The Dead is one of the twentieth centurys most beautiful pieces of short literature. Taking his inspiration from a family gathering held every year on the Feast of the Epiphany, Joyce pens a story about a married couple attending a Christmas-season party at the house of the husbands two elderly aunts. A shocking confession made by the husbands wife toward the end of the story showcases the power of Joyces greatest innovation: the epiphany, that moment when everything, for character and reader alike, is suddenly clear.

EXTRACTS FROM ADAM S DIARY (1904) and EVE S DIARY (1906) are essentially send-ups of the scripture, in which Twain parodied Genesis, the parables of creation and original sin, and Eve s role in the fall of humankind. In EXTRACTS FROM ADAM S DIARY, published with Fred Strothmann s humorous cartoons of supposedly ancient stone carvings on every left-hand page, Twain playfully established Niagara Falls Park as the setting of the Garden of Eden, the honeymoon capital of the world. EVE S DIARY, accompanied by the stunning line drawings of Lester Ralph, was Twain s moving eulogy to his wife, Livy, who died the previous year. The grief-stricken Samuel Clemens, in a letter to his brother-in-law, Charles Langdon, wrote: I am a man without a country. Wherever Livy was that was my country. Similarly Adam s tribute to Eve at the end of Eve s Diary reads, Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. Eve s story is tender throughout and focuses on the more humorous aspects of Adam and Eve s relationship and eventual marriage. Like Adam s story it lacks the darker implications of the other biblical pieces Twain wrote during the last decade of his life.

In this novel about music, love, and creativity, Hermann Hesse weaves a tale of loss and redemption. Kuhn, the sensitive narrator, disabled in an accident as a young man, has become a renowned composer. He is drawn to a beautiful, mysterious singer named Gertrude and becomes engulfed in an enduring passion for her. But because he fears her sympathy, he ends up losing her to his friend and singer, Muoth. Kuhn becomes inextricably involved in their ill-fated marriage and is almost destroyed -- but eventually he finds his redemption through his art and the completion of his opera.

Featuring 30 of the greatest short stories from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new anthology begins with Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" and ranges across more than one hundred years of storytelling, concluding with F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "Winter Dreams." Other selections include Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, "The Middle Years" by Henry James, plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of short stories will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.