Favorite short story collection?

[Oppei]

Favorite short story collection?

A couple of my favorites are ;

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel's,
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, and
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

Id like some opinions, maybe I could find something new, and good. :cheers2:

[108 fountains]

My favorite is Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy, but there are so many good collections out there, including:
- any of the various collections of O Henry Stories
- A Day in the Country by Guy de Maupassant (as well as others collections by him)
- The Machineries of Joy by Ray Bradbury (as well as other collections by him)
- any of the collections of Edgar Allan Poe

[Lykren]

I'm reading Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories right now, and it's quite interesting. They are all very skillfully done.

I peeked into Lydia Davis's collection entitled "Can't and Won't" yesterday and it was also intriguing. If you'd like something more experimental that might be something you want to pick up.

[stlukesguild]

J.L. Borges- Labyrinths
J.L. Borges- Ficciones
J.L. Borges- El Hacedor (Dream Tigers)
J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions
Italo Calvino- The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
Theophile Gautier- My Fantoms/Collected Short Stories
Julio Cortazar- Blow-Up and Other Stories
Flannery O'Connnor- The Complete Stories
Nathaniel Hawthorne- Tales and Sketches
Franz Kafka- Collected Stories
Edgar Allan Poe- Poetry and Tales
anon.- The Arabian Nights
Giovanni Boccaccio- Decameron
E.T.A. Hoffmann- Tales
Guy de Maupassant- Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway- The Complete Short Stories
Nikolai Gogol- The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Anton Checkov- Collected Short Stories
Tomasso Landolfi- Gogols Wife and Other Stories
Augusto Monterroso- Complete Works and Other Stories

[Pierre Menard]

Ficciones - Borges
The Aleph - Borges
Book of Sand - Borges
Look, everything Borges wrote.

Rashomon and 17 Other Stories - Ryonuske Akutagawa
Collected Stories - Vladimir Nabokov (very underrated when it comes to short stories)
Collected Stories - Isaac Bashevis Singer
Complete Stories - Flannery O' Connor
Lost in the Funhouse - John Barth

And I'd recommend checking out the stories from Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hawthorne.

[JBI]

Thousand and one Nights.

"San Yan" by Feng Menglong.
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

[Pierre Menard]

Oh I forgot 'Dubliners' by James Joyce. One of my very favourite works full stop.

[SilvanDitties]

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
A Sportman's Sketches - Ivan Turgenev

[Lokasenna]

I shall join the Borges fanboy-ism...

I'm not a huge fan of the short story generally, though as a medium for horror fiction it can be excellent - so add the likes of Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and Ambrose Bierce to my list.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Rudyard Kipling collection, some examples include The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Puck of Pooks Hill and others
Complete Edgard Allan Poe Tales
Anton Chekov Short Stories
Jack London - Tales of the North
Alred Hitchcock Presents- More Stories For Late at Night. Compilation of short stories from various authors
A Treasury of American Folklore - Stories, Ballads and Traditions of the People with a forward by Carl Sandburg

[Seasider]

w.Somerset Maugham wrote several collections of short stories. I think "Rain" is my favourite story. It made a good film too.

[chrisvia]

Borges
Kafka
McCullers
Carver
Poe
Hemingway
O'Connor

[Poetaster]

I'll be really boring and say: any edition of Lovecraft, Borges, Kafka, Joyce's Dubliners, Poe, Hemingway, and The Decameron.

[bouquin]

Joyce Carol Oates: HEAT and other stories
Raymond Carver: WHERE I'M CALLING FROM - selected stories
T.C. Boyle: Stories
James Plunkett: THE TRUSTING AND THE MAIMED and other Irish stories

[ladderandbucket]

What I like most about short stories is their potential to completely twist your mind in a matter of minutes. I think the best ones are more like thought experiments and they are my preferred format for reading science fiction.

My favourites:

Borges - Labyrinths
Ted Chiang - Stories of your life
Greg Egan - Axiomatic
Philip K Dick - Collected stories
J G Ballard - Complete short stories

[mona amon]

I haven't been reading short stories lately, but my favourites are Maugham, Hemingway, Poe. My favourite short story is The Crime Wave at Blandings by P G Wodehouse.

[Snowqueen]

Guy de Maupassant- Selected Short stories
O Henry -100 Selected short stories (I haven't read all yet)
D. H Lawrance- Selected short stories
Tolstoy- Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
The Complete Saki
Saadat Hassan Manto- Manto Nama

I've read some stories by Turgenev but wasn’t really impressed by them. My younger sister wanted me to read Chekhov's Vanka and I did. Now it is one of my favourites.

[Seasider]

"The Odour of Chrysanthemums" is a great story by DH Lawrence. I am not a Lawrence fan in general but this story is special.

[luhsun]

Robots series. Heck, the first three books of the foundation series are short stories.

[RetsixArp]

One of my favorites is an ancient collection called Points of View: stories by many authors, by point of view from interior monologue to omniscient narrator.

My favorite most recent collection is William Harrison's The Buddha in Malibu: includes older stuff like Rollerball Murder & his own interior monologue, The Warrior, & later stuff like the genuine horror story, The Makeup Man.

[Calidore]

My favorite most recent collection is William Harrison's The Buddha in Malibu: includes older stuff like Rollerball Murder & his own interior monologue, The Warrior, & later stuff like the genuine horror story, The Makeup Man.

So many writers, so little memory space. Thanks for the reminder about William Harrison. "Rollerball Murder" was aces. I'll have to look for that collection.

[glennr25]

Hmm, wow, this is a good thread. So many authors I like--from Hemingway to Carver, to Asimov-- but, I have to say, Ray Bradbury's R is for Rocket is quite possibly the greatest collection of short stories I've ever read. That along with Ender's Game is the reason I'm writing right now. That's my opinion, of course.

[bouquin]

Joyce Carol Oates: HEAT and other stories
Raymond Carver: WHERE I'M CALLING FROM - selected stories
T.C. Boyle: Stories
James Plunkett: THE TRUSTING AND THE MAIMED and other Irish stories

Also -
Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories




_______________
Currently reading: Voss (Patrick White)

[qimissung]

The Complete Short Stories of Saki. Priceless.

[Annamariah]

My two favourites have not been mentioned yet.

First, short stories by Roald Dahl (especially Kiss, Kiss and Someone Like You).

I'm also very fond of L. M. Montgomery's short stories, especially Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea.

[Bad Horse]

I'll second everybody who listed Ficciones or Labyrinths. Borges is so much more intelligent and interesting than, well, all other authors; and yet he can still write something like "The South".

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri. She's a one-trick author, writing only about problems in the lives of young married Indian couples who have just moved to America, but she's very good at it.

Some Ray Bradbury collection; hard to pick one. The October Country, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, The Vintage Bradbury would all be contenders.

Not a Flannery O'Connor collection. She was a great writer, but she only wrote one story, over and over again. How many stories about an alienated and flawed protagonist who dies in the end do you really need to read? She cheated too much, too often, by relying on death to make the story seem significant.

I read Joyce's Dubliners many, many years ago & wasn't impressed. Perhaps I was too young. The stories didn't interest me, especially not "The Dead". It has great things about it, but then it closes with blatant, and shoddy, philosophizing. The problem with philosophizing in your stories isn't, as writers have collectively decided, that direct and confident claims are vulgar; it's that writers are poor philosophers (often even worse than professional philosophers). Or, rather, that in philosophy, popularity is inversely proportional to truth.

Charles Bukowski is another one-trick pony. Plenty of collections full of variations on the same story. One thing I especially like about Bukowski is he does that Hemingway realism; but unlike Hemingway, his narrators have feelings, and the events and objects he describes are relevant to the theme of the story.

There's a book called "100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories", none of which are "classics" or even "literature", but all of which have a lot of punch per word. Most are about a thousand words long, and interesting.

The yearly Gardner Dozois anthologies of science fiction were good, as are the yearly Nebula Awards collections, which I would read rather than the Hugo winners.

The Datlow & Windling Fantasy & Horror anthologies are quite good.

The Best of Cordwainer Smith (fantasy-like science fiction)

There's some Eric Frank Russell anthology that's very good; I forget the name. (Science fiction.)

John Updike's collections are remarkable, especially considering how little life material he seems to have had to work with.

I'm undecided about Anton Chekhov's stories. They're almost all variations on the same structure: A story exposing its central character(s) as a fool. It gets old. You're probably better off with Gogol.

[Chris 73]

The Bloody Chamber-Angela Carter
The Outlaw Album-Daniel Woodrell

[Jack of Hearts]

I read Joyce's Dubliners many, many years ago & wasn't impressed. Perhaps I was too young. The stories didn't interest me, especially not "The Dead". It has great things about it, but then it closes with blatant, and shoddy, philosophizing. The problem with philosophizing in your stories isn't, as writers have collectively decided, that direct and confident claims are vulgar; it's that writers are poor philosophers (often even worse than professional philosophers). Or, rather, that in philosophy, popularity is inversely proportional to truth.


"The Dead" is a novella, not a short story.

Dubliners is devoid of the force-fed philosophy you write about as this is a central element of the Joycean 'epiphany.' It's also the best short story collection mentioned in this thread so far.






J

[glennr25]

I would add "The best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century" to the list if you are intrigued by Time Travel stories.

[Calidore]

Some Ray Bradbury collection; hard to pick one. The October Country, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, The Vintage Bradbury would all be contenders.

The yearly Gardner Dozois anthologies of science fiction were good, as are the yearly Nebula Awards collections, which I would read rather than the Hugo winners.

The Datlow & Windling Fantasy & Horror anthologies are quite good.


I can second these. The anthologists mentioned above have pretty good taste, and even when a Bradbury story doesn't measure up to the others, his craftsmanship is impeccable.

[AuntShecky]

Dubliners, of course. Also Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson), any collection by Cheever and Updike. The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud.

The Best American Short Stories (any year.) The most current one I actually own is the 2012 edition,edited by Tom Perrotta. It's really special. One of my daughters gave me as a gift.

I've acquired some really fine collections over the years. One of my faves goes way back to the 80s, and it's a paperback collection of the best stories (of that decade) from The Atlantic Monthly. I'm not really sure the Atlantic still publishes fiction, but that particular volume contains two memorable pieces:
"The Halfway Diner" by John Sayles and "Emperor of the Air" by Ethan Canin.

[Jack of Hearts]

1. Dubliners James Joyce
2. Numbers in the Dark Italo Calvino
3. Difficult Loves Italo Calvino
4. Cathedral Raymond Carver
5. Rock Springs Richard Ford

The question being, was Calvino better than Joyce? This reader thinks that the former edges the latter out for greatest prose stylist but only slightly (keeping in mind that Jack of Hearts has only read Calvino in translation). It's hard to say that when you're reading 'Eveline' or the final 3,000 words or so of 'The Dead,' though.





J

[missylovalova]

Hoffmann, Der Sandmann
Kafka, The Trial
Anything by Poe of course, but also a guilty fan of Yukio Mishima.

[Harold Clurman]

all of chekhov's short stories. these are undoubtedly my favorites
ben hecht-1001 afternoons in chicago

[ennison]

Kipling wrote many great short stories. Cheever wrote a few. I Shaw wrote some. Bierce and Maupassant wrote slick professional ones. I like these but I also like Trevor, A Munro. Maclean, Hartley and James Shaw Grant. Dare I say it, I also like Paul Jennings who is considered a writer for teens. And there are good stories by Neil Munro and there is of course "Scotch Settlement" which you have to be dead not to enjoy.

[Vota]

Tolstoy Short Stories
Guy de Maupassant- Selected Short stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Juelsspuels]

The short story collections of Edgar Allan Poe (especially "The Tell Tale Heart", my favorite short story of all time), H.P. Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce!

[Volya]

Not a single mention of Sherlock Holmes? This upsets me very much :bawling:

[tonywalt]

The thing around your neck - Chimamanda Adichie

[wordeater]

1. Roald Dahl - Someone Like You
2. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
3. Roald Dahl - Kiss Kiss
4. Arthur Conan Doyle - The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
5. James Joyce - Dubliners
6. Agatha Christie - The Thirteen Problems
7. G. K. Chesterton - The Innocence of Father Brown
8. Roald Dahl - Switch *****
9. P. G. Wodehouse - The Inimitable Jeeves
10. Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones

Collected Short Stories:
Roald Dahl (Lamb to the Slaughter, Parson's Pleasure, William and Mary...)
Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue...)
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Red-Headed League, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box...)
Anton Chekhov (The Bet, The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6...)
Nikolai Gogol (Nevsky Prospekt, The Nose, The Overcoat...)
Thomas Hardy (Barbara of the House of Grebe, A Mere Interlude, The Three Strangers...)
Ernest Hemingway (Hills Like White Elephants; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; The Snows of Kilimanjaro...)
Agatha Christie (The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Wasp's Nest, The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb...)
H. G. Wells (The Country of the Blind, The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham...)
Dorothy Parker (Big Blonde...)