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies": My two lives / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Jhumpa Lahiri / Sean Flynn -- Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" / Simon Lewis -- Casebook three: Flannery O'Connor: From ''Letters 1954-55''; Writing short stories; Reasonable use of the unreasonable / Flannery O'Connor -- Rhetorical reading of O'Connor's ''Everything that rises must converge'' / Wayne C. Booth -- On ''Good country people'' / Dorothy Tuck McFarland -- Casebook four: Graphic storytelling: What the little old ladies feel / Alison Bechdel -- From "Alternative comics: toward the habit of questioning" / Charles Hatfield -- Are comics serious literature / Michael Kupperman -- From understanding comics: Invisible art / Scott McCloud -- Reading "The Veil" by Marjane Satrapi / Sydney Plum -- Some reflections on Palestine / Joe Sacco / Homage to Joe Sacco / Edward W. Said. Appendices: Reading short stories (Includes Grace Paley, ''Samuel'') -- Elements of fiction -- Brief history of the short story -- Writing about short stories -- Literary theory and critical perspectives -- Glossary of literary terms -- Chronological listing of authors' stories -- Chronological listing of authors and stories -- Index of authors and titles
The Ghouls
1971
from the dust-jacket: "The Ghouls: edited by Peter Haining, with an introduction by Vincent Price and an afterword by Christopher Lee" "Will any of us ever forget the first time we saw Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney? Or The Beast with Five Fingers with Peter Lorre? Or Die, Monster, Die with Boris Karloff? Whether we saw them as first-run films at the local theater or are only now becoming addicted to 'Chiller Theater' on television, the ghoul-watchers among us are in for a rare treat. The Ghouls is a horror film buff's dream. Peter Haining has collected the stories on which eighteen of the very best horror films were based..." "...In his introductions to each story, Mr. Haining provides a brief look at the story itself and the films made from it, including some fascinating bits of information about the making of the motion picture." Stories included: The Devil in a convent, by F. O. Mann The lunatics, by E. A. Poe Puritan passions, by N. Hawthorne Phantom of the opera, by G. Leroux The magician, by S. Maugham Freaks, by T. Robbins [Most dangerous game]( by R. Connell Dracula's daughter, by B. Stoker All that money can buy, by S. V. Bent The body snatcher, by R. L. Stevenson The beast with five fingers, by W. F. Harvey The beast from 20,000 fathoms, by R. Bradbury The fly, by G. Langelaan Black Sunday, by N. Gogol [Incident at Owl Creek]( by A. Bierce Monster of terror, by H. P. Lovecraft The skull, by R. Bloch The oblong box, by E. A. Poe