Research Guides: English: Finding Short Stories

Finding a Short Story

Short stories come in collections, such as Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, and sometimes finding what collection a specific individual short story is located in can be difficult. These tools can help you identify what collection to use.

Catalogs

Use the catalogs to find a collection. More recent items are likely to the table of contents, so if you search for a particular short story it will find it within a collection.

Beeghly Library Catalog (OPAL)
Searches books at Heidelberg and other private Ohio academic libraries. Books from other libraries can be shipped to Beeghly.
OhioLINK Catalog
Searches books at Ohio academic libraries. Books from other libraries can be shipped to Beeghly.

Online Search

The American & English Literature database also has a number of short stories available.

American & English Literature This link opens in a new window
Full text of books and other sources of poetry, drama and prose originally published in print. Also includes 21 historic editions of the Bible in English.
contains many works of poetry, drama, and prose, based on books and other sources originally published in print. Collections include: 20th Century African American Poetry Collection; 20th Century American Poetry Collection; 20th Century English Poetry Collection; African American Poetry 1700-1900 Collection; American Poetry 1600-1900 Collection; Bible in English; Bibliography of American Literature; Early American Fiction 1774-1850; Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare; Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1700-1800; English Poetry 600-1900 Collection; English Prose Drama 1280-1915; English Verse Drama 13-19th Centuries; W.B. Yeats Collections.

Short Story Index provides a mix of full-text short stories and citations for finding short stories in collections, journals, and other sources.

Short Story Index (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new window
Citations for hundreds of thousands of short stories
Short Story Index is an essential resource for readers seeking short stories by author or genre, or for those researching a body of work of a literary figure. Indexes more than 117,000 stories from more than 4,200 collections and anthologies as far back as 1984.

While Google Books only shows a preview, searching a short story's title should identify what collections have that short story. You can then get the book using the Beeghly or OhioLINK catalogs.

Google Books
Google Books searches the full text of millions of scanned books. Search for the title of a short story, and Google Books may be able to identify what collections it is located in.