Introduction / by John Freeman -- The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara, 1972 --
A conversation with my father / Grace Paley, 1972 --
The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973 --
Bicycles, muscles, cigarettes / Raymond Carver, 1973 --
The flowers / Alice Walker, 1973 --
Girl / Jamaica Kincaid, 1978 --
The red covertible / Louise Erdrich, 1981 --
The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1982 --
Taking care / Joy Williams, 1982 --
Story / Lydia Davis, 1983 --
China / Charles Johnson, 1984 --
Pet milk / Stuart Dybek, 1984 --
The way we live now / Susan Sontag, 1986 --
Salvador late or early / Sandra Cisneros, 1986 --
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien, 1986 --
River of names / Dorothy Allison, 1988 --
Emergency / Denis Johnson, 1991 --
Sticks / George Saunders, 1994 --
Fiesta, 1980 / Junot Díaz, 1996 --
Silence / Lucia Berlin, 1998 --
The twenty-seventh man / Nathan Englander, 1998 --
Bullet in the brain / Tobias Wolff, 1998 --
The hermit's story / Rick Bass, 1998 --
A temporary matter / Jhumpa Lahiri, 1998 --
The penthouse / Andrew Holleran, 1999 --
The fix / Percival Everett, 1999 --
Water child / Edwidge Danticat, 2000 --
The American embassy / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003 --
The conductor / Aleksandar Hemon, 2005 --
St. Lucy's home for girls raised by wolves / Karen Russell, 2007 --
The last thing we need / Claire Vaye Watkins, 2010 --
The paper menagerie / Ken Liu, 2011 --
The dune / Stephen King, 2011 --
Diem perdidi / Julie Otsuka, 2011 --
The great silence / Ted Chiang, 2015 --
The midnight zone / Lauren Groff, 2016 --
Anyone can do it / Manuel Muñoz, 2019.
