Introduction by Charles Baxter

Contents:

• The Falling Girl by Dino Buzzati
• Death of the Right Fielder by Stuart Dybek
• Blackberries by Leslie Norris
• Don't You Blame Anyone by Julio Cortázar
• On Hope by Spencer Holst
• Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood
• The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket by Yasunari Kawabata
• Girl by Jamaica Kincaid
• The Other Wife by Colette
• La Volpaia by Mark Helprin
• An Insolvable Problem of Genetics by Josef Skvorecky
• House Opposite by R. K. Narayan
• Love, Your Only Mother by David Michael Kaplan
• The Laugher by Heinrich Böll
• August 25, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek
• Homage for Isaac Babel by Doris Lessing
• One of These Days by Gabriel García Márquez
• Welcoming the Board of Directors by Peter Handke
• Boy by Joyce Carol Oates
• The Weather in San Francisco by Richard Brautigan
• Blue by David Brooks
• The Grass-Eaters by Krishnan Varma
• Preparations by Kenneth Barnard
• At the River by Patricia Grace
• The Blue Jar by Isak Dinesen
• Gregory by Panos Ioannides
• Iguana Hunting by Hernán Lara Zavala
• Disappearing by Monica Wood
• A Lover's Ear by Yuan Ch'iung-ch'iung
• By the Creek by Barry Yourgrau
• The Book by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
• Facing the Light by Talat Abbasi
• Lost Keys by Paul Milenski
• Arrest Me by Denis Hirson
• Orion by Jeanette Winterson
• The Verb To Kill by Luisa Valenzuela
• All At One Point by Italo Calvino
• Bigfoot Stole My Wife by Ron Carlson
• Mr. and Mrs. Martins by Edla van Steen
• Di Grasso by Isaac Babel
• The Street-Sweeping Show by Feng Jicai
• Courtly Vision by Bharati Mukherjee
• The Model by Bernard Malamud
• Terminal by Nadine Gordimer
• Emilie Plead Choose One Egg by Paule Barton
• There's a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella by Fernando Sorrentino
• Family Album by Siv Cedering
• The Last Days of a Famous Mime by Peter Carey
• The Shoe Breaker by Daniel Boulanger
• Katya by Sergei Dovlatov
• Looking for a Rain God by Bessie Head
• The School by Donald Barthelme
• The Fifth Story by Clarice Lispector
• Tancredi by Barbara Alberti
• Las Papas by Julio Ortega
• The Black Dog by J. Bernlef
• Snow by Ann Beattie
• The Explosion in the Parlor by Bai Xiao-Yi
• Acknowledgements by Paul Theroux

Edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas