Recommand me a Short story collection?

hello. i am looking to read some modern short stories 1900's to present. Any recommendation to authors, collection etc will be much appreciated :)

you can't go wrong with a bit of JG Ballard or Roald Dahl in my opinion

for early 1900s - anything by Kafka and some of HG Wells's short stories that were penned at the turn of the century too

Ernest Hemingway.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY!

Complete Stories is best, but if it's got more than you want I'll say my favorite (if I HAD to choose one) would be Men Without Women. It also has the best title ever, because is there anything else worth reading about?

....(ernest hemingway)......

Also I read a 60s scfi-fi anthology called Dangerous Visions last year and it was really fantastic. Besides the great, aforementioned J. G. Ballard it includes other 'famous' people like Roger Zelazny, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison (who edited it as well), Phillip K. Dick, Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Damon Knight, and Samuel Delany. The stories were all written specifically for the book, and they're all short and weird; a lot of them are really cool too, and some of them are actually mind-blowing. If it's your thing, check it out.

Well, they say variety is the spice of life, but here are my 4 favourite short story collections:

'Collected Stories' by Katherine Mansfield
'Collected Stories' by Vladimir Nabokov
'For Esme-with Love & Squalor' by J.D Salinger
Plus the short stories of Kafka and Borges.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hank Stamper

you can't go wrong with a bit of JG Ballard or Roald Dahl in my opinion

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I'd recommend Dahl too :nod:

If you like SF, Gene Wolfe's 'The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories and Other Stories' is probably the best single author short story collection I've ever read. I'd also echo the recommendation for J G Ballard - my favourite collection of his is 'Vermilion Sands'.

There are a lot of good short ghost story anthologies - most stories by M R James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce and the like will usually be well worth reading.

Angela Carter's Black Venus or The Bloody Chamber are both excellent short story collections providing a slightly different take on the fairy tale.
Ian McEwan - First Love, Last Rites
Haruki Murakami - The Elephant Vanishes
Margaret Atwood - Bluebeard's Egg
A S Byatt - The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

Witold Gombrowicz - Bakakai

The Happy Prince and Other Tales - Oscar Wilde, beautiful.

I'd like to give Borges another shout-out. Besides his own work (any volume of which is bound to be well near perfect), he co-edited a large anthology of short fantastic literature, all philosophical and thought-provoking, called "The Book of Fantasy". In it are 80-some small pieces by luminaries such as Ambrose Beirce, Ray Bradbury, Jean Cocteau, G. K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kafka, Kipling, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Yeats, J. G. Ballard (!), and a bunch of Eastern folktales. Plus it has Borges' best story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

For contemporary, Alice Munro is superb. And as already mentioned, Katherine Mansfield, whose collected stories brought me into the reading of short stories as an art outside of other narrative prose. In truth, almost any canonical short story writer seems to be good, because bad short story writers seem to be silenced quickly.

Another great name in the short story is Italo Calvino, who seems the supreme magical realist short-story writer. Cosmicos is a good collection by him, as is t zero, and even Invisible Cities (though I confess, Invisible Cities loses tons in translation).

Faulkner is another superb story writer, whose work is quite constantly sublime.

Of those not already mentioned, D.H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce.

My two favorite short story writers are Donald Barthelme and Eudora Welty.

I'd suggest olaf olaffson, the icelandic author, and clive barker, and echo james joyce and jg ballard.