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Subject Guide: Short Stories

Finding a Short Story

The Best American Short Stories (813.082 B464) and O'Henry Prize Stories (813.5 P939) are the two premier anthologies of the best short stories written since the early twentieth century. You might might want to browse through them to find a story you enjoy. Use the Index to the Best American Short Stories and O'Henry Prize Stories (REF 016.813 W585i) to quickly identify prize winners, by author, title, or year.

You can use the Short Story Index (REF 016.8 C771s) to identify thousands of short stories and locate where they were published. Stories are indexed by author, title, and by subject.

Search the library catalog, COLT, for “short stories” or using the name of a particular author of short stories; by doing so you'll retrieve a list of short story anthologies or collections available at the LRC.

Criticism

 

  • Short Story Criticism (REF 809.04 G131W) – Provides introductions to major short story writers from around the world. Gives biographical and critical introductions, principal works, and critical essays about the author's work.

  • Masterplots II Short Story Series (REF 809.3 M272ms) – Provides basic information about author of specific short stories, and then proceeds to summarize and analyze the short story.

  • Twentieth-century Short Story Explication (REF 016.8093t). An index for short story criticism. Identify and locate criticism of short stories, by author or by title.

  • Literature Research Center - Online database that offers critical and biographical information about more than 120,000 authors. It provides full text journal articles and other critical essays, plot summaries and links to authoritative Web sites, author biographies, several thousand author portraits.

  • EBSCO MasterFile - Indexes both popular magazines and scholarly journals and provides full-text access for many of them.

  • JStor - Provides full-text access to important scholarly journals in the arts and sciences.

  • Academic Search Premier - indexes a number of popular magazines and scholarly journals and provides full-text access for many of them

 

Biograhpy

  • Contemporary Authors (REF 928.1 C767) - An ongoing biographical series covering a broad range of authorship. CA is available electronically in the Literature Research Center.

  • Critical Survey of Short Fiction (809.31 M272c) – Provides biographical sketch of author and brief analysis of major works.

  • Dictionary of Literary Biography Series (REF 928 D561) – This series divides authors by era and format (e.g. novel, short story, poetry, drama). The DLB is also available through the online database, Literature Research Center.

  • Reference Guide to Short Fiction (REF 809.31 W335R) – Gives biographical information and general analysis of author's work. The second section of the book has 403 essays on individual short stories.


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