Classic American Short Stories, selected and introduced by Douglas Grant (OUP, £5.99 in UK).

With fourteen examples running from Hawthorne to Hemingway, this is a sound selection/collection, which brings in Melville, Twain, Poe, James, Edith Wharton, Crane, etc. Hamlin Garland, coming in again from the cold, is a welcome addition but since the book stops with Katharine Anne Porter, Faulkner and Hemingway, this means that there is no writer included who was born later than the 1890s. There will also be some groans about the exclusion of Scott Fitzgerald, and personally I miss something by Glenway Wescott.