Twelve Stories by American Women (Penguin Classics)

A collection of twelve essential short stories by iconic American women writers that introduces a more diverse canon and emphasizes non-white and queer writers to better represent the experiences of all American women and to understand the importance of the short story for women

“Zibrak curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša.” – The Millions

When Four Stories by American Women was first published by Penguin Classics in 1990, it understandably reflected the second-wave feminist interpretations of that time—a period marked by an impressive recovery of what were then considered to be minor American writers. Since then, the four white women writers included in the volume—Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton—have become canonical figures, and scholars have grown to see their work as only a small part of the rich tapestry of American women’s lives, values, and political beliefs in the fertile period of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century American literature.

Today, we not only have a deeper understanding of the significance of these texts and the complicated nature of their authors’ ideological orientations, scholars and educators have also expanded the canon of American women writers to more frequently foreground the voices of non-white and queer writers whose work speaks more fully to the experiences and beliefs of all American women.

This updated and expanded volume, Twelve Stories by American Women edited by Arielle Zibrak, offers a more diverse selection of writers–including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, María Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Ša, Sui Sin Far, and Barbara E. Pope–; covers hot-button issues such as environmentalism, queerness, and marital status; and provides a new introduction that highlights the developments in the critical understanding of turn-of-the-century American women writers in all of their complexity.