[.ca] 75 Short Masterpeices (ISBN 0553251414)

A MUST READ !!!!!:
What a glorious collection of some of the best short stories in the world. My father was an English teacher before going into law and this is one of the books I "borrowed" (heh heh...never seem to return anything you "borrow" from your parents, do you?!) from him years ago. I'm 29 now, married and with 7 and 4 year-old sons and I dug through one of my bookcases so that I could read them THE BOY WHO DREW CATS by Lafcadio Hearn and especially CHARLES, a short story by Shirley Jackson that should be a prerequisite read for **ALL** parents of children entering kindergarten! From THE SNIPER by Liam O'Flaherty and THE LOTTERY TICKET by Ventura Calderon to THE SCOOP by James Farrell and THE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREE by Fyodor Dostoevsky, this book contains stories that are an honest reminder of human nature, refreshingly unclouded by most of the politically-correct rhetoric often found today that does nothing but obscure the truth and then attempt to re-serve it in the designer, p.c. soup-de-jour. Bah! -- the stuff taught now in Academia by English "professors" pales by comparison! THIS is a timeless collection of substantival "reads"; the title is an accurate description of what's within.

what a fantastic group of stories:
I was just cleaning out my bookcase and found an old, tattered copy of this great book. I am so glad i found it again and ecstatic that I can order a fresh copy as the old one is practically a collection of loose, brittle paper at this point. All the stories are quite short (buy it and put it in the bathroom) and all are lovely reads. A wonderful example of what can be achieved in a handful of pages.

one of the best collections ever done:
What a delight to see this back in print. The stories are VERY short and delightfully blend works by classic and contemporary writers both from the U.S. and abroad. There are other collections more famous, but none better.