Stop what you are doing and go read ALL of these short story collections. All of them! (These are the 10 best that I have ever read, with some honorable mentions below.)
- The Collected Stories, by Eudora Welty
- The Duel and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov
- The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
- The Stories of Paul Bowles, by Paul Bowles
- Rashomon and 17 Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
- Close Range, by Annie Proulx
- Tenth of December, by George Saunders
- The Marquise of O and Other Stories, by Heinrich von Kleist
- Runaway, by Alice Munro
- The Wonders of the Invisible World, by David Gates
Honorable Mentions
- The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
- Drown, by Junot Diaz
- The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, by Ernest Hemingway
- Dubliners, by James Joyce
- Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Garden Party and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by Z.Z. Packer
- Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, by Edith Pearlman
- Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
- Fools: Stories, by Joan Silber
- Sleepwalker in a Fog, by Tatyana Tolstaya
- First Love and Other Stories, by Ivan Turgenev
- A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, by Virginia Woolf
What are your favorite short story collections? What did I grievously leave off the lists?
Thanks. Great reading here. I would add more of the Irish – so Frank O’Connor, William Trevor, Beckett, John McGahern. Regards Thom.
Runaways is a great one. My very favorite Munro collection is The Progress of Love. I adore the quirky surrealism of Karen Russel: the final story in ‘Vampires in the Lemon Grove’ is perhaps my favorite short story of all time.
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thanks for the list! really interesting!
von Kleist! Awesome.
Wonderful List and add Up In The Old Hotel ~ Joseph Mitchell. Brilliant stuff.