I would definitely recommend these short stories to anyone who wants to become familar with Europe's great Modern fiction writers. Kafka, Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Mann, Chekhov, Conrad, Dineson, and Lawrence are all represented, but you can read these authors in any mediocre anthology; I like this anthology because it includes many lesser known authors like Alberto Moravia and Yuri Kazakov. If you want an intro to Modernism without having to delve through Ulysses or Magic Mountain, start here.