To mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of ten American writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize and perhaps the most influential and beloved Jewish-American author, The Library of America presents Collected Stories, a major celebration of Singer's achievement. Beginning with "Gimpel the Fool," whose title story brought Singer to prominence in America when translated from Yiddish by Saul Bellow in 1953, and concluding with "The Death of Methuselah," the collection published three years before his death in 1991, this three-volume edition brings together for the first time all the story collections Singer published in English in the versions he called his "second originals"—translations he supervised and collaborated on himself, revising as he worked. In addition, Collected Stories includes thirteen previously uncollected stories from the Ransom Center collections.

Here are nearly 200 stories—the full range of Singer's vision encompassing Old World shtetl and New World exile. Born in Poland in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer was raised in the traditional culture that was to be annihilated during World War II, and his haunting stories testify to the richness of that vanished world. Singer's Old World stories reveal a wild, mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism evocative of both local storytelling traditions and dark undercurrents born of Singer's own concerns and obsessions.

After leaving Poland, Singer settled in Manhattan and—slowly at first, then dramatically—made himself an American writer, in the process transforming American culture and being transformed himself, in his life and his work. Exploring the daily lived reality and imaginative boundaries of Jewish culture as it was transplanted to the United States, he created characters—many of them survivors of the Holocuast— that dramatized the conflicts not only of postwar American Jews, but of an entire society committed both to cultural pluralism and to assimilation. His achievement in the stories gathered in Collected Stories reveal him to be the emblematic immigrant American writer, whose vision and insights expanded his adopted country's sense of its own culture.