Main-Travelled Roads collects 11 short stories, originally published in 1891, set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or what Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.†Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland's radical, realist stories refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest. Unrelenting yet strangely hopeful in its view of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly...

Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called "the last of the Beats." His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel

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Plain Tales from the Hills is a classic collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling.

Venture back in time to Victorian London to join literature's greatest detective team, the brilliant Sherlock Holmes and his devoted assistant, Dr. Watson, as they investigate a dozen of their best-known cases. Originally published in 1892, this is the first and best collection of stories about the legendary sleuth. The collection includes one of the author's personal favorites: "A Scandal in Bohemia," in which a king is blackmailed by a former lover...

American author and poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), best known for the poetry that attributed to two of his three Pulitzer Prizes, also wrote histories, biographies, novels, and children's stories. Born in Illinois, Sandburg spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina in 1945, where he lived till his death. In the early 1920s Sandburg began writing children's stories for his three daughters, beginning with his "Rootabaga...

The Gentle Grafter (1907) is a collection of fourteen short stories by American writer O. Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive and prisoner, these tales follow the escapades of two professional con artists whose humor and storytelling ability illuminate the nature of wealth and crime in early twentieth century America. In "Modern Rural Sports," con-man Jeff Peters recalls a job in a rural Western town where, in need of money, he devised...

"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories-heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...

In this representative volume, "The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories" the reader will find twenty-four of Mark Twain's best shorter works. Classic and unforgettable tales that span the author's career are included, such as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which is Twain's most famous short story and was his first great success as an author. It is the unforgettable tale of Jim Smiley, the gambler who will bet on anything including...

This collection of eight short stories about the struggles and triumphs of artists was published in 1920. Four of the stories originally appeared in Cather's first collection, The Troll Garden (1905), including her best known short story, "Paul's Case." Other stories include "Flavia and Her Artists," "The Diamond Mine," "A Gold Slipper," and "Scandal."

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a Scottish writer and physician, most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. "Danger! And Other Stories" (1918) was a collection of short stories The collection's title story, "Danger!", was written eighteen months before the outbreak of World War I. First published in the Strand Magazine...