Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Steinbeck's brilliant short novels
Collected here for the first time in a deluxe paperback volume are six of John Steinbeck's most widely read and beloved novels. From the tale of commitment, loneliness and hope in Of Mice and Men, to the tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society in Cannery Row, to The Pearl's examination of the fallacy of the American dream, Steinbeck stories of...

Presents short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author O. Henry, including the title work about the Christmas sacrifices of a young married couple.

In these short stories it's the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly:...

Don't just see the sights- get to know the people. Say "Cambodia," and two associations often come to mind: the lost glories of Angkor, and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. Any understanding of Cambodia today, however, must embrace these opposites, as well as the changing attitudes within the country caused by something of a demographic revolution- today, close to seventy percent of Cambodians are under thirty. In the past, Cambodia was the center...

An anthology of stories probing the human psyche. In the title story, a woman prepares to put her life on the line to get a man. She will confront him with a murder he committed, at which point he might kill her, but if he doesn't she will have him in her power.

Jim Harrison's vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His latest highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn't Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, The Summer He Didn't Die, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family's health...