Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always proved an irresistible subject for writers. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope,Edith Wharton, Ring Lardner, William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge and V.S. Pritchett. Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of 19th-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a cruise down the Nile. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing 'A Journey to theSeven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal rite ofpassage, an escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment and a sense of achievement - 'Not fare well,' as T.S. Elliot has it, 'But fare forward, voyagers'.

A collection of stories about time, exploring all the different ways that we can twist and play with time. The stories take in trips to the future, package holidays to the past, visitors from other times with unwelcome messages, a thief with the power to stop time altogether, a man in lovewith someone who died years before he was born, a star fleet that paradoxically caused its own destruction, and many more. With a sure appeal for everyone who likes an exciting, thought-provoking story, as well as fans of science fiction and ghost stories, this is a wonderfully entertaining collection of stories to amuse, amaze, and enthral.

Poems by British travelers reveal their impressions of France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, and the Americas

Historical fiction is as popular today as it was at its birth in the nineteenth century. The imaginative recreation of a period beyond living memory has a power to evoke the past better than any history textbook. The stories in this collection travel in time from pre-history and the ancient Greeks to Regency bucks and Edwardian suffragettes, by way of medieval Europe, the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Emperors and kings, poets and soldiers walk these pages, in tales of intrigue, adventure, mystery and romance. As well as the giants of the genre - Stanley Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, and Georgette Heyer among them - this anthology also includes tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner and Marjorie Bowen, and by writers from the golden age of the Victorian magazine. In their choices the editors demonstrate the vitality of a form that cuts across the boundaries of popular and literary fiction to appeal to anyone who enjoys a cracking good read.

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of nearly sixty tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." But alongside these often-anthologized tales, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a work that reveals a darker side to his humor. From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Langston Hughes, to Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. For the second edition, Oates has introduced a wide range of new stories from writers who represent the state of American literature today. These new works include Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer," Richard Ford's "Under the Radar," Junot Diaz's "Edison, New Jersey," David Foster Wallace's "Good People," Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith," and Amy Hempel's "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." As in the original volume, Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work. In addition, she has written a new preface that contemplates our shifting literary culture, and has revised her introductory essay to the first edition, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.