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 Diaz, 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 Munoz, 2019.

"A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman."--