A compilation of the best entries in the annual Fifty-Five Fiction writing contest held by New Times in San Luis Obispo, this volume offers more than 150 masterpieces of brevity in writing! Enjoy mysteries, love stories, and creepy ironies in less time than it takes to tie your shoe.

A selection of timeless masterpieces from Charles Dickens Edgar Allan Poe William Thackeray Rudyard Kipling and many more World’s Best Short Stories is a collection of captivating tales from around the world, penned by some of the greatest storytellers of all time. Featuring pioneers of the short-story genre, this book promises to entertain you in many different ways. Be it the intellectual but endlessly fun The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, or even the enduringly brilliant Aladdin from the Arabian Nights, every story has a unique charm. Also included are the ever-popular A Christmas Carol by master storyteller Charles Dickens and Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving. Presenting masterpieces of literature by the likes of Rudyard Kipling, William M. Thackeray, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne and J. M. Barrie, this edition belongs in every avid reader’s personal collection.

177 short stories.

The short story is one of the finest forms of writing. As short as a paragraph at times, or as lengthy as a novel, short stories are widely read and immensely lauded. Some of the most exceptional writers have dabbled in this form penning beautiful, unforgettable stories. In this carefully-crafted selection, we bring to you some of the greatest writers from around the world-- the iconic storytellers from America, such as Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, the legendary Grimm brothers from Germany, to the lyrical Rabindranath Tagore from India, and the witty H H Munro from Britain. All these and many more remarkable people come together in this edition . . . and all have stories to tell. An anthology beginning with Aesop's fables-- perhaps the first stories we come across-- and ending with Virginia Woolf's gothic, thrilling ' The Haunted House', 100 World's Greatest Short Stories brings together stories short and sweet, descriptive and lengthy, and stories that can do anything-- from telling a tale to hiding its narrator, from portraying the reality to diving into pure imagination-- and are a must-read for every fiction lover."

Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, this wonderfully wide-ranging and enjoyable anthology includes Tolstoy, Kipling, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Pirandello, Mann, Updike, Borges, and other major writers of world literature.

Postcards From Impossible Worlds collects 88 dazzling micro-stories written as postcards from strange and beautiful worlds that run parallel to our own.

"With an outstanding selection of authors and carefully designed apparatus, the book is the ideal vehicle for introducing world literature to developing readers. A World of Short Stories is organized around different literary elements, such as characters, setting, plot, and irony, the selections in the text are surrounded by pedagogy including vocabulary exercises, pre-reading questions, extensive journal assignments, comprehension quizzes, and writing prompts."--