Thirty-eight brief fictions, both classic and contemporary, by well-known authors from around the world.

In the introduction, the editors describe the 'short short' as being "different from the usual kind of short story. How so? It is fiercely condensed, almost like a lyric poem; it explodes in a burst of revelation or illumination; it confines itself to a single overpowering incident; it bears symbolic weight."

Edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe

Contents:

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