"This volume focuses on issues raised by James's short fiction by treating a significant number of less-scrutinized works and by taking new routes into some of the more familiar tales. These new paths into what James termed his "brevities" challenge set assumptions about these texts and provide the reader/researcher of James with insights into valuable new directions for study.". "The authors of the seventeen essays in this volume invite a number of angles and offer the challenge of multiple approaches. They take provocative stands and dare us to reencounter James, to rethink what James might have been up to.". "For all their diversity, the authors trace a common thread throughout the Jamesian short fiction: how to handle the anxiety of uncertainty, the subversive thrust of (mis)perception, our environment's right and necessary indecipherability, James's patient revelations that revelation itself is a deception, a surpriser, and a risk."--BOOK JACKET.