导语

  

    This collection of 100 of O Henry’s finest stories is a showcase for the sheer variety of one of America’s best and best-loved short story writers.
    The variety of the stories is amazing; O Henry is as at home describing life south of the Rio Grande as he is chronicling the activities and concerns of ’the four million’ ordinary citizens who inhabited turn--of-the-century New York.They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humour that have made O Henry’s stories popular for the last century.

内容提要

  

    THE STORIES OF O HENRY are in the great tradition of American short story writing that stretches from Irving and Poe through to Damon Runyon and even P J O’Rourke. In all, Henry wrote two hundred and seventy stories, and they consist of a rich mixture of semi-realism, sentiment and surprise endings. Though he is frequently thought of as a ’funny’ writer, O Henry was, like Runyon,capable of addressing the darker side of life - A Municipal Report and The Furnished Room are two such stories. At the same time, his genius for comic invention flows through the pages of this book,exemplified by the epicurean exchange in Hostages to Momus between the narrator and Caligula Polk.

The Gift of the Magi
A Cosmopolite in a Cafe
Between Rounds
The Skylight Room
A Service of Love
The Coming-out of Maggie
The Cop and the Anthem
Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein
Mammon and the Archer
Springtime a la Carte
From the Cabby’s Seat
An Unfinished Story
Sisters of the Golden Circle
The Romance of a Busy Broker
The Furnished Room
The Brief Debut of Tildy
Hearts and Crosses
Telemachus, Friend
The Handbook of Hymen
The Trimmed Lamp
The Pendulum
The Assessor of Success
The Buyer from Cactus City
The Badge of Policeman O’Roon
Briekdust Row
The Making of a New Yorker
Vanity and some Sables
The Social Triangle
The Lost Blend
A Harlem Tragedy
’The Guilty Party’
The Last Leaf
The Count and the Wedding Guest
The Tale of a Tainted Tenner
Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet
The Hand that Riles the World
The Exact Science of Matrimony
Conscience in Art
The Man Higher Up
A Tempered Wind
Hostages to Momus
The Ethics of Pig
Strictly Business
The Day Resurgent
The Fifth Wheel
The Poet and the Peasant
The Thing’s the Play
A Ramble in Aphasia
A Municipal Report
Compliments of the Season
Proof of the Pudding
Past One atRooney’s
’The Rose of Dixie’
The Third Ingredient
Thimble, Thimble
Buried Treasure
The Moment of Victory
The Head-Hunter
The Last of the Troubadours
The Sleuths
Witches’ Loaves
Holding up a Train
Ulysses and the Dogman
At Arms with Morpheus
A Ghost of a Chance
Jimmy Hayes and Muriel
The Door of Unrest
The Duplicity of Hargreaves
Let Me Feel Your Pulse
Law and Order
Transformation of Martin Burney
Roads of Destiny
The Guardian of the Accolade
The Enchanted Profile
’Next to Reading Matter’
A Double-dyed Deceiver
The Passing of Black Eagle
A Retrieved Reformation
The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss
Two Renegades
A Lickpenny Lover
Dougherty’s Eye-opener
’Little Speck in Garnered Fruit’
While the Auto Waits
A Comedy in Rubber
One Thousand Dollars
The Shocks of Doom
Nemesis and the Candy Man
The Memento
The Hypotheses of Failure
Calloway’s Code
’Girl’
A Technical Error
A Blackjack Bargainer
Madame Bo-Peep of the Ranches
A Ruler of Men
The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear
The Marionettes
The Dream