Greatest Short Stories 2

In a quiet neighborhood, a grocery deliveryman mumbles arithmetic to hide his thoughts from a little boy who shapes reality with his mind. Elsewhere, a severed hand plays the piano; a teenager is manipulated into chopping off her hair by a popular cousin; and a deaf-mute child wanders the bloody aftermath of a Civil War battle swinging a wooden sword.

This second volume gathers twenty-four works of short fiction. The contents move from Anton Chekhov’s Russian country estates and Guy de Maupassant’s ruined Norman peasants to Dylan Thomas’s snow-covered Welsh towns and Jerome Bixby’s mid-century science fiction.

Brought together, these pieces track the mechanics of the short story from nineteenth-century fable and gothic horror to modern psychological realism. The anthology stands as a cross-section of the form's development across European, British, and American literature.