Do I need to create a separate works-cited-list entry for a story in a collection of stories by one author?

Note: This post relates to content in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. For up-to-date guidance, see the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook.

If a book collects works by one author, creating separate works-cited-list entries for each story, poem, or essay that you cite from the book is usually unnecessary. If, however, your discussion focuses on only one work in the collection—for example, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women, in the collection Ten Plays, by Euripides, or Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe—then you might create a separate entry for the work, as shown in the examples below, taken respectively from pages 27 and 35 of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook:

Euripides. The Trojan Women. Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche, New American Library, 1998, pp. 457-512.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James A. Harrison, vol. 4, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902, pp. 250-58. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079574368;view=1up;seq= 266.