When the five-volume collection known as “Short Story Classics (American)” was planned, it was entirely evident that it should be supplemented by a collection of the best examples of the short story to be found in foreign literatures.
The five volumes now offered to the public are designed to supply this lack. They contain seventy-eight short stories, chosen from the literatures of France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—works of importance that have made their mark in the literary world.
The aim has been not only to represent the most widely sympathetic writers, but to select their most generally interesting as well as characteristic stories. The stories have all been written within the last seventy-five years, which has this advantage for the reader, that the scope of the collection may be said to lie within present-day interests.
None of the stories by the following authors appear in any other collection:
FRENCH
Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Scribe, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Prosper Mérimée, Jules Janin, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Octave Feuillet, Alexandre Dumas (Fils), Erckmann-Chatrian, Alphonse Daudet, André Theuriet, Ludovic Halévy, Émile Gaboriau, Émile Zola, Jules Claretie, François Coppée, Anatole France, Joris Karl Huysmans, Jean Richepin, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Henri de Régnier, Henri Lavedan, Marcel Prévost, Georges Courteline, Alphonse Allais.
RUSSIAN
Poushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoievski, Tolstoi, Korolénko, Garshin, Potapenko, Chekhov, Chirikov, Teleshov, Maxim Gorki, “Skitalitz,” Andreiev.
ITALIAN AND SCANDINAVIAN
Enrico Castelnuovo, Giovanni Verga, Antonio Fogaszaro, Edmondo de Amicis, Matilda Serao, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Grazia Deledda, Björnson, Holger Drachmann, Jacob Ahrenberg, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Alexander Kielland, August Strindberg, Hermann Bang, Selma Lagerlöf.