Rip Van Winkle ; The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving -- Rappaccini's daughter / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The fall of the House of Usher ; The murders in the Rue Morgue ; The purloined letter / Edgar Allan Poe -- Benito Cereno / Herman Melville -- The man without a country / Edward Everett Hale -- The lady, or the tiger / Frank R. Stockton -- The celebrated jumping from of Calaveras County ; The man that corrupted Hadleyburg / Mark Twain -- The luck of Roaring Camp ; The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte -- Marjorie Daw / Thomas Bailey Aldrich -- The damned thing ; An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce --

The turn of the screw / Henry James -- Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar Baby / Joel Chandler Harris -- A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett -- The story of the other wise man / Henry Van Dyke -- The return of a private / Hamlin Garland -- The mission of Jane / Edith Wharton -- The gift of the Magi ; The furnished room / O. Henry -- A deal in wheat / Frank Norris --

The open boat / Stephen Crane -- The lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Paul's case / Willa Cather -- To build a fire / Jack London -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- The golden homeymoon / Ring Lardner -- The afternoon of a faun / Edna Ferber -- Humoresque / Fannie Hurst -- Silent snow, secret snow / Conrad Aiken -- Flowering Judas / Katherine Anne Porter -- Big blonde / Dorothy Parker -- The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber --

Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald

A rose for Emily / William Faulkner

The Devil and Daniel Webster / Stephen Vincent Benét

The snows of Kilimanjaro / Ernest Hemingway

The lost boy / Thomas Wolfe

The red pony / John Steinbeck

Gimpel the fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer

Imagine kissing Pete / John O'Hara

The daring young man on the flying trapeze / William Saroyan

Death of a traveling salesman / Eudora Welty

Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato

The country husband / John Cheever

The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud

A silver dish / Saul Bellow

The lottery / Shirley Jackson

There will come soft rains / Ray Bradbury

Welcome to the monkey house / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

A Christmas memory / Truman Capote

Tell me how long the train's been going / James Baldwin

A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor

Pigeon feathers / John Updike

Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates.