Short Story Collection Lists

Thanks to Sarah for asking me to recommend short story collections.  I have made a list of ten classic and ten contemporary short story collections by single authors.  Behold:

10 Contemporary Collections

1. Drown by Junot Diaz.  It’s sad to start out with a collection I haven’t read completely, but the two and a half stories I’ve read about Yunior (who returns in The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao) are iconic.
2. Love & Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon.  Many of these stories are about a Bosnian writer in America, rather like the author himself.
3. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain.  These are some of the most different, most spectacularly crafted stories I’ve ever read.  Plus I got the author’s autograph.
4. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.  This first-published book won the Pulitzer for a reason.
5. Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin.  And I will put UKL on any list I possibly can; this is my favorite collection of hers.
6. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.  Some say magical realism, some say fantasy for adults, but there’s always a sense of delight in this collection.
7. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser.  If you like mind-bending fables and eerie, unexpected suspense, Millhauser is for you.
8. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin.  These loosely connected stories follow the Harouni family, Pakistani landowners, and the lives they alter.
9. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.  I’ve only read the stories from The Little Disturbances of Man, but I wish I had them all.
10. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell.  Brilliant title story, with others of well-written interest.

10 Classic Collections

1. Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems by John Beecroft (2 vols, Doubleday).  If you’ve never read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavvi” aloud, you have not yet lived.
2. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics).  If you don’t want to buy all of the stories, at least buy Labyrinths.
3. Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov (Bantam).  As much as I hate to admit the merit a Russian writer, there’s no other way to learn the craft than by reading Chekhov.
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (Dover).  See UKL, above.
5. The Short Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner).  “The Offshore Pirate” and “Babylon Revisited” are favorites.
6. The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner).  I like many of his short stories better than his novels.
7. The Best Short Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry (Modern Library).  These might feel redundant after a while, so read sparingly over a long period of time; but still, “The Gift of the Magi.”
8. Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield (Norton).  Mansfield is a personal favorite, and her New Zealand Stories edited by Vincent O’Sullivan is another good version.
9. Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (The Library of America).  For “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
10. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (HBJ).  For “Old Mortality,” which might be one of my ten favorite stories of all time.