"Read great fiction and discover what it takes to write it. This book is a treasury of short fiction by the best writers of the past and present. Their stories will transport you to other times and places, where you will be inspired to laugh, to question, and to think. Along with the stories are writers' own commentaries on their craft and the traditions of short fiction, offering you insight, inspiration, and plenty of support for discussion and...

Variety lights: A beautiful and ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises. The white sheik: During a day in their honeymoon, a couple is separated by the city's lust and the desires it produces. I vitelloni: Details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to...

Contains essays on 21 alphabetically arranged themes that recur throughout American poetry . Includes interpretations of 250 poems, representing the work of 86 poets from a wide spectrum of historical, contemporary, ethnic, and canonical writers. THEMES and POEMS: ART AND BEAUTY To Helen (Edgar Allan Poe), Each and All (Ralph Waldo Emerson), The Rhodora (Ralph Waldo Emerson), Art (Herman Melville), Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare (Edna St....