Fifty Great Short Stories [Paperback]

50 Great Short Storiesis a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction.

The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O’Connor.

The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common—the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world’s fiction.Milton Crane is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at George Washington University and the University of Chicago. His is the author several books and articles on English literature, as well as the editor of the Bantam anthology,50 Great American Short Stories.THE GARDEN PARTY*
BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD


AND AFTER all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.

Breakfast was not yet over before men came to put up the marquee.

"Where do you want the marquee put, mother?"

"My dear child, it's no use asking me. I'm determined to leave everything to you children this year. Forget I am your mother. Treat me as an honoured guest."

But Meg could not possibly go and supervise l3¦