Short stories

A New England village gathers on a bright June morning to draw slips of paper from a black wooden box. A hunter falls from a passing yacht and washes ashore on a Caribbean island, only to discover he is the quarry of an aristocratic general. In Paris, a clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for a ministry ball and loses it in the night. A family acquires a mummified talisman that grants three wishes, exacting a grim toll for each.

This anthology brings together twenty-two works of short fiction. The contents span centuries and continents, moving from a rural murder investigation in the American Midwest to Anton Chekhov’s account of an adulterous affair in Yalta. Hans Christian Andersen’s winter fables sit alongside Stephen Leacock’s banking satire and H.P. Lovecraft’s coastal horror.

Ranging from the courts of the Italian Renaissance to mid-century American towns, these narratives established the mechanics of their genre. They serve as the architectural blueprints for the modern short story.