Wonderfully wide-ranging and enjoyable, this outstanding collection features short stories by great 19- and 20th-century writers from America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Western Europe.
Included are Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in which two waiters and a lonely customer in a Spanish cafe confront the concept of nothingness; "A & P," John Updike's most anthologized story and one of his most popular; "Borges and I," typical Jorge Luis Borges -- imaginative, philosophical, and mysterious; as well as short masterpieces by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Herman Melville, Thomas...