Reading the Short Story: A Student's Guide to Selected British, Irish and American Works, Paperback

Beginning with a brief history and evolution of the short story genre, alongside an overview of the key short story writers, and an explanatory chapter of literary criticism, this book aims to give readers insight into the works by canonical British, Irish, and American authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, and more. Applying close reading skills and critical literary approaches to twelve selected short stories in English, this work conducts comparative analyses to reveal the interrelationships between the texts, the authors, the readers, and the sociocultural contexts. Developed and tested in literature classes at university over several semesters, this book addresses key issues, topics and trends in the short story genre.

Anna Wing-bo Tso is an associate professor who has over ten years of English teaching experience at various universities in Hong Kong, where she directs the Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities and heads the Master of Arts in Applied English Linguistics. She has published widely on literacies, children's literature, and language education in refereed books and peer-reviewed journals across Asia, Europe, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Australia. Scarlett Lee is an English teacher and Cambridge English examiner in Rome. She works as a freelance literary critic.