40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology Fourth Edition

This book does the job of its competitor anthologies (The Norton Anthology, Pearson/Longman's "Fiction 100", et al) extremely well for a fraction of the cost. I chose to adopt this text for my summer Short Story class (a 5-week course) and my students fell in love with the portability of the book, its selection, and the cost-friendliness of the book. We also appreciate the writing apparatus in the back of the book--it's concise, yet not filled with technical jargon, and written in a way that novice literature students can understand. For full-semester courses, I usually adopt "The Story and It's Writer" (also a Bedford publication) which is equally effective and cost friendly for even a full length anthology.

The book is great for short reads and has a lot of great short stories but the most frustrating thing is that it includes some short stories from full books that it doesn't tell you where they came from. For example, it includes a chapter from "The Things They Carried" and unless I had already read that, I wouldn't know that there was a whole other book associated with that story.

. This collection gives a taste of some of the classic short stories . Each paragraph short story has combinations of essential rhetorical devices - such as metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, alliteration and so forth. Equally impt each paragraph uses at least one of the five senses if not more. A delight to read. Reader is encouraged to follow through on other short stories by the same authors.

This book was for one of my English class but I found myself reading chapter that were not assigned. I like it

I liked the selections of short stories by established authors. This was an assigned text for a fiction writing class.an interesting collection

Got it for an english course in college but it contains some very good reading material. Got me into Franz Kafka! My course has been long over but this is a textbook I can't stay away from for long!

I used it for one of my classes last semester. It really worked out quite well and I wish they'd have a few more classical stories and thematically listed them.

Needed this for class. It had writing on some stories, but was readable. Along with the stories, it has biographies, and a glossary of literary terms.

bought for school