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“This critical anthology is the result of a brilliant idea….A volume which not only will lead most readers to place more value on a number of stories previously passed over but that will likely extend the reader’s sense of Hemingway’s artistry.” —Studies in American Fiction

Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction is a groundbreaking exploration of Ernest Hemingway’s least‑examined stories, works long overshadowed by the towering fame of his novels. The collection reveals how many of Hemingway’s short stories have been cursorily summarized, misread, or simply ignored. Through twenty‑five original essays, leading scholars illuminate the breadth, experimentation, irony, and emotional range found in over thirty stories—tales that challenge the conventional “code hero” paradigm and expose a richer, more complex Hemingway. What emerges is a vivid portrait of an artist whose most overlooked pieces frequently contain his sharpest innovations and deepest moral provocations. 

Structured with historical awareness and critical freshness, the volume ranges from Hemingway’s earliest apprentice fiction (“The Mercenaries,” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man”) to his experimental, metafictional, or posthumously published works (“A Natural History of the Dead,” “Get a Seeing‑Eyed Dog,” “A Man of the World”). Contributors draw from an impressive range of approaches—rhetorical theory, linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, religious studies, Bakhtinian dialogism, and close textual analysis. Along the way, they revisit stories distorted by biography (“Out of Season,” “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”), reconsider stories dismissed as trivial (“A Pursuit Race,” “A Day’s Wait”), and restore neglected gems such as “Wine of Wyoming,” “The Sea Change,” and “Homage to Switzerland.” 

This book will captivate scholars of modernism, Hemingway specialists, teachers seeking fresh classroom material, and general readers who want to discover the Hemingway hidden between the lines. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of a major American writer and the vibrant life of the short story form.

Tracing the origins of the modern short story, Michael Gorra provides the first fully realized picture of a century’s worth of great tales. 

The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.

What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.

What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.