Best Short Stories of the Modern Age

I picked this book up at a thrift store for 50 cents a few years ago. I read through it during the summer I worked as a parking lot attendant at SeaWorld and it was a great introduction to many authors I had never heard of. All the stories in this collection are examples of the best that can be done with a short story but the few that I think are the standouts are Frank O'Connor's Judas, Lawrence Sargent Hall's The Ledge, D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner and Sherwood Anderson's Sophistication. I still go back and read many of these stories over and over again, and have even gone out and bought larger selections of some of the author's works. It is a great introduction to the short story form.

The stories collected here are well-known, if only by reputation. Many of them I read in junior high and thus remember them with awe, especially "A Rose for Emily" and "The Lottery", as well as "The Rocking Horse Winner". The Russian stories (Chekhov and Babel) I had read in college and grad school, and are very familiar to me -- though I wonder that the editor chose 2 stories that are part of group of stories that go together, and whether it makes a difference in one's interpretation, if you haven't read the accompanying stories from which it came. I would think some of the context for the stories is not apparent to the first-time reader.

Most of the other stories were ones I had heard of at some point and was glad to read them, though show more there was one, read for the first time here and never having heard mention of it, called "Of This Time, Of This Place." I don't understand why it deserves a place here. It is about a college professor who begins to think one of his students is insane -- though, frankly, as a one-time college teacher myself, the student comes across to me as simply slightly eccentric.
Includes:
The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe
The Jewels, de Maupassant
Gooseberries, Chekhov
The Tree of Knowledge, James
The Cat, the Goldfinch, and the Stars, Pirandello
Youth, Conrad
The Rocking Horse Winner, Lawrence
Bliss, Mansfield
The Dead, Joyce
Little Herr Friedemann, Mann
Sophistication, Anderson
The Story of My Dovecot, Babel
The Devil and Daniel Webster, Benet
A Rose for Emily, Faulkner
The Metamorphosis (Part 1), Kafka
The Wall, Sartre
Judas, O'Connor
Of This Time, Of That Place, Trilling
The Lottery, Jackson
The Ledge, Hall show less

This superb collection of 20 stories encompasses the work of such legends as Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, and more. I'd read about half of these stories in years past and was delighted to find just how much detail remained with me. My favorites included

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe - A deranged killer, sickened by an elderly man's bulging eye, murders the man in the middle of the night and buries the body under the floorboards. He considers it a perfect crime, even when the police arrive, until he hears a ringing in his ears, which turns into a ticking, then a heartbeat...

"The Jewels" by Guy de Maupassant - A show more young clerk becomes annoyed at his wife's penchant for collecting costume jewelry. When she passes away, he eventually takes to them to a jeweler for an appraisal...

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway - A lonely man refuses to leave the outdoor cafe he frequents—to the chagrin of one young exhausted waiter, but his coworker understands that there are those, desolate and unloved, who need a clean, well-lit place...

"The Rocking Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence - A young boy flawlessly predicts the winners of horse races by rocking on his hobby horse, but each time he must exert more effort until...

"The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benét - A hapless farmer strikes a deal with the devil, but when it comes time to pay up, he reaches out to legendary farmer, lawyer, and patriot Daniel Webster to save his soul.

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner - An reclusive elderly woman, once popular in the town and a source of gossip, passes away, leaving behind a grisly revelation.

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson - A small town, steeped in tradition, holds an annual lottery, but the winner is far from lucky.

"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka - A young traveling salesman awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach.

"The Ledge" by Lawrence Sargent Hall - A fisherman and two boys venture out to a small island for Christmas morning for a day of duck hunting—until they find themselves stranded as high tide rushes in. show less

One of the three indifferently printed mass market paperbacks that most profoundly warped my literary values.