The Selected Stories of O. Henry Paperback – May 24, 2017 by O. Henry and , William Sydney Porter (Digireads.com Publishing)

I had never read O. Henry before, but as a lover of short stories his name was unavoidable. I finally decided to remedy my ignorance of this master of the craft, and settled on this Kindle edition as an introduction.



A few notes on the formatting: I loved the clickable Table of Contents, and routinely used it to navigate between different stories. There is one story that is not listed in the ToC... I found it hidden between two others, like an easter egg. Other than this omission, the Table of Contents was extremely useful, and the whole thing was much better put together than I expected for a $2 e-book.

The stories themselves are wonderful. While this volume contains a great many stories, it was brief enough that I didn't become completely tired of them by the end. Enough of O. Henry's work relies on similar twists and themes that I did find myself predicting the outcomes by the end, but even knowing there was a twist coming and looking for it, the majority of the stories still surprised me. These clever endings are enough of a trademark for Henry that it's easy to get distracted by them and miss the quality of the writing... his dialogue and wordplay are always witty and amusing.

O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, is known for his short stories with surprise endings. In this collection you will find the following beloved O. Henry stories: “The Plutonian Fire”, “The Princess and the Puma”, “By Courier”, “The Gift of the Magi”, “The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein”, “Mammon and the Archer”, “The Memento”, “Springtime À La Carte”, “The Last Leaf”, “The Skylight Room”, “The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock”, “The Count And The Wedding Guest”, “The Romance of a Busy Broker”, “The Higher Pragmatism”, “While the Auto Waits”, “The Social Triangle”, “After Twenty Years”, “The Green Door”, “A Lickpenny Lover”, “Lost on Dress Parade”, “Transients in Arcadia”, “Brickdust Row”, “The Furnished Room”, “Schools And Schools”, “The Defeat of the City”, “Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches”, “From Each According to his Ability”, “The Cabellero’s Way”, “Hygeia at the Solito”, “The Higher Abdication”, “A Double-Dyed Deceiver”, “Friends in San Rosario”, “The Hiding of Black Bill”, “Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet”, “The Man Higher Up”, “The Handbook of Hymen”, “Telemachus, Friend”, “The Lonesome Road”, “A Retrieved Reformation”, “The Renaissance at Charleroi”, “The Thing’s the Play”, “Tobin’s Palm”, “A Newspaper Story”, “Proof of the Pudding”, and “Confessions Of A Humorist”. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.