Includes bibliographical references (pages 373-416) and indexes.

Introduction : Notes of a common reader -- Agostino / Alberto Moravia -- Animal farm : a fairy story / George Orwell -- Another Brooklyn / Jacqueline Woodson -- The awakening / Kate Chopin -- The ballad of the sad café / Carson McCullers -- Big boy leaves home / Richard Wright -- Bonjour tristesse / Françoise Sagan -- Candide, or optimism / Voltaire -- Charlotte's web / E. B. White -- A clockwork orange / Anthony Burgess -- The country girls / Edna O'Brien -- Death in Venice / Thomas Mann -- Dept. of speculation / Jenny Offill -- The dry heart / Natalia Ginzburg -- Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton -- Evil under the sun / Agatha Christie -- The fifth child / Doris Lessing -- The ghost writer / Philip Roth -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The hour of the star / Clarice Lispector -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- If Beale Street could talk / James Baldwin -- If this is a man [survival in Auschwitz] / Primo Levi -- July's people / Nadine Gordimer -- The lathe of heaven / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Lord of the flies / William Golding -- The lost daughter / Elena Ferrante -- The lover / Marguerite Duras -- Lucy / Jamaica Kincaid -- Maus I : a survivor's tale : my father bleeds history / Art Spiegelman -- Middle passage / Charles Johnson -- Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf -- The hours / Michael Cunningham -- The nickel boys / Colson Whitehead -- No one writes to the colonel / Gabriel García Marquez -- The old man and the sea / Ernest Hemingway -- On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan -- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- Oranges are not the only fruit / Jeanette Winterson -- Pale horse, pale rider / Katherine Anne Porter -- A pale view of hills / Kazuo Ishiguro -- Passing / Nella Larsen -- The perfect nanny / Leïla Slimani -- A portrait of the artist as a young man / James Joyce -- The postman always rings twice / James M. Cain -- The prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark -- The red badge of courage / Stephen Crane -- Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption / Stephen King -- The sailor who fell from grace with the sea / Yukio Mishima -- The stranger / Albert Camus -- Sula / Toni Morrison -- Surfacing / Margaret Atwood -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- Things fall apart / Chinua Achebe -- Tokyo Ueno station / Yu Miri -- Waiting for the barbarians / J. M. Coetzee -- We have always lived in the castle / Shirley Jackson -- Wide Sargasso sea / Jean Rhys -- Afterword : What's not here -- My favorite fifteen great short books.