Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right.

Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell Holmes; "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", by Mark Twain; "Elder Brown’s Backslide", by Harry Stillwell Edwards; "The Hotel Experience of Mr. Pink Fluker", by Richard Malcolm Johnston; "The Nice People", by Henry Cuyler Bunner; "The Buller-Podington Compact", by Frank Richard Stockton; "Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff", by Bret Harte; "The Duplicity of Hargraves", by O. Henry; "Bargain Day at Tutt House", by George Randolph Chester; "A Call", by Grace MacCowan Cooke; "How the Widow Won the Deacon", by William James Lampton; and "Gideon", by Wells Hastings.