The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O'Connor.

The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common--the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world's fiction.