Presents a collection of fifty-four short stories, including "Gimpel the Fool," "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," and "The Mirror."

Sometimes overshadowed by his work as a novelist, Henry James’s short fiction is an astonishing achievement, a triumph of inventiveness and restless curiosity. This Library of America volume (the third of five volumes devoted to his short fiction) includes among its seventeen stories some of James’s greatest masterpieces. “The Aspern Papers” is a stunning novella about emotional ruthlessness in the service of literary scholarship. “The Pupil” is a densely suggestive account of the moral perplexities underlying the relationship between an impoverished tutor and a young invalid. “The Lesson of the Master” is an intricate study of ambition, disappointment, and the demands of a life devoted to art. “Brooksmith” is a moving portrait of a house servant and “Sir Edmund Orme” is an enthralling ghost story. In “The Liar,” a painter attempts to force a former love to admit that her present husband is a pathological liar; in “The Patagonia,” a young man cavalierly flirts with a young woman en route to her wedding in England, with disastrous consequences. More than half the stories within this volume are available in no other edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In the wake of his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer published several volumes of short stories in collections that mingled recent work with previously untranslated stories written in Yiddish decades earlier. Stretching back to “The Jew from Babylon,” a story first published in 1932, and gathering tales such as “Brother Beetle” and “There are No Coincidences” from the 1960s, the works collected in this Library of America volume, the third of three, serve as a retrospective view of Singer’s achievement as a storyteller. Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah also contains ten stories published in English translation for the first time, selected from the extensive collection of Singer’s papers at the University of Texas. Ranging from “Between Shadows,” an evocative, naturalistic sketch set in Warsaw, to the bittersweet melodrama “Morris and Timma,” to the beguiling fable “Hershele and Hanele, or The Power of a Dream.” These stories enrich our understanding of Singer as a writer. The volume also includes “The Bird,” “My Adventures as an Idealist,” "and “Exes,” stories published in magazines that were not included in any of Singer’s collections. Complementing the seventy-eight stories gathered here is the introduction to Gifts (1985), a version of a lecture Singer had delivered since the early 1960s—sometimes called “Why I Write as I Do”—which illuminates his biography, philosophical outlook, and literary aims. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.