The stories included are:

1. The Dead, James Joyce
-- The final story from Joyce's book "Dubliners", this is one of his most famous stories and an excellent choice, well worth reading.

2. Three Questions, Leo Tolstoy
-- From Tolstoy's collection "What Men Live By, and other tales", describes a King and his efforts to find the answers to what he considers to be the three most important questions in life.

3. The Looking-Glass, Anton Chekhov

4. To Build a Fire, Jack London
-- Possibly the most famous short story by Jack London (it was published in two versions; this is the second and most well-known version), it is the story of a man and his dog, alone travelling on the Yukon Trail on a very cold day.

5. The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde

6. The Diamond Necklace, Guy de Maupassant

7. Alibi Ike, Ring Lardner
-- A very well known story by Lardner, about a baseball player who was always making up excuses. It was made into a movie in 1935 starring Joe E. Brown and Olivia de Havilland.

8. The Birth-Mark, Nathaniel Hawthorne
-- This is a classic story by Hawthorne, it also appears in the collection "Mosses from an Old Manse"

9. The Most Dangerous Game, Richard Connell
-- This story is longer than some of the others in this collection (but still very readable in a hour or less), involving big game hunting on a remote mysterious island

10. The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
-- Poe's famous detective story, his third after "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt".

11. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald
-- Taken from "Tales of the Jazz Age" (note that not all reprints of that collection of short stories include the same selection of stories. This story was in the original collection published in 1922).

12. A Painful Case, James Joyce.
-- Also taken from Joyce's book "Dubliners", this is another very good selection, highly regarded by fans of Joyce.

Thank you to Phil in Magnolia.