Stories of Ourselves, Volume 3 (set stories)

For Paper 1 of CIE IGCSE Literature in English (9-1) (0992), candidates study ten short stories from Stories of Ourselves, Volume 3: Thomas Hardy's comic Wessex tale 'Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver'; Kate Chopin's poignant 'A Pair of Silk Stockings'; Herman Charles Bosman's 'Excursion'; Ray Bradbury's moral fable 'The Flying Machine'; Sam Selvon's comic immigrant story 'The Cricket Match'; David Lodge's 'The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up'; Anita Desai's 'Sale'; Ila Mehta's 'Smoke'; Patricia Grace's 'Fishing'; and Silmy Abdullah's 'Reflection'. The stories range across centuries and continents and share concerns including the submerged or suppressed self, deception and bluff, beauty and responsibility, identity and belonging, and the use of comedy to make serious points.

Note on coverage and sources: the four stories whose public-domain texts we hold or which we can treat authoritatively - Thomas Hardy's 'Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver', Kate Chopin's 'A Pair of Silk Stockings', Ray Bradbury's 'The Flying Machine' and Sam Selvon's 'The Cricket Match' - are covered in full below, with quotations grounded in the texts where we hold them (Hardy, Chopin). The remaining six stories in the set (Bosman's 'Excursion', Lodge's 'The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up', Anita Desai's 'Sale', Ila Mehta's 'Smoke', Patricia Grace's 'Fishing' and Silmy Abdullah's 'Reflection') are modern, copyright-protected works we were not able to source or study closely enough to comment on in detail; they are listed below for completeness but should be studied directly from Stories of Ourselves, Volume 3. No quotations are invented for any story.