Part I. Contexts: 1. Transatlantic print culture and the emergence of short narratives Oliver Scheiding; 2. The short story and the early magazine Jared Gardner; 3. The short story fad: gender, pleasure, and commodity culture in late-nineteenth century magazines Brad Evans; 4. The best of the best: anthologies, prizes, and the short story canon Alexander Manshel; 5. The story of a semester: short fiction and the program era Loren Glass; 6. The short story in the age of the internet Simone Murray; Part II. Histories: 7. The war story Cody Marrs; 8. Narratives from below: working class short fiction Owen Clayton; 9. The short story and the popular imagination: pulp and crime Will Norman; 10. Love what you do: neoliberalism, emotional labor, and the short story as a service Lee Konstantinou; 11. Local color to multiculturalism: minority writers in the short story and ethnographic markets Long Le-Khac; Part III. People and Places: 12. Native American short stories Hertha D. Sweet Wong; 13. African American short fiction: from reform to renaissance Amina Gautier; 14. Little postage stamps: the short story, the American south, and the world Coleman Hutchison; 15. Regional stories and the environmental imagination Sylvan Goldberg; 16. Concrete illuminations: the short story and/as urban revolution Myka Tucker-Abramson; Part IV. Theories: 17. Short fiction, language learning, and innocent comedy Gabriella Safran; 18. The technology of the short story: from sci fi to cli fi Shelley Streeby; 19. Homelessness: the short story and other media Gavin Jones; 20. The human and the animal: toward posthumanist short fiction Michael Lundblad; 21. The end of the story: grammar, gender, and time in the contemporary short story Lola Boorman; 22. The affordances of mere length: computational approaches to short story analysis Mark Algee-Hewitt, Anna Mukamal and J. D. Porter.