Playing it straight by making it up: imaginative leaps in the personal essay / Facts and fancy: the "nonfiction short story" / Historiografiction: the fictionalization of history in the short story / Closure in Sandra Cisneros's "Women hollering creek" / The silence of the bears: Leslie Marmon Silko's writerly act of spiritual storytelling / The feminine consciousness as nightmare in the short-short stories of Joyce Carol Oates / Postmodernism in women's short story cycles: Lorrie Moore's Anagrams / Crippled by the truth: oracular pronouncements, titillating titles, and the postmodern ethic / Male paradigms in Thom Jones and Tom Paine / Eloquence and plot in Denis Johnson's Jesus' son: the merging of premodern and modernist narrative / Ardor with a silent H: submitting to the ache of love in Edmund White's "Skinned alive" / The genre which is not one: Hemingway's In our time, difference, and the short story cycle / Short stories to film: Richard Ford's "Great falls" and "Children" as Bright angel / Melancholia and the death motif in Richard Brautigan's short fiction / Perhaps she had not told him all the story: the disnarrated in James Joyce's Dubliners / Multiple narrative frames in R.R.R. Dhlomo's "Juwawa" / Beyond genre: Canadian surrealist short fiction / Postmodernism in the American short story: some general observations and some specific cases