ISBN The Oxford of Short Stories book 576 pages

V. S. Pritchett one our greatest short-story writers has chosen forty-one stories written in the English language for this volume producing a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years. Great Britain America and especially Eire have fine traditions of short-story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne while in the last century the art was perfected by Ernest Hemingway D. H. Lawrence W. Somerset Maugham John Updike and V. S. Pritchett himself. The Irish contribution includes such masters as James Joyce Frank O'Connor and Liam O'Flaherty and stories by Canadian Indian New Zealand and Australian writers show the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.