Burton Raffel Books

The best of American short fiction Spanning over 100 years of literary history, here are 33 of the finest short stories by Washington Irving * Nathaniel Hawthorne * Edgar Allan Poe * Herman Melville * Harriet Beecher Stowe * Bret Harte * Bayard Taylor * Rose Terry Cooke * Ambrose Bierce * Hamlin Garland * Mary E. Wilkens Freeman * Henry James * Charlotte Perkins Gilman * Sarah Orne Jewett * Grace Elizabeth King * Harold Frederic * Kate Chopin * Stephen Crane * Edith Wharton * Mark Twain * Jack London * F. Hopkinson Smith * Zona Gale * O. Henry * Sherwood Anderson * Ernest Hemingway * John Dos Passos * Stephen Vincent Benet * Willa Cather * William Faulkner * James Thurber * F. Scott Fitzgerald * William Saroyan

George P. Elliott, Bobbie Ann Mason, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Jayne Anne Phillips, Peter J. Taylor, Ann Beattie, Jean Stafford, Richard Ellman, Purdy James, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, John Updike, Grace Paley, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Alice Walker, Mark Helprin, Wright Morris, Robert Greenwood, Leonard Michaels, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Joyce Carol Oates, Layle Silbert, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Ivi Goodman, Walter Mosley Jr.

Developed in conjunction with experts from the University of Surrey, this work is designed to encourage independent reading. Accompanied by illustrations, it is a part of the "Usborne Young Reading Series", which re-examines the tragedy of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".

The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.