Pocket Book of Short Stories — Edmund M. Speare

This brilliant collection includes many of the world's greatest short stories. Beginning with modern classics, including Hemingway's 'The Killers, ' it retraces the genre through the early decades of this century with such works as Maugham's 'Rain' and Thomas Mann's 'Disorder and Early Sorrow, ' concluding with nineteenth-century masterpieces by Mark Twain, Tolstoi, Poe and Balzac.