Read The Gift of the Magi

A Wall Street copyist answers every instruction with "I would prefer not to" and stops doing anything at all.

Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.

The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.

Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.

Scheherazade keeps herself alive with Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, a story a night.

The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.

Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.

The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.