Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving -- Peter Rugg, the missing man / William Austin -- The wives of the dead / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids / Herman Melville -- The tell-tale heart / Edgar Allan Poe -- The ghost in the mill / Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Cannibalism in the cars / Samuel Clemens -- a white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- The storm / Kate Chopin -- The sheriff's children / Charles Chesnutt -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The middle years / Henry James -- In a far country / Jack London -- Old woman Magoun / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman -- The little regiment / Stephen Crane -- A journey / Edith Wharton -- The strength of God / Sherwood Anderson.

A death in the desert / Willa Cather -- Blood-burning moon / Jean Toomer -- A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway -- An alcoholic case / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The girl with a pimply face / William Carlos Williams -- He / Katherine Anne Porter -- That evening sun / William Faulkner -- Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston / Red-headed baby / Langston Hughes -- The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright -- A distant episode / Paul Bowles -- A late encounter with the enemy / Falnnery O'Connor -- Sony's blues / James Baldwin -- Battle royal / Ralph Ellison -- There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury -- Rain in the heart / Peter Taylor -- Where is the voice coming from? / Eudora Welty.

The lecture / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- My son the murderer / Bernard Malamud -- Something to remember me by / Saul Bellow -- The death of Justina / John Cheever -- Texts / Ursula K. Le Guin -- The school / Donald Barthelme / The persistence of desire / John Updike -- Alaska / Alice Adams -- Are these actual miles? / Raymond Carver -- Yellow Woman / Leslie Marmon Silko -- The shawl / Cynthia Ozick -- Heat / Joyce Carol Oates -- Hunters in the snow / Tobias Wolff -- The things they carried / Tim O'Brien -- Big Bertha stories / Bobbie Ann Mason -- Fever / John Edgar Wideman -- The management of grief / Bharati Mukherjee -- Two kinds / Amy Tan -- Fleur / Louise Erdrich -- Gravity / David Leavitt.

The house on Mango Street; What Sally said; Linoleum roses; A house of my own / Sandra Cisneros -- Town Smokes / Pinckney Benedict.