Short Fiction and Critical Contexts: A Compact Reader is a challenging, versatile, and engaging resource for the study of short fiction. This collection features a diverse group of writers from differing ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds and highlights female and Canadian authors. Each story is introduced by a brief biography of the author, information on his or her approach to writing fiction, and information about the story itself. The second half of the text collects a variety of documents written on the topic of the short story, many by the authors featured in the first half of the text. The combination of stories and their context makes this an invaluable reader for students studying the short story at any level.