Book excerpt: Examining how teachers help students respond to short fiction, this book presents 25 essays that look closely at "teachable" short stories by a diverse group of classic and contemporary writers. The approaches shared by the contributors move from readers' first personal connections to a story, through a growing facility with the structure of stories and the perception of their varied cultural contexts, to a refined and discriminating sense of taste in short fiction. After a foreword ("What Is a Short Story and How Do We Teach It?"), essays in the book are: (1) "Shared Weight: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'" (Susanne Rubenstein); (2) "Being People Together: Toni Cade Bambara's 'Raymond's Run'" (Janet Ellen Kaufman); (3) "Destruct to Instruct: 'Teaching' Graham Greene's'The Destructors'" (Sara R. Joranko); (4) "Zora Neale Hurston's 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me': A Writing and Self-Discovery Process" (Judy L. Isaksen); (5) "Forcing Readers to Read Carefully: William Carlos Williams's 'The Use of Force'" (Charles E. May); (6) "'Nothing Much Happens in This Story': Teaching Sarah Orne Jewett's 'A White Heron'" (Janet Gebhart Auten); (7) "How Did I Break My Students of One of Their Biggest Bad Habits as Readers? It Was Easy: Using Alice Walker's 'How Did I Get Away...'" (Kelly Chandler); (8) "Reading between the Lines of Gina Berriault's 'The Stone Boy'" (Carole L. Hamilton); (9) "Led to Condemn: Discovering the Narrative Strategy of Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'" (James Tackach); (10) "One Great Way to Read Short Stories: Studying Character Deflection in Morley Callaghan's 'All the Years of Her Life'" (Grant Tracey); (11) "Stories about Stories: Teaching Narrative Using William Saroyan's 'My Grandmother Lucy Tells a Story without a Beginning, a Middle, or an End'" (Brenda Dyer); (12) "The Story Looks at Itself: Narration in Virginia Woolf's 'An Unwritten Novel'" (Tamara Grogan); (13) "Structuralism and Edith Wharton's 'Roman Fever'" (Linda L. Gill); (14) "Creating Independent Analyzers of the Short Story with Rawlings's 'A Mother in Mannville'" (Russell Shipp); (15) "Plato's 'Myth of the Cave' and the Pursuit of Knowledge" (Dennis Young); (16) "Through Cinderella: Four Tools and the Critique of High Culture" (Lawrence Pruyne); (17) "Getting behind Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (Dianne Fallon); (18) "Expanding the Margins in American Literature Using Armistead Maupin's 'More Tales of the City'" (Barbara Kaplan Bass); (19) "Shuffling the Race Cards: Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif'" (E. Shelley Reid); (20) "Readers, Cultures, and 'Revolutionary' Literature: Teaching Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Lesson'" (Jennifer Seibel Trainor); (21) "Learning to Listen to Stories: Sherman Alexie's 'Witnesses, Secret and Not'" (Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez); (22) "'Sometimes, Bad Is Bad': Teaching Theodore Dreiser's 'Typhoon' and the American Literary Canon" (Peter Kratzke); (23) "Teaching Flawed Fiction: 'The Most Dangerous Game'" (Tom Hansen); (24) "Reading Louise Erdrich's 'American Horse'" (Pat Onion); and (25) "Opening the Door to Understanding Joyce Carol Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" (Richard E. Mezo). An afterword "Writing by the Flash of the Firefly" and a bibliographic postscript are attached. (RS)