Introduction

As others have written in their introductions to this project, before I could begin selecting the stories I chose below, I had to exhaust myself of numerous inquiries about how one should go about doing something like this — specifically, should I worry about those writers and stories I’m invariably leaving out? No such list is complete, it should go without saying, and if you asked this of me a year ago or a year from now there would likely be a different set of stories than those given below. That said, these stories are — today, at this moment in time, at this moment in my life — twelve of my favorites. I have taught most if not all of them at some point in my life, and I return to each of them regularly. (One mark of  great short story, I think, is how often you can return to it and still encounter it, somehow, anew.) I hope some of these stories will be unknown to you, and that you will seek them out. You have my promise that they reward your reading.