Introduction by Irving Howe. Thirty-eight brief pieces of fiction, averaging between three and seven pages each, by reknowned writers.

Introduction by Irving Howe • PART ONE: “The Three Hermits,” Leo Tolstoy • “Alyosha the Pot,” Leo Tolstoy • “The Beggarwoman of Locarno,” Heinrich von Kleist • “A Little Legend of the Dance,” Gottfried Keller • “After the Theatre,” Anton Chekhov • “The Wolf,” Giovanni Verga • “An Episode of War,” Stephen Crane • “An Old Man,” Guy de Maupassant • “The Third Bank of the River,” Joao Guimaraes Rosa • “A Yom Kippur Scandal,” Sholom Aleichem • “If Not Higher,” I. L. Peretz • PART TWO: “Eveline,” James Joyce • “A Sick Collier,” D. H. Lawrence • “The Soft Touch of Grass,” Luigi Pirandello • “The Hunter Gracchus,” Franz Kafka • “First Sorrow,” Franz Kafka • “The Untold Lie,” Sherwood Anderson • “Paper Pills,” Sherwood Anderson • “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Ernest Hemingway • “Joy and the Law,” Giuseppe di Lampedusa • “Magic,” Katherine Anne Porter • “The Death of Dolgushov,” Isaac Babel • “The Bathhouse,” Mikhail Zoschenko • “The Use of Force,” William Carlos Williams • “Swaddling Clothes,” Yukio Mishima • “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” James Thurber • “Homage for Isaac Babel,” Doris Lessing • “The Dead Man,” Jorge Luis Borges • “In the Night,” Varlam Shalamov • “The Blue Bouquet,” Octavio Paz • “My Father Sits in the Dark,” Jerome Weidman • “Wants,” Grace Paley • “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” Gabriel García Márquez • “The Eclipse,” Augusto Monterroso • “The Laugher,” Heinrich Böll • “News from the World,” Paula Fox • “Going to Jerusalem,” Maria Luise Kaschnitz • “The Censors,” Luisa Valenzuela • About the Authors