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20 Top Short Story Collections
Shakespeare once wrote "brevity is the soul of wit." Brevity is also the soul of the short story, which only has a small amount of space to resonate with a reader. We took a look at these mini but mighty powerhouses on Goodreads to bring you the best of the best. Don't forget to add your favorites to your Want to Read shelf.
For this round-up, we're defining short story collections as a series of short stories written by a single author. From there, we chose collections that have been added to Goodreads members' shelves more than 50,000 times and earned at least a four-star rating.
This list is by no means exhaustive, however. So please be sure to share your own recommendations in the comments.
For this round-up, we're defining short story collections as a series of short stories written by a single author. From there, we chose collections that have been added to Goodreads members' shelves more than 50,000 times and earned at least a four-star rating.
This list is by no means exhaustive, however. So please be sure to share your own recommendations in the comments.
Who's your favorite short story author? Share it with us in the comments!
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Comments Showing 1-50 of 53 (53 new)
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Anastasi
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Feb 28, 2018 12:19AM
My personal favorite is "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut.
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It is a travesty that John Connolly and Ursula K. Le Guin could be missing from any list of excellent short story collections. They are both true masters of the form. I absolutely cannot recommend enough Nocturnes and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
Labyrinths by Jorge Louis Borges - just amazing!!
Levar Burton Reads podcast read The Paper Managerie. I cried my eyes out.
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is utterly brilliant. F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories are perfect encapsulations of the Jazz Age (my favourite is The Diamond ad Big as the Ritz). Daphne du Maurier wrote some great shorts, especially Don't Look Now. Frank O'Connor has some lovely stories (I laughed out loud at First Confession).
Close Range by Annie ProulxBeautiful prose! I think it was five tales including Brokeback Mountain at the end.
F. Paul Wilson: Soft and Others: 16 Stories of Wonder and Dread
The Barrens and Others
Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities.
Edited to add:
Forgot to also mention Damon Runyon.
“The Four Million,” by O. Henry is his best book. Fun tales about New York City at the turn of the century. Also, lest we not forget, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is a classic for a reason.
Love seeing Flannery O'Connor on this list. Most of these are on my to-read list actually. I would have added Virginia Woolf's A Haunted House and Other Stories as well.
Tenth of December by George SaundersThe Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye
Memory Wall byAnthony Doerr
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Labors of Hercules by Agatha Christie
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
I consider The Pieta in Ordinary Time: And Other Stories by William J. Cook to be the equal of any of these.
The Early Stories of Truman Capote by Truman CapoteJhumpa Lahiri's other short story collection Unaccustomed Earth
Anastasi wrote: "My personal favorite is "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut."I could not agree more. Uncle Kurt was a masterful short story teller.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
Dubliners by James Joyce???
Here are two that I've read recently that should be on everyone's list:What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A list with Chekhov & Kafka is good, whatever other titles are in.Compilation I loved, and is not here, is Winesburg, Ohio, of Sherwood Anderson. Alice Monro is also worth reading.
North American Lake Monsters: Stories is definitely among my top story collections. Nathan Balingrud is amazing.
My favorite writer of short stories is William Somerset Maugham.Anuradha. C.
One of my favorite collections is "Selected Short Stories: Guy de Maupassant." He was a master of the form!
I would replace the Martian Chronicles with Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. That book is my favorite collection of short stories I have ever read (although I have not found a single fault in any of his works). The Illustrated Man
The Short Stories of John Cheever, as well as any of the various collections of John O'Hara's short stories.
Monica wrote: "Here are two that I've read recently that should be on everyone's list:What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah"
Yes!! Hers was one of my favorite collections read in 2017.
Also, lest we forget, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is a classic for a reason."I'm reading them again for the umpteenth time. TV & film have done their part in keeping the Holmes character alive, but Doyle's writing style has a contemporary feel to it that much 19th century lit simply doesn't. (Not that I don't like novels from that era).
Dana wrote: "Should have added Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami."Sadly, this book, like most of the other suggestions, doesn't meet the 4-star/50,000 review criteria.
AGMaynard wrote: "Try Alice Munro!"I second that. Munro is pure magic.
Stefan Zweig - a short story/novella master, particularly from the perspective of a character's psychology.I am closer to his short story characters than I am to hundreds of characters written by great novelists.
And what about the Irish? John McGahern (Creatures of the Earth),Edna O'Brien (The Love Object: Selected Stories), the brilliant Colm Toíbin (Mothers and Sons, The Empty Family), and the magnificent William Trevor (Collected Stories (2009) and Selected Stories (2010)
Thank you for compiling such a great list! I added nearly all of these to my To-Read pile.
The Decapitated Chicken and Other StoriesThere Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
ZOO
by Otsuichi,
Bus Driver who wanted to be God
Gogol
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Rampo
These are excellent short story collections as well.
Jgrace wrote: "Tenth of December by George SaundersThe Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye
[book:Memory Wall..."
Thank you for including Anthony Doerr...brilliant writer; also, his The Shell Collector along with Memory Wall.
George Saunders...amazing as well.
For those interested in another venue regarding short story/short fiction, you can search for The Story Project (TSP) which is a program through the New School in New York City. Reviews and awards authors annually, but is a good resource with postings about many of the authors who submit work (not just the 'winners'). This year's for a 2017 published work is Elizabeth Strout. Folks can sign up for an email newsletter for free.
Anything is Possible is the Strout title that won the highest honor of the 2017 Story Project award.
Sorry, all...it is The Story Prize, not the Story Project.
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov,The Collected Stories of Grace Paley,
The Stories of John Cheever,
John O'Hara,
Peter Taylor,
William Maxwell,
J.F. Powers...
are some of my favorites.
10th of December, by George Saunders, is certainly one of the best story collections I've ever read. Honestly deserving of its renown.And Anthony Doerr's first book, The Shell Collection, is just amazing (and truthfully far more affecting than All The Light We Cannot See).
no Jack London? To Build A Fire? -
I almost froze my ass off . . .
My favorite short story writers are British writer Somerset Maugham, Canadian writer Alice Munro and Indian nobel prize winning author Rabindranath TagoreShort Story Collections by Alice Munro: The View from Castle Rock, Lives of Girls and Women, Runaway, Who Do You Think You Are?
The Best Short Stories of William Somerset Maugham
Short Stories From Rabindranath Tagore
O. Henry. Didn't he invent and nurture the art of the short story?
Some of my favorite short story collections include: The Portable Dorothy Parker; 24 Stories by Willa Cather; The Muse's Tragedy and other Stories by Edith Wharton; The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen; The Complete Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence; The Maugham Reader; the short story collections of John O'Hara and John Cheever. I've been addicted to short stories since I was in high school in the 1960's.
Christine wrote: "Close Range by Annie ProulxBeautiful prose! I think it was five tales including Brokeback Mountain at the end."
Always have loved Annie Proulx. Her heart-rending stories need to be on a list.
Leslie wrote: "For those interested in another venue regarding short story/short fiction, you can search for The Story Project (TSP) which is a program through the New School in New York City. Reviews and awards ..."Do you have a link? I couldn't find it.
It's a fine list and there have been some great suggestions of other collections which might just as easily have been on it (Vonnegut and Fitzgerald, to name a couple.) I've thought of two which would make my own list: "The Best of Roald Dahl" and "Bazaar of Bad Dreams" by Stephen King. I think King may get overlooked when it comes to these types of discussions due to his current popularity and a perception that, perhaps, he has become somewhat commercialized. Insofar as a single short story, "The Distributor" by Richard Matheson comes to mind. It's outstanding.
A solid list, and yet I can't help but wish it had included some writers everyone hasn't already heard of! As a short story writer myself, I try to read farther off the beaten path. There are so many brilliant writers deserving of wider audiences. Some of my favorite short story collections: Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall (I think it's far better than his bestselling novel); Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn; Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women; Anne Enright's Yesterday's Weather; and Lydia Davis's Can't and Won't. And of course Alice Munro, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor are among the greats.
Uh, what? "Top short story collections" that doesn't include a single Alice Munro?? Does not compute :)) If I had to pick only one, it would be The Moons of Jupiter but honestly she could fill half this list on her own. Also, V.S. Pritchett ... just saying.
