Wasn't sure where to put this. I did consider Fantasy Novels as this particular volume deals with Ghosts, but the whole series overall is a hodge-podge of stories, so I put it here.

The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes] (Funk & Wagnell, 1927)
Volume IX Ghosts
The Red Room by H. G. Wells
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
The Two Drovers by Sir Walter Scott
Kari Aasen In Heaven by Johan Bojer
The Man Without A Country by Edward Everett Hale
A Source Of Irritation by Stacy Aumonier
Mateo Falcone by Prosper Merimee
The Queer Scare by James Hopper
The Queen Of Spades by Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin
Quality by John Galsworthy

I'd only heard of two of these stories before, Sleepy Hollow & Man Without A Country.

Surprisingly I had never heard of The Red Room, but then I read it & realized why. It's not one of Wells better stories, although it's about average for ghost stories of the era, that I've read.

Despite this volume being subtitled Ghosts, The Two Drovers, Man Without A Country, A Source Of Irritation, Mateo Falcone & Quality are not ghost stories. The Introduction (in Volume I) mentions that Ghosts refers not to ghosts in particular, but rather "haunting ideas". It's a weak justification. They should have either come up with a different subtitle or abandoned the subtitle idea. Let's face it, what are the odds that you can come up with a 100 stories that neatly fit 10 at a time into 10 different topics. Some of the topics are vague: Adventure, Courage (seem generally interchangeable), Love, Women (I suppose there were love stories without women in 1927, but I doubt a mainstream publisher would publish them. ;-)

Kari Aasen In Heaven - even for 1927 I can't believe that this would appear in any list of 100 best. A bland little story.

The Man Without A Country - not a bad story, a little heavy on the patriotism, although I do wonder what the rest of the world thinks of it. Have any of you 'foreigners' even heard of it or read it?
Anyway one possible nit in the story is that at one point the author says that Nolan only hears the words United States once more in his life, then the author writes the judge's sentence & the judge says United States twice and at the end of the story the person who was with Nolan at the end mentions United States in prayer. So did the author mean Nolan never heard United States after the day of sentencing or was it a nit?
A possible Inter-Continental Ballistic Nit could be the idea that Nolan spent 56 years being punished for basically a willingness to support Burr. No mention was made of any treasonous actions.
Also it's mentioned that the people in Washington, DC, don't seem to know of Nolan, which seems hard to believe as Nolan must be shifted from ship to ship and all the men assigned to that ship cannot talk of the United States & all his papers must have references to the US cut out.
One explanation for Washington, DC, not knowing of Nolan is that all records had been lost in a fire, except that mention is made of the original 1807 order which seems to be passed from captain to captain & efforts to have Nolan paroled or pardoned must have a paper trail as well.
A more believable explanation is the idea that Nolan might sue the US for this unusual punishment. Although even that sounds weak to me.

Mateo Falcone - A nasty little piece of work. WARNING! SPOILER! Frankly Mateo's decision to shoot his son doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. Presumably it has something to do with honor as his son's actions have labeled Falcone's house a house of traitors. Although seeing as how the person making this claim is a criminal one wonders how much tarnishing his claim would cause. Also it was the actions of this criminal & the officer who caught him who created the situation where the son made the decision he did. And finally, how will shooting his son make a difference? He shot his son out of view of the crook making the charge of being betrayed, so the crook will simply go on claiming that Falcone's is a house of traitors. Like the story, the action seems pointless.

The Queer Scare - The justification for calling it a ghost story comes from a character thinking of radio signals being like a ghost & how static is ripping holes through a composer's 'ghost'. It could be considered an early Science Fiction* story as a larger subplot involves an alleged communication between a little girl & a boy from Mars.
* The term Science Fiction was coined in 1926, this story was first published in 1927.

The Queen Of Spades - This story mentions a Count Saint-Germain, which puzzled me since a few months ago I read a story from the '80s that featured Saint-Germain, and vaguely remembered another story, by a third author, that may have featured Saint-Germain as well. Was Count Saint-Germain an actual historical figure, or a literary character who is in the Public Domain? (like Dracula).
The magical three cards to play didn't make much sense, but then 'it's magic', so I guess it's not supposed to make sense. Still simply choosing a card to play seems unlikely to spark a magical sequence of events. One should think that a person would need to have cast a spell beforehand to activate the magic.

The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories [In Ten Volumes] (Funk & Wagnell, 1927)
Volume I Adventure
The Two-Gun Man by Stewart Edward White
The Reporter Who Made Himself King by Richard Harding Davis
A Lodging For The Night by Robert Louis Stevenson
Friends In San Rosario by O. Henry
The Fourth Man by John Russell
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
The Luck Of Roaring Camp by Bret Harte
The Run Of The Yellow Mail by Frank H. Spearman
The Dummy Chucker by Arthur Somers Roche
A Fight With A Cannon by Victor Hugo

The only story I'd heard of was The Most Dangerous Game.

The Two-Gun Man - Western, yes, Adventure? Well, it features the set-up for an adventure. Buck Johnson leading a posse through a dangerous desert area looking for rustlers. Except that it doesn't happen. Not a bad story with a punchline-type ending, but not what I would consider an adventure story.

A Lodging For The Night - I suppose tramping through the snow-covered streets of Paris trying to avoid the patrol after witnessing a murder can be considered an adventure.
The second line of this story reminded me of Bulwer-Lytton's infamous "Worst opening line of all time."
At one point the protagonist finds a dead woman, later he wonders where his mother is, but, surprisingly, the author does not say if the dead woman was the guy's mother or not.

Friends In San Rosario - Not a bad story. However, as the story involves a bank examiner going through bank records, I think you would have to be either an accountant or a math geek to consider it an adventure.

The Luck Of Roaring Camp - More of a character study of a place than an adventure story. Mostly humorous, but with a real let down ending.

The Dummy Chucker - The title refers to a type of beggar who gets money by pretending to have a seizure, or "chucking the dummy." (In case anyone was wondering.)

I don't have the following two volumes, but I was able to get the list of stories & authors from the Index in Volume X.

Volume II Romance (? a guess based on comments in the Introduction to Volume I)
The Star Spangled Manner by Peter B. Kyne
Youth by Joseph Conrad
The Beauty Spot by Alfred Louis Charles De Musset
The Token by Joseph Hergesheimer
Purple And Fine Linen by May Edginton
The Fury by Paul Heyse
To Love And To Honor by Octavus Roy Cohen
The Mummy's Foot by Theophile Gautier
The Gilded Pheasant by Stephen Morehouse Avery
The Chink And The Child by Thomas Burke

Volume VIII Men (? a guess based on a comment in the Introduction to Volume I & the fact that Volume VII is Women)
Words And Music by Irvin S. Cobb
His First Penitent by James Oliver Curwood
Strain by Albert Richard Wetjen
The Outlaws by Selma Lagerlof
A Change Of Treatment by W. W. Jacobs
The Thief by Feodor Mikailovitch Dostoievski
The Great Triangular Dual by Captain Frederick Marryat
The Passage Of The Red Sea by Henri Murger
The Man From Red Dog by Alfred Henry Lewis
Boppo's Bicycle by James Warner Bellah

Hey KAM, are these in print?

I seriously doubt it.

So, how'd you come across them? Are they yours (or someone you know), or did you check them out of a library? Inquiring minds want to know...

The house that I grew up in had previously been a junk or antique shop (is there a difference? ;-) and the attic had these books in it. 8 of the 10 volumes anyway.

The copyright date is 1927 which is when I assume they were published.

They are small hardcover books, maybe 3x5 inches or thereabouts.

Cool.

They are also red and had golden letters impressed in the spines. Most of the gold is gone and the spines are hard to read now.

Volume III Mystery
The Doomdorf Mystery by Melville Davisson Post
The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy
The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
The Guilty Secret by Paul De Kock
Out Of Exile by Wilbur Daniel Steele
The Knightsbridge Mystery by Charles Reade
Silence by Leonid Andreiev
The Doll's House by Katherine Mansfield
A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins
The Bamboozling Of Mr. Gascoigne by E. Phillips Oppenheim

The Gold Bug is the only one I'd heard of before.

Silence - Okay, a mystery is what drives the drama of this story, but since the mystery is unsolvable it almost seems a cheat to stick it in the Mystery volume. Maybe it would have worked better in the Drama volume? Heck it has a better claim to be a ghost story than some of the ones in the Ghost volume. (Although I probably would have nitted its inclusion there.)

The Doll's House - The real mystery is why is this story considered a mystery? Even with the wide definition of the term mystery this story doesn't qualify. It's actually a story of class in a small town. No mystery whatsoever.

The Bamboozling Of Mr. Gascoigne - I never read this story before, but it seemed familiar. I would guess that this is the basis of any number of conmen caper films.

Red covers, huh?
"Hey kerriem, who wrote that red book?"

Ok, I found them at the library I work at.

The world's one hundred best short stories ... Grant Overton,...

Author: Overton, Grant Martin, 1887-1930, ed.
Title: The world's one hundred best short stories ... Grant Overton, editor-in-chief ...
Publisher: New York, London, Funk & Wagnalls Company [c1927]
Description: Book
10 v. 16 cm.
LC Subject(s): Short stories.

Table of Contents: v. 1. Adventure.
v. 2. Romance.
v. 3. Mystery.
v. 4. Love.
v. 5. Drama.
v. 6. Courage.
v. 7. Women.
v. 8. Men.
v. 9. Ghosts.
v. 10. Humor.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Location: 'Main 3rd floor
Call Number: PN6014 .O8 1927
Number of Items:
Status: No Information Available

Great! I'll just get on inter-library loan and I'll be all set...

Well, now that you have the Library of Congress number and more information about the books, you can check your local libraries. Also, I was listing all the volumes titles, since there was some confusion about them.

Yep, I guessed correctly. Thanks.

I'm sorry, Merat. I didn't mean to seem ungrateful or sarcastic.

That made no sense, given that I signed my username "with a dose of sarcasm."
sigh...
At any rate, I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. Seriously.
Now, off to the library!

Kmorgan,

This story mentions a Count Saint-Germain, which puzzled me since a few months ago I read a story from the '80s that featured Saint-Germain, and vaguely remembered another story, by a third author, that may have featured Saint-Germain as well. Was Count Saint-Germain an actual historical figure, or a literary character who is in the Public Domain? (like Dracula).

The Count of Saint-German is a debated historical figure. He was around in 1750s at the court of the french king, and displayed an enormous knowledge in natural sciences as well as speaking
many languages. Depending on who you ask, he either was a clever con man, who was shot in eckernfoerde (north germany) and buried ignomiously, or he was a mysterious man, who lived for quite a long time. E.g. one countess recognized him after having seen him in venice 50 years ago, and she said he hadn't aged a day. So, were the count and the countess acting together as tricksters, did the count trick the countess, or had he discovered the secret to living long and staying young? (He might have been a time traveller, too.)
So, he is not a historic figure, as not enough is known, and the opinion about him is very controversial. (Although, to be fair, very little is known of most historic people we often take for granted, and objective evidence...)

I believe Casanova also mentioned him in his memoirs.

Don't worry about it, CR.

Thanks constanze & ScottN.

And constanze, please call me either Keith or KAM, I don't like kmorgan. (I can't change that part of my moderator sign-in, unfortunately.)

Volume IV Love
Youth To Youth by Konrad Bercovici
I'm A Fool by Sherwood Anderson
Love And Bread by August Strindberg
Down Bayou Dubac by Barry Benefield
The District Doctor by Ivan Turgenev
A New Year's Eve Confession by Hermann Sudermann
Mademoiselle Olympe Zubriski by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Boless by Maxim Gorki
A Postscript To Divorce by Gouverneur Morris
The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner

Anyone expecting sappy, romantic love stories will be surprised. An interesting collection. While all the stories did deal with love, surprisingly they did deal with other things, like perception, money, loneliness. I wasn't really looking forward to this volume as I was expecting a series of Harlequinesque-type love stories, but only one story heads in that direction, but doesn't come that close, fortunately.

I'm not sure, but it seems like this volume has the shortest group of stories in the volumes I've read so far. It certainly was the fastest read.

The District Doctor had an odd ending. It seemed strangely disconnected from the rest of the story. Like the writer wasn't sure how to properly end his story.

Mademoiselle Olympe Zubriski had a seemingly important paragraph involving the whereabouts of a character, but nothing in the rest of the story ever referred to the paragraph again. As important as the paragraph seemed it could be removed and nothing would seem to be missing.

Several of the stories had the odd storytelling device of 'This story was told to me by a friend and I shall tell it as he told me.' Which, frankly, didn't make much sense. Why not just tell it as the friend is telling the story instead of trying to distance the reader yet further? Possibly the writer may have been uncomfortable telling the story & by distancing himself from the immediacy he could be more comfortable, or maybe if someone pointed out a nit it could be anti-nitted by pointing out that details were probably obscured by the rereretelling.

I never heard of any of these stories before & I do wonder about some of their designations as World's Best.

The world was a much different and less interconnected place back then...

KAM,

when I googled Saint-Germain, I found some links:
a positive description of the mystery man
an critical essay searching historical sources

this was quicker than translating a german lexikon or articles I have about him.

OK, thanks.

KAM,

Several of the stories had the odd storytelling device of 'This story was told to me by a friend and I shall tell it as he told me.' ...

I've noticed this in many of the stories (not only short ones) that are from the last century (19th, not 20th). At first I wondered about it, too, but I guess that in those times, the public wanted books to be "true". There were several outrages and books being scorned which had previously been praised only because the author hadn't experienced what he claimed, but the books were fiction. Today, we shrug it off (as long it doesn't pretend to be non-fiction, it can be invented all it likes), but for some reason, the public thought otherwise in the past. Hence the device of "some guy came to me late at night, told me the following story and died", or "I found a manuscript in some ruined house, and don't know if its true, but here goes" or, as you mentioned "a friend told me..., however, he may have lied.."

Like "The Man Who Would Be King" by Rudyard Kipling.

Volume V Drama
The Return Of The Tide by Kathleen Norris
A Dark-Brown Dog by Stephen Crane
The Silver Crucifix by Antonio Fogazzaro
The Stick-In-The-Muds by Rupert Hughes
The Long Exile by Leo Tolstoy
The Prophetic Pictures by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Manette's Manuscript by Charles Dickens
The Last Lesson by Alphonse Daudet
The Mysterious Mansion by Honore De Balzac
The Necklace by Guy De Maupassant

I have heard of a story called The Necklace, but I'm not sure if it is the same one.

I guess they figured calling it Drama would sell better than calling it Depressing. Oddly enough, compared to the other stories The Necklace almost comes off like a comedy. (It certainly has a punchline ending.)

I think they made a mistake when assigning stories to volumes. In Volume III: Mystery they had The Doll's House which wasn't a mystery, but could be considered a Drama, and here in Drama they have The Mysterious Mansion which could be considered a mystery.

Volume VI Courage
The Trumpet Sounds by Mary Roberts Rhinehart
The Matador Of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
The Substitute by Francois Coppee
The Cloak by Nikolai Vasilievitch Gogol
Fame's Little Day by Sarah Orne Jewett
A Great Rushing Of Wings by Emma-Lindsay Squier
Mr. Onion by Dana Burnet
A Horseman In The Sky by Ambrose Bierce
The Age For Love by Paul Bourget
Our Lady's Juggler by Anatole France

Either they had a different definition of Courage in 1927 or this is another catch-all title. Only four of the stories (The Substitute, A Great Rushing Of Wings, A Horseman In The Sky & The Age For Love) contain moments of what I would consider courage, but in all of them it seems to be a minor point.

The Trumpet Sounds - I fail to see how this can be considered a story of Courage (let alone one of the world's best). It would have fit better in Ghosts as it does feature the ghost of a Roman Catholic priest.

The Matador Of the Five Towns - While the narrator refers to it as an adventure, I don't see how it can be considered a story of Courage.

The Cloak - One character says that another must have courage to see him, but not really.
I wonder if this was intended to be a comedy? The author makes comments and asides that you might find in a comedy.

Fame's Little Day - A cute little story, but how do they figure it's a story of courage?

Mr. Onion - A story of faith & desperation, but unlike A Great Rushing Of Wings the lead characters don't really do anything that I would consider couragous. Not a bad story though.
NANJAT. I wonder how many people would guess this was a story from the 1920s? I think most people reading it, without knowing when it was written, would guess the `60s or `70s.

The Age For Love - Not a bad story, but I think it would have been more appropriate for Love than Courage.

Our Lady's Juggler - A story of Faith, perhaps, but Courage???

Volume VII Women
She Walks In Beauty by Fannie Hurst
Solitude by Ben Ames Williams
P & O by W. Somerset Maugham
The Woman And Her Bonds by Edwin Lefevre
The End Of Candia by Gabriele D'Annunzio
That Famous Love Affair by Stephen French Whitman
The Barn At Giraldon's by Bernice Brown
A Bal Masque by Alexander Dumas
Ruth by Chester P. Crowell
A Mother Sits By The Fire by F. Britten Austin

Never heard of any of these stories.

The End Of Candia - Interesting typo. One of the women is described as a "breast of prey".

Ruth - The Index, the Table Of Contents and the name under the title identify the author as Chester P. Crowell, however the Copyright information says Chester T. Crowell.
Not a bad story, although since it's about a woman telling a man how a woman thinks written by a man, I do wonder what women think of this story?

Volume X Humor
The Boy Penrod by Booth Tarkington
Spring Is Here With Poems And Bathtubs by Will Rogers
The Custody Of The Pumpkin by P.G. Wodehouse
The Accursed House by Emile Gaboriau
"To Make A Hoosier Holiday" by George Ade
The Lady Of Lyons, N.Y. by H.C. Witwer
The Fete At Coqueville by Emile Zola
The Widow's Cruise by Frank R. Stockton
The Regalars by Charles Brackett
I'm In A Hurry by William Hazlett Upson

Never heard of any of these stories.

Spring Is Here With Poems And Bathtubs - The Table Of Contents & the Index has Bathtubs as one word, but the title over the story has Bath Tubs as two words.

The Custody Of The Pumpkin - A P.G. Wodehouse story without Jeeves and Wooster??? Must be a nit.
Yeah, I know he wrote stories not featuring his most famous characters. However, despite the absence of Jeeves & Wooster it really felt like it could have been a Jeeves & Wooster story.

i need some answers!!

The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42

If you want answers to more specific questions, you need to ask those questions first. (Unless the question was "Can you read my mind?", then the answer is "No. Not on a sunday, and the moon is in the wrong phase, and it's raining )