Introduction / by John Freeman --
The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara 1972 --
A conversation with my father / Grace Paley 1972 --
The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin 1973 --
Bicycles, muscles, cigarettes / Raymond Carver 1973 --
The flowers / Alice Walker 1973 --
Girl / Jamaica Kincaid 1978 --
The red convertible / Louise Erdrich 1981 --
The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer 1982 --
Taking care / Joy Williams 1982 --
Story / Lydia Davis 1983 --
China / Charles Johnson 1984 --
Pet milk / Stuart Dybek 1984 --
The way we live now / Susan Sontag 1986 --
Salvador late or early / Sandra Cisneros 1986 --
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien 1986 --
River of names / Dorothy Allison 1988 --
Emergency / Denis Johnson 1991 --
Sticks / George Saunders 1994 --
Fiesta, 1980 / Junot Díaz 1996 --
Silence / Lucia Berlin 1998 --
The twenty-seventh man / Nathan Englander 1998 --
Bullet in the brain / Tobias Wolff 1998 --
The hermit's story / Rick Bass 1998 --
A temporary matter / Jhumpa Lahiri 1998 --
The penthouse / Andrew Holleran 1999 --
The fix / Percival Everett 1999 --
Water child / Edwidge Danticat 2000 --
The American embassy / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2003 --
The conductor / Aleksandar Hemon 2005 --
St. Lucy's home for girls raised by wolves / Karen Russell 2007 --
The last thing we need / Claire Vaye Watkins 2010 --
The paper menagerie / Ken Liu 2011 --
The dune / Stephen King 2011 --
Diem perdidi / Julie Otsuka 2011 --
The great silence / Ted Chiang 2015 --
The midnight zone / Lauren Groff 2016 --
Anyone can do it / Manuel Muñoz 2019.
