The World of the Short Story: A Twentieth Century Collection

Overview

The World of the Short Story: A Twentieth Century Collection, edited by Cliff Fadiman, is a broad, reader-friendly anthology that gathers fifty short stories spanning the century's major literary movements and geographic regions. The selections range from intimate domestic sketches to formally adventurous experiments, presenting the short story not as a single, fixed form but as a lively arena where voice, technique, and social concern intersect. The anthology aims to map the variety of 20th-century fiction while remaining accessible to general readers and students.
Fadiman's taste favors pieces that both exemplify particular styles and reward repeated reading. Each selection offers a self-contained experience, while the whole collection implicitly traces the shifting concerns of modern life: industrialization and urban crowding, war and dislocation, psychological interiority, decolonization and cultural encounter, and the ongoing negotiation of tradition and modernity.

Content and Scope

The collection is deliberately international, drawing on writers from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and including translated work that highlights the global circulation of aesthetic innovations across languages. Chronologically arranged sections allow readers to sense continuity and rupture across decades: early modernist experiments appear alongside realist and naturalist pieces, mid-century narratives reflect wartime trauma and existential questioning, and later stories show postwar pluralism and postcolonial perspectives.
Variety in length and tone is a hallmark of the anthology. Short, sharp parables sit beside longer, more leisurely narratives; satirical sketches alternate with poignant psychological portraits. The overall effect is a panorama of the short story's capacity to compress experience, complicate perspective, and deliver emotional as well as intellectual impact within a compact form.

Themes and Styles

Recurring thematic threads run through the selections: alienation and the fracturing of identity, the moral ambiguities of modern life, the impact of social change on intimate relationships, and the collision between local customs and global forces. Formally, the anthology showcases a wide range: economical realism, interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness, allegory and fable, minimalist precision, and the surreal or fabulist modes that would feed into magic realism and other late-century innovations.
Fadiman's arrangement also highlights how technique serves theme. Stories that experiment with narrative voice often do so to dramatize subjectivity or unreliability; realist sketches frequently foreground social detail to illuminate broader forces; and allegorical or fantastical pieces invite ethical or metaphysical readings. The reader is encouraged to notice how similar concerns, loss, desire, power, receive radically different treatments across cultures and eras.

Editorial Approach

The editor provides concise introductions and contextual notes that situate each author and selection without overwhelming commentary. Biographical sketches and brief historical pointers help readers place stories within larger literary and cultural currents, while the choice to include many translated works underscores an inclusive, cosmopolitan vision of the short story as an international art form.
The anthology's pedagogical usefulness is clear: it functions equally well as a classroom resource and as a general reader's companion. The pacing and variety make the volume suited to sampling widely or returning to individual stories for close study.

Significance

As a curated cross-section of 20th-century short fiction, the collection illuminates both the enduring strengths of the genre and its capacity for renewal. It demonstrates how the short story continually adapts to new historical pressures and artistic impulses while preserving a focus on concentrated human encounter. For readers seeking a consolidated view of modern short fiction's range and richness, the anthology offers a dependable and lively entry point that rewards exploration and reflection.