Book excerpt: Wonderfully wide-ranging and enjoyable, this outstanding collection features short stories by great nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers from America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Western Europe. Included are Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in which two waiters and a lonely customer in a Spanish cafe confront the concept of nothingness; "A & P," John Updike's most anthologized story and one of his most popular; "Borges and I," typical Jorge Luis Borges — imaginative, philosophical, and mysterious; as well as short masterpieces by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, D. H. Lawrence, and ten other great writers. Prime examples of the classic short story, these enduring literary treasures will be invaluable to students and teachers as well as to anyone who appreciates the finely turned tale.