This book is ideal for second semester courses in Introduction to Literature, Literature and Composition, Introductory Fiction and Creative Writing courses. This anthology is an international story collection by critically-acclaimed authors, and includes essays by renowned writers and scholars on the key stylistic elements of this relatively new art form: the very short story. Authors of these classic, modern, and avant garde stories include Alice Walker, Yasunari Kawabata, Helena Vivien Viramontes, Amy Hemple, H.H. Munro, and Anton Chekhov, plus many others. It provides students with an exciting taste of global literature, and writing guidelines, which include a list of 10 succinct crafting instructions, enable students to focus on key aspects of writing as they analyze the authors' prose and write their own very short stories.In I & I (Jamaican for me and my people or me and my God), the characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by tumultuous racial history, the disamenities of urban strife and the stark realities of contemporary relationships. The writing in these eleven narratives is soft, but the observations are harshly accurate. The surface structure of the eleven poems appears simplistic, yet subtle changes in tone or gesture move the reader from the mundane to the sublime, as in the poem about U.S. 1, the California highway. The prose in this unique collection complete a matrix, allowing the reader to ponder how the Kabalist-themed essays on ancient Egyptian spirituality correspond to the poems and stories of the same number. The numbering begins with zero, the most comprehensive number, according to the ancient scribes of Kemet, or “Egypt” (the Greek name for “the land of the blacks”). The poetry and prose in this dynamic collection recall Baldwin at his most stylistic and Manto at his most evocative. Assured and stunning in voice and vision, it could well have been called, “A Different Kind of Light.”