What does a reader look for in a literary “companion”? Someone (or in this case some book) highly knowledgeable in the field, one able to present a mass of information in a clear and accessible form, to give us new directions for reading, to sharpen our feeling and understanding of those works we already know (or think we know), to challenge us with new perspectives, and finally one which may often provoke us with ideas that run counter to our own and which are worth debating. On all these counts the present volume succeeds admirably, though perhaps in some of these roles more than in others.

As a compendium of knowledge this work is full of detailed information that will widen the literary-historical horizons of any individual reader. The thirty-one chapters are divided into four parts, “The Nineteenth Century,” “The Transition to the New Century,” “The Twentieth Century” and a final part on “Expansive Considerations” which consider such topics as “Landscape in American Women's Short Stories,” “The American Ghost Story,” “The Detective Story,” the short-story cycle, and short stories from different ethnic groups. Each chapter is written by a different specialist in that particular field, and in the case of chapters on individual authors (some nineteen chapters or so) this means that the critic can bring to bear on the short stories a detailed knowledge of the writer's whole oeuvre. Information within each essay and the “Notes” and “References for Further Reading” at the end of each chapter ensure that there is a wealth of references here to guide a student in further research.

At the same time this is a book of essays, and this means a fuller sense of critical engagement and discussion than is sometimes the case with the “encyclopedia”-style literary companion.

We want a companion to be more than simply a reliable and approachable cicerone. So the first essay, on “The Emergence and Development of the American Short Story,” raises the question of the connections of the short story with the idea of American democracy (tacitly echoing, perhaps, Frank O'Connor's classic association of the form with “the Little Man” and “submerged population groups”). This theme recurs in several essays in the book, together with other social and historical preoccupations: in particular feminism, questions of race and social identity, and the importance of region in the American short story (as in a notable chapter on “New England Local Color Literature,” one of the few essays, interestingly, that seems particularly informed by late twentieth-century developments in literary theory). This is a book that frequently and aptly reminds us of the short story's reaction, and contribution, to social change.

The majority of the chapters are on individual authors, and here too the essays probe more deeply and widely into the authors' works than is often the case with a book of this kind. However, one sometimes feels the lack of that evaluative engagement which is one of criticism's main functions. One wants an essay to show discriminating enthusiasm, and sometimes one feels that the critic is too content to be merely descriptive. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, is famous for her powerful and groundbreaking story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and there is an interesting discussion of that here, but in the discussion of her other stories there is little attempt to ask how they match up to that story in terms of artistic success. Again, Kate Chopin's stories of adultery are contrasted descriptively with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, leaving the question of relative value untouched. In this respect the essays in this book are in line with a general tendency of much recent academic criticism. The question of form, too, is often subordinate to questions of social theme. The reader sometimes wants to know more of what is distinctive about how the writer deals with his or her material – what makes stories worth reading as literature – as opposed to what ideological attitude the author takes to the subject matter. After all, Faulkner is aptly quoted here as describing the short story as “the most demanding form after poetry” (244).

The question of literary value brings one finally to the matter of this volume's omissions. Whereas there is (rightly) a perceptive whole chapter on Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor merits only four page references in the index, with reference to only two of her stories. O'Connor's relentless focus on spiritual matters and her occasionally problematic (but complex and fascinating) treatment of racial questions may have something to do with this, I suspect. But she is a major writer of the short story whatever one thinks of her religious and social views (indeed, the unfashionable challenge and subtlety of those views should themselves make the stories especially worthy of critical discussion). And Henry James, too (though often referred to in chapters on others), ought surely to have a whole chapter to himself. The chapter on Edith Wharton points out that she has often been seen as “a minor Henry James” (a fact attributed to “twentieth-century critical prejudices” (118)), but the question exactly how she differs from James, and the question where she might equal or outdo him in the short-story genre, are not discussed in the essay.