Tales from the Inner City
Artistic Short Story Collection
In this heavily illustrated short story collection, Tan explores the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. Using animals to link together the narrative, Tan explores such topics as the eternal relationship between mankind and dogs, the place that fishing holds in one community's daily life, and a vignette about all of the members of a governing board turning into frogs. Some of these tales are longer narrative form, and some are blank verse.
This would be a very useful book for a classroom studying essential conflicts in literature, since the stories are predominately about the theme of man versus nature. This theme is explored in a variety of approaches that would be conducive for interpretation. I can't think of a lot of collections of literary short stories for middle grade students; this is certainly a level above the Guys Read short story collections on a variety of themes, or the Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, two of the most popular short story collections in my library.