Greatest Short Stories 3

A giant returns from a seven-year visit to a Cornish ogre and walls off his peach orchard, trapping his estate in an endless winter. A young revolutionary steps into a boxing ring to win rifle money for a junta. A bourgeois family waits years for a wealthy relative to return from America, only to spot him shucking oysters on a channel ferry. A one-legged tin soldier fixes his gaze on a paper ballerina.

This third volume gathers twenty-five stories, shifting rapidly in scale and setting. The contents move from talking toys and fairy tales to a prize fight, an overheard telephone call, and the parlor schemes of the middle class.

Featuring Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Guy de Maupassant, Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain, and O. Henry, this anthology demonstrates the expansion of short fiction. The pieces collected here show how writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adapted the medium for nursery fables, political realism, and newspaper syndication.