O Henry S Short Stories

"The Gift of the Magi" is a short story by O. Henry first published in 1905. The story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money. As a sentimental story with a moral lesson about gift-giving, it has been popular for adaptation, especially for presentation at Christmas time.

William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), better known as O. Henry, led a life similar to those of his own fictional characters. Convicted of embezzlement, he drew inspiration from his prison experiences.nbsp;This volume includes "The Ransom of Red Chief," "The Last Leaf,"nbsp; the classic, "The Gift of the Magi" and 13 more.

Now celebrating its centenary, this prestigious annual anthology gathers the twenty best new short stories published in the previous year. An Anchor Books Original. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019--continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. The winning writers are an impressive mix of celebrated names and new, emerging voices. Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Colombian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit. The uniformly breathtaking stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. List of 2019 winners: Tessa Hadley John Keeble Moira McCavana Rachel Kondo Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Stephanie Reents Alexia Arthurs Valerie O’Riordan Patricia Engel Kenan Orhan Sarah Hall Bryan Washington Isabella Hammad Weike Wang Caoilinn Hughes Souvankham Thammavongsa Liza Ward Doua Thao Alexander MacLeod John Edgar Wideman Prize Jurors 2019: Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, Lara Vapynar

"In the early twentieth century, William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, captured the fancy and touched the hearts of newspaper and magazine writers throughout the United States. Interpreted as quintessentially American, O. Henry's short fiction made him the spokesman for Manhattan's "four million" during his own era. In nearly three hundred stories, O. Henry's artistry, style, and technique has been compared favorably with writers such as Conrad, Hardy, and Wharton." "In this new volume, Eugene Current-Garcia presents a comparative survey of critical attitudes and evaluations of O. Henry's short fiction from as early as 1908, through the 1920s and 1930s, and up to more recent decades. Current-Garcia traces the influence of O. Henry's childhood in North Carolina, as well as his early adulthood spent in the western frontier in Texas and along the border of Mexico. The landscapes of his stories were vastly enriched by his unique life experiences, both as a convicted criminal who learned to write short stories while in jail and, later, as a literary celebrity in New York City." "O. Henry: A Study of the Short Fiction contains excerpts from select critics on O. Henry, as well as an annotated bibliography and a comprehensive index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved