In his short life, Stephen Crane produced stories that are among the most enduring in the history of American fiction. This volume does not include perhaps his most famous work, "The Red Badge of Courage," but instead brings to the fore other stories where impressionistic, hallucinatory, and realistic situations are conveyed by the cold irony of Crane′s narrative voice. The stories included here are: "The Monster," "An Experiment in Misery," "A Mystery of Heroism," "An Episode of War," "The Upturned Face," "The Open Boat," "The Pace of Youth," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "The Blue Hotel."

Alongside AN EXPERIMENT IN MISERY, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Dennis Cooper′s forthcoming collection, UGLY MAN, will be printed at the back of this volume.