Spanning in scope from this century's early moderns, including Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence, and Colette, to the best of todays practitioners, such as Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates, this collection features sixty-two stories from sixteen countries At age 82, Clifton Fadiman continues his prolific publishing career, here presenting 62 of the world's best short stories from 16 countries. His criteria? "Each story had to be both interesting and of high literary merit." Fadiman fulfills both requirements and much more, offering a cornucopia of superior 20th-century writers that includes Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Babel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Sean O'Faolain, Graham Greene, Robert Penn Warren, Colette, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, and James Thurber. (Regrettably, J. D. Salinger is not included due to lack of permission.) Here is a truly remarkable collection of this century's short stories that readers from all over the world will read with delight. Glenn O. Carey, English Dept., Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.