The short story is to-day our most common literary product. It is read by everyone. Not every boy or girl will read novels after leaving school, but every boy or girl is certain to read short stories. It is important in the high school to guide taste and appreciation in short story reading, so that the reading of days when school life is over will be healthful and upbuilding. 

Here is a collection that is entirely modern. The authors represented are among the leading authors of the day, the stories are principally stories of present-day life, the themes are themes of present-day thought. The students who read this book will be more awake to the present, and will be better citizens of to-day.

The great number of stories presented has given opportunity to illustrate different types of short story writing:

Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle

Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders In The Rue Morgue

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From The Underground

Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis

Charles Dickens: The Chimes

Ivan Turgenev: Mumu

Francis Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Joseph Conrad: Heart Of Darkness

Ambrose Bierce: Chickamauga

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study In Scarlet

H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Roger Malvin's Burial

Guy de Maupassant: Necklace

Leo Tolstoy: God Sees The Truth, But Waits

Anton Chekhov: The Lottery Ticket

Virginia Woolf: The Mark On The Wall

Katherine Mansfield: The Garden Party

H.G. Wells: The Star

Stendhal: Vanina Vanini

Honoré De Balzac: The Unknown Masterpiece

Mark Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow

Ernest Hemingway: Up In Michigan

Nikolay Gogol: A May Night

O. Henry: The Ransom Of Red Chief

Jack London: To Build a Fire