I’m just in the mood for lists, because I’ve created yet another one. This one is about short story collections. The short story is often considered an underrated form. It is also considered (incorrectly) to be dying out. The form is still strong, but it remains more on the fringes of most readers considerations. Here are several collections I’ve enjoyed.

Our Story Begins

This collection by Tobias Wolff includes 31 stories. Several have appeared in other collections but there are 10 that were newly published in this one. Some of my favorites are “Bullet in the Brain” or “In the Garden of North American Martyrs”. I consider Wolff to be one of the best short story writers America has produced. Most of his work is in the short story form and he has several collections available.

Exhalation

Exhalation is Ted Chiang’s newest collection of short fiction, and it includes a novella length piece titled “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”. I really enjoyed “The Merchant and The Alchemist’s Gate” (I enjoyed all of them really). This collection was released just last year and is Chiang’s second collection. His first was Stories of Your Life and Others which I also recommend. I’ve become a huge fan of Chiang’s work and I look forward to whatever he releases next.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

I consider Philip K. Dick (PKD) one of the best science fiction writers of the past century. He is probably best known for his stories that have been adapted into film. Many of these were short stories that were adapted while others were novels. A few of the films based on short stories are Minority Report, Total Recall, Paycheck, and The Adjustment Bureau. Ted Chiang admits that some of his writing has been influenced by PKD, and I think both writers have crafted stories that keep you thinking long after you finish reading, which is what I love most about them. PKD has written approximately 121 short stories and you can get all of them in about five collections with this being one of them.

Trigger Warning

Neil Gaiman is better known for his novels, but he has dabbled in/mastered several genres/fields. He has a few collections of short stories with Trigger Warning being the most recent. His sense of magic and wonder are as prevalent in these shorter works as they are in his longer forms.

Rogues

Rogues is a collection of stories by various authors. All the stories focus on a character considered to be rogue themselves hence the title. This collection includes a story by Neil Gaiman (but it’s not a story included in Trigger Warning). I must admit that I have not read this entire collection. I primarily got it in order to read the short story by Patrick Rothfuss which is a fun, supplemental story to his book The Name of the Wind.

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe is known for several of his short stories. I’ve seen a lot of mentions of “The Masque of the Red Death” going around recently. I have yet to read that particular story, but I will likely do so soon. My personal favorite that I’ve read by Poe is “A Cask of Amontillado”. His stories are more on the darker side and include death in some form (but not all). He is known as a master of the macabre after all.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver is known primarily as a short story author. The title story is probably his best known or most referenced. It also happens to be my favorite. “Cathedral” is probably my other favorite, but it is not included in this particular collection. You can likely find a few of these stories online including the two mentioned. Carver is considered one of the best at the short form and I have to say that I agree.

I’d Die For You

This collection of stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald is unique because it was released in 2017 and consists of all his work that had remained unpublished. These 18 stories were considered “lost” and had been recently found/discovered, collected, and published in this volume. I bought the collection back when it was first published and have read through about half of them. I was working on my MFA at the time and had to put the collection aside for a bit and haven’t picked it back up, but now that I’ve talked about it, I will probably go back and finish it soon.

If you like short stories and have a favorite story or author not on this list, let me know. I’m always open for new recommendations myself.

I hope that you give some of these a chance if you are not a regular short story reader. At the very least, I hope you go out and read a short story sometime soon. You can find many online for free. I even have several of my own on this blog you can check out (my favorite might be Children of Changyang Mountain).

Happy Reading.