Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories

Published in the final year of the Great War, this collection gathers twenty-three exceptional short stories from the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, representing some of the finest voices in early twentieth-century literature. Here American writers like Dallas Lore Sharp, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Margaret Prescott Montague sit alongside British talents including E. Nesbit and E.V. Lucas, creating a transatlantic portrait of a world in transformation. The stories range from subtle character studies to sharp social commentary, each demonstrating the compressed power that the best short fiction can achieve. Editor Charles Swain Thomas provides biographical and interpretive notes that illuminate not only the authors' techniques but also his provocative argument about why women writers particularly flourished in this form. This is literary history rendered intimate: twenty-three windows into a world that was about to change forever, selected by a critic who understood that brevity could be its own kind of profundity.