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About The Top 10 Short Stories - The African American Story: The top ten short stories written by black American authors

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author? The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme. Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. Across the American continent African Americans have never achieved equal status. Civil war, societal upheavals white ignorance have still left many at the bottom of the heap. For them the American dream is just that, a long way from real life. Yet these authors are unafraid to spell out their lives for future generations, it is a powerful legacy. Hope endures. 01 - The Top 10 - The African American Short Story - An Introduction 2 - The Scapegoat by Paul Laurence Dunbar 3 - The Grist in the Mill by Wallace Thurman 4 - The Stones of the Village by Alice Dunbar Nelson 5 - The Quadroons by Lydia Maria Child 6 - Two Offers by Frances W Harper 7 - The Wife of His Youth by Charles W Chesnutt 8 - The City of Refuge by Rudolph Fisher 9 - Talma by Pauline E Hopkins 10 - The Hoodoo by Martha Gruening 11 - The Black Vampyre by Uriah Derick D'Arcy