Contains 17 short stories, arranged chronologically from 1836 to 2014. Those by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jorge Luis Borges were selected by Folio, with the remainder voted through from a Readers' Choice shortlist.

There are celebrated writers from the 19th century – Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Tell-Tale Heart’), Charles Dickens (‘The Signalman’) and Anton Chekhov (‘Gooseberries’) – as well as modern masters, such as Dorothy Parker (‘The Waltz’) and Octavia E. Butler (‘Speech Sounds’).