Introduction / Deborah Treisman -- Life cycle of a literary genius (1926) / E.B. White -- Over the river and through the wood (1934) / John O'Hara -- The secret life of Walter Mitty (1939) / James Thurber -- Such a pretty day (1939) / Dawn Powell -- The weeds (1944) / Mary McCarthy -- A perfect day for bananafish (1948) / J.D. Salinger -- Children are bored on Sunday (1948) / Jean Stafford -- Symbols and signs (1948) / Vladimir Nabokov -- The lottery (1948) / Shirley Jackson -- The ladder (1949) / V.S. Pritchett -- The five-forty-eight (1954) / John Cheever -- The state of grace (1954) / Harold Brodkey -- I live on your visits (1955) / Dorothy Parker -- A father-to-be (1955) / Saul Bellow -- A summer's reading (1956) / Bernard Malamud -- The happiest I've been (1959) / John Updike -- Defender of the faith (1959) / Philip Roth -- Where is the voice coming from? (1963) / Eudora Welty -- The Indian uprising (1965) / Donald Barthelme -- The house of the famous poet (1966) / Muriel Spark -- The cafeteria (1968) / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- City lovers (1975) / Nadine Gordimer -- Voices lost in snow (1976) / Mavis Gallant -- The book of sand (1976) / Jorge Luis Borges -- Father's last escape (1978) / Bruno Schulz -- The burning house (1979) / Ann Beattie -- The shawl (1980) / Cynthia Ozick.

The bookseller (1980) / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Where I'm calling from (1982) / Raymond Carver -- The first American (1983) / Lore Segal -- The red girl (1983) / Jamaica Kincaid -- Love (1983) / William Maxwell -- The way we live now (1986) / Susan Sontag -- Emergency (1991) / Denis Johnson -- The pugilist at rest (1991) / Thom Jones -- Bullet in the brain (1995) / Tobias Wolff -- How to date a brown girl (Black girl, white girl, or halfie) (1995) / Junot Díaz -- People like that are the only people here (1997) / Lorrie Moore -- Brokeback Mountain (1997) / Annie Proulx -- The telephone game (1998) / William Trevor -- The third and final continent (1999) / Jhumpa Lahiri -- Drinking coffee elsewhere (2000) / ZZ Packer -- UFO in Kushiro (2001) / Haruki Murakami -- Seven (2001) / Edwidge Danticat -- The courtesy (2002) / John Berger -- My father addresses me on the facts of old age (2002) / Grace Paley -- Gallatin Canyon (2003) / Thomas McGuane -- What you pawn I will redeem (2003) / Sherman Alexie -- A rich man (2003) / Edward P. Jones -- Chicxulub (2004) / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- The plague of doves (2004) / Louise Erdrich -- Last evenings on Earth (2005) / Roberto Bolañao -- Dimension (2006) / Alice Munro -- Good people (2007) / David Foster Wallace -- Another Manhattan (2008) / Donald Antrium -- In the South (2009) / Salman Rushdie -- Old wounds (2009) / Edna O'Brien -- Midnight in Dostoevsky (2009) / Don DeLillo.

The other place (2011) / Mary Gaitskill -- Going for a beer (2011) / Robert Coover -- Tenth of December (2011) / George Saunders -- What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank (2011) / Nathan Englander -- Black box (2012) / Jennifer Egan -- An abduction (2012) / Tessa Hadley -- A voice in the night (2012) / Steven Millhauser -- The embassy of Cambodia (2013) / Zadie Smith -- The Christmas miracle (2013) / Rebecca Curtis -- Apollo (2015) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- Cold little bird (2015) / Ben Marcus -- The midnight zone (2016) / Lauren Groff -- Cat person (2017) / Kristen Roupenian -- Chaunt (2018) / Joy Williams -- All will be well (2019) / Yiyun Li -- Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2020) / Jamil Jan Kochai -- Visitor (2020) / Bryan Washington -- Café Loup (2022) / Ben Lerner -- Narrowing valley (2022) / Jonathan Lethem -- Crown Heights North (2024) / Rivka Galchen.