Introduction

I have been teaching teenagers English for almost 40 years, and my selection  here is of short stories which work well in the classroom. There are few more unforgiving audiences than schoolchildren, and so you can be sure these stories have survived that test. I have read all of them out loud: no-one is too old to close their eyes and listen, and a live audience really tests the quality of the writing.

Teachers are also actors, and stories provide such great performance opportunities, as long as your reading is servant to the story rather than drawing attention to itself. When you read a story out loud repeatedly over the years, you learn its shape intimately. Its rhythms become pleasurably familiar.