This book has grown out of the former anthology Short Stories
of the English Language: A Course Book published by Chongqing
University Press in 2009. In that book we have laid heavy emphasis
on language, theme, characters,plot, and stylistic matters. Here
this Great Stories anthology aims to read those same stories as in
the Course Book more profoundly and more academically. For this
purpose, we have deleted the after-text exercises, added short
summaries and commentary entailed by a further reading list, and
most importantly, supplied each story with more detailed linguistic
and cultural notes in order that our readers--students and
teachers--can understand more tangibly.