what are your five favorite short story collections?

i can think of tons of stories i love but i'm struggling to think of short story books i enjoyed all the way through. my top 5 collections:

katherine mansfield -- the garden party
chekhov -- forty stories
mccullers -- ballad of the sad cafe
salinger -- nine stories
mary gaitskill -- bad behavior

Allen Barnett - "The Body And Its Dangers"
Dennis Cooper - "Closer"

Drown - Junot Diaz
Loveship, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage - Alice Munro
The Drowned World - JG Ballard
Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

joyce - dubliners
krzhizhonovsky - memories of the future (ilx recommendation!)
borges - labyrinths
the nabokov brick (i have the one with the dumb glittery butterfly cover like a less vivacious lisa frank)
any wodehouse collection

what is 'the nabokov brick'?

krzhizhonovsky - memories of the future (ilx recommendation!)

this is really good but c'mon

http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0679729976

I have to think abt this for a while but I have thoughts on this, I was really stoned a few days ago w/ some friends and one was like "I like short stories......they're like.....not long"

xp yeah that. it isn't really right to list, maybe, since it's huge and i don't like everything in it, but it's the only format i've read his stories in.

i am the krzhizhonovsky book's target market; i don't know what to tell you.

xp wow that's a lot of stories. putting it on my christmas list!

the k-zhizh one where the guy spreads the expanding cream on the baseboards of his tiny apartment and the walls end up fleeing from him until he's left in the center of an endless void. dropping his coat in his scramble to escape and it sliding away from him across the expanding floor into the dark.

Raymond Carver - Will You Please Be Quiet Please?
Flannery O'Conner - The Collected Stories
Anton Chekhov - 40 Stories
Haruki Murakami - The Elephant Vanishes
William Faulkner - The Portable Faulkner
Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, OH
Katherine Anne Porter - Pale Horse, Pale Rider

(ha those last 2 probably don't count...)

katherine mansfield - the garden party
thom jones - cold snap
sherwood anderson - winesburg ohio
hermann hesse - strange news from another star
albert camus - exile and the kingdom

also collected gogol, collected bellow, maybe the illustrated man. i just checked and all the sherlock holmes stories i'm really fond of are irritatingly spread across the different collections.

i have that o'conner book; really should read more from it.

Flaubert - Three Tales
Joyce - Dubliners
Borges - Ficciones
Chekhov - Stories
Katherine Ann Porter - Collected Stories
F. Scot Fitzgerald - Stories Of
John Cheever - Stories
Alice Munro - Hateship Friendship...

i was really close to adding FSF but i just haven't found a collection that works consistently for me. i read 'bernice bobs her hair' a few months ago and it's almost perfect but still, a couple really minor stories.

Taps at Reveille is the most consistent but if you want the canon material plus boilerplate stuff ("The Bridal Party") the '89 collection compiled by hagiographer Brucoli is the most thorough.

william gibson - burning chrome

i have the brucoli collection and yeah bernice/the offshore pirate/mayday/diamond as big as the ritz (dgaf)/rags martin-jones and the pr--- of wa--- (tried to make this into a movie once)/other stuff are all great but didn't list it cuz so much chaff.

^ yes xp to dan

Jesus' son - dennis johnson

Open secrets - Alice munro

Cathedral - raymond carver

can't believe Kafka wasnt mentioned yet

also:
Bruno Schultz - Street of Crocodiles
Cortazar - blow up and other stories

'

Bradbury - October Country
Wallace - Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
King - Night Shift
Coen - Gates Of Eden
Handey - What I'd Say To The Martians

Honorable mention to Dick and Lovecraft and Howard's Conan stories, many of which I love but none of which have any canonical collections.

definitely Kafka and Hemmingway
Alice Monro anything really
i really liked Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From and Will You Please Be Quiet Please? when i was younger but haven't really revisited in years
i've been reading Lorrie Moore's Birds of North America, which is great but i can really only read one or two stories at a time
which reminds me a bit of Amy Hempel - i have the Collected Stories book
others that i need to try to remember... what's popping into my head instead are books of short non-fiction stuff like Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Down and Out in Paris and London, etc

These two are firmly ensconced in my favourites of all time:

Borges - Labyrinths
BSJ - Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?

I think most of the rest of mine are made up by yr classic short-story writers (Saki, Poe, etc) and old-school horror compendiums. Oh, the Blanchot reader contains some great stuff but shouldn't really count here, I guess.

Oh, I also really liked Primo Levi's The Sixth Day and Other Tales, but I haven't read it since my teens.

i really want to read Ursula Le Guin collection The Unreal and the Real

J.D. Salinger - Nine Stories
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles
Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Breece D'J Pancake - The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

wish i read more short stories but fourthing nine stories

60 Stories -- Doanld Barthelme
Strangers Things Happen -- Kelly Link
Drown -- Junot Diaz
Jesus' Son -- Denis Johnson

Maybes:
Venus Drive -- Sam Lipsyte
The Things They Carried -- Tim O'Brien
something by George Saunders (maybe Civilwarland ...)
maybe Carver too, but haven't re-read him in far too long

and how could I forget?:
A Good Man is Hard to Find -- O'Connor

Everything's in storage, but off the top of my head

Beckett - More Pricks Than Kicks
Borges - Labyrinths
Joyce - Dubliners
Barth - Lost In The Funhouse
Akutagawa - Rashomon

Cosign on Honorable mention to Dick and Lovecraft [...] many of which I love but none of which have any canonical collections.
Which is the Mishima collection w/"Patriotism"? Or was it more stand-alone? Maybe Vollmann, if The Rainbow Stories counts? Prob not, but Thirteen Stories... wld do. Twain/Melville should be represented too, probably.

Labyrinths, Dubliners, Donald Barthelme's City Life, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator (if it counts)... tbh I haven't been a serious reader of short stories for years

probably throw some Asimov in there just to round it out to five, idk

I want to reread Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" tonight but can't speak for the consequences.

oh just go ahead and cry yr snotty tears

chekhov - stories
james joyce - dubliners
hemingway - collected
cheever - collected
borges - ficciones

Haven't read enough collections to do an interesting top 5, but I agree with the Joyce & Borges love.

borges - ficciones
kafka - complete stories
samuel r. delany - aye, and gomorrah
lydia davis - the collected stories
william gibson - burning chrome

maybe.

krzhizhonovsky - memories of the future (ilx recommendation!)

this is really good but c'mon

haha if either of you read this because of stuff i posted i legit feel way better about the years of my life ive wasted posting to this msg board

other than trying to make some torturous case for like the robert silverberg edited 'legends' collection i cant really think of anything that hasnt been mentioned other than maybe lydia davis collected stories, i guess 'mirgorod' idk

borges is like my no. 1 'need to read' guy that i've never read even a word of. kind of embarrassed about that.

Charles Baxter - A Relative Stranger
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Lydia Davis - Break It Down
Joyce Carol Oates - The Assignation
Faulkner - Go Down, Moses
Hemingway - Collected

(Off top of head, couldn't cut one for five.)

i'll have to think of some faves. there are so many short story writers i love. or just writers who wrote some of my favorite short stories. katherine anne porter collection was a big one for me. it made me realize there was a world of writers i didn't know about when i was younger. katherine mansfield too. stephen crane was huge for me too once i got beyond the required school reading of open boat/red badge. he's still one of my favorite writers. and there are all kinds of people i love who aren't exactly canon or whatever. ben hecht, ring lardner, people like that. the last bombshell for me was the collected richard yates. and i thought i was too old for ameri-lit short story bombshells. but it made me rethink how i felt about carver who i still love. and when i read my current faves munro and moore i think of those early ann beattie and oates story collections i loved. but five, huh? i dunno, tolstoy would be on there. and poe. and de maupassant. maybe. more recent stuff too though. the hungry girls and other stories by patricia eakins was a whopper. joy williams - breaking and entering. that book alone rocked my world. mary gaitskill's first collection was awesome but i haven't read it since the 80's. i love john o'hara to death. especially those early stories. faulkner kinda blows most people away too. flannery and carson and eudora. i don't think there is really anyone right now who can hit you upside the head like flannery. sarah orne jewett kills me too. the country of the pointed firs might make my top five. i love patricia highsmith's later fucked up stories. they are half angela carter and half...i don't know what. Little Tales of Misogyny is a hoot. you could read that and the hungry girls and a carter collection in a row for some seriously grim fairy tales. hubert selby's one book of short stories is amazing. i could pick books by thom jones and barry hannah too. love those guys. that pancake collection that someone mentioned was a fine thing. and jesus' son might be one of the best of the last 20 years. kentucky straight by chris offutt is essential. henry james and saul bellow. i better stop...sherman alexie...i love kate chopin's southern stuff. i guess winesburg has to make any list. so great. hasn't lost a step. ambrose bierce. robert bloch. ray bradbury. shirley jackson is a hero a mine. any of her collections. kafka. stephen king. jack london is still the bomb. shiloh by bobbie ann mason is essential. theodore sturgeon. would never stop with the sci-fi. and there are very few straight literary writers today who can write anything even approaching the awesomeness of the best sci-fi out there. mark twain. edith wharton. tobias wolff! in the garden of the north american martyrs is massive. stanley elkin's criers and kibitzers kibitzers and criers one of my faves too. and malamud's the magic barrel. collected leonard michaels is essential. everyone has to read that. likewise the collected bruce jay friedman. flaubert and the other big time russians are kind of a no-brainer i guess. cheever another no brainer. mavis gallant too. and pritchett. james purdy short fiction essential. same with isak dinesen. i love muriel spark's short stories. but i would. you might enjoy an old irwin shaw collection. whoever you are. fun stuff. edna o'brien!

That's a great list. I'd cosign lots of those. It's hard to narrow the list to five. I'm actually reading a couple of story collections right now, by Steven Millhauser and Deborah Eisenberg, which I'm enjoying a lot, but top 5 of all time? I don't know. I guess I'd have to go by my personal reading history, which may have been influenced by things I happened to encounter at the right time. In some cases, especially when things have been anthologized multiple times, it's hard to remember the exact title of the collection I encountered, but some of the big names for me are: Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London, Roald Dahl, and John O'Hara.

think i have most of the kafka ones in another collection. brilliant. the coal-scuttle rider really got me.

also like carver's "what we talk about when we talk about love" - generally i need to dive into some of the recommendations upthread as i have only got into short stories in the last couple of years, as opposed to novels.

I'm kind of a genre dork, so I dunno if any of these really measure up with that's been suggested already.

- Hardboiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian is one of my favorite hard-boiled short story collections. Lots of great authors, known and unknown, I still circle back to it every year or two and find a new author to introduce myself to.
- though I've fallen off the bandwagon with him considerably, I'll still rep for Neil Gaiman's Smoke And Mirrors short story collection.
- The Best of Joe R Lansdale is a goodun'

your favorites are your favorite! doesn't matter if they measure up to anything. genre people is a long list too. richard matheson!

plus, like i said above, the list of great SF short fiction writers is endless. so much richness.

also, i forgot e.f. benson. who wrote all kinds of great short fiction.

that is a rad selection of stuff. and now i know where strongo got his lifelong adoration for john updike from.

wow, there is an updike story in there -- and with a hilariously updikean title. i don't remember a thing about it.

berryman not the first name i'd expect to see in a sci-fi comp

Arrgh, that's one of the books I just yo-yo through--got to mend my ways!

(note to self: YOLO not yo-yo)

yay scott for mentioning john ohara, richard matheson, pat highsmith. ohara is a ghost, forgotten these days but so good. on the sci-if tip i loved reading jg ballard's complete stories all the way through last year, arguably as good/better than his best novels. and i like raymond carver less than almost everybody here probably but out of the 80s short story glut lorrie moore and mary gaitskill deserve "props" as people used to say

obligatory mention of Alasdair Gray's Unlikely Stories Mostly here.

aaaahhhh I totally had (and loved) that World Treasury of Sci-Fi -- couldn't remember the name, thanks for posting!

I read O'Hara's short stories as a lad, to get a bead on what the grown-ups were doing, especially after they rolled up the sidewalks in towns like mine. Scary! Later, Highsmith's collection Mermaids On The Golf Course was quite a dark lark (and more); title tale about a congressman losing it, really losing it, on a sunny day. High Pat
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_O5acwjCR4G0/TTDdWZ-bQ9I/AAAAAAAAA3s/gftM9hS5cOM/s1600/patty+2.JPG

I have no idea what to say to this thread it makes me nervous idk

mine would prob be something boring like uh

borges - collected
calvino - cosmicomics
cortazar - blow up n others
mathews - human county
a collection of gertrude stein essays (which are really stories or w/e)

like, these are the people who really changed my life when I read them, and I'm not embarrassed that young me liked them when I really did, but I don't get the same thing now that I do when I was really into em, but idk other times I would be like chekov, paley, ann beattie, barry hannah, other americans

J.D. - JD Salinger - Nine Stories (the tribute poll)

i need to read that again. haven't read it in a million years. be interesting to know what i think of it now that i'm older.

a million years is really old. i'm 23 and *i* need to read it again

i read it when i was a teen. and i'm 44. teenhood definitely feels like a million years ago. especially with my kid having his tenth birthday last week.

i hadn't read it since high school but i found a copy at a church rummage sale a couple years ago and i was surprised how much i still enjoyed a lot of it.

that said, i'm having trouble remembering the plots of any of them other than "esme" and "bananafish" right now.

Nine Stories I've tried to love.

grrr

was having one of those ineffectual shout-over-the-background-noise bar conversations with a work buddy a couple weeks back about books and he namedropped JDS as someone who's good to read when you're 14 but embarrassing to revisit later. he must've seen my look of anguish because he tried to change the subject, but i wound up doing my epic speech about how salinger is really all about wartime trauma and anti-semitism, etc., to stony silence. now that i'm sober i've realized that this same guy reps for bret easton ellis so WFC.

expand on the antisemitism thing?

the latest biography sort of goes into it more -- salinger experienced a lot of shit for being jewish growing up, was there when dachau was liberated, and suffered a nervous breakdown soon afterward. apparently he made a lot of notes about the holocaust for a possible book -- they're in a library collection somewhere. it only really comes up explicitly in 'down at the dinghy' and maybe a couple of his unpublished stories but i think it's sort of a veiled theme throughout his work. it's also really interesting to me that he made holden caulfield (a character based on himself) super-WASPy and kind of a dick about ppl whose 'suitcases weren't as nice,' et al. ha, now i'm regretting not going to grad school.

lol

thanks

i'm not still at an age where i need to vehemently defend salinger and holden from the Same Exact Criticism Every Time (ugh whiny teens!) but catcher is and always will be one of the more accurate depictions of teenage depression/mental disorder/suicidalness. maybe you can strike 'teenage' from that.

my 16 y.o. son read nine stories this year in school, liked it better than catcher. all teens are whiny! but hopefully not depressed/suicidal

Yeah, I suspect if I were to do comparative reading now, I'd agree with your son. Nine Stories has more variety, incl person of the narrator--I'm currently sick of novels with first-person narrators, Unreliable or supposedly other. Just gets to seem like over-selling, the character over-pleading his case--too often, somebody I should be paid to listen to, if I were qualified to counsel (thinking of Holden *and* the new Junot Diaz, for inst). I also suspect I like "Franny" better than "Zooey" because the former works as a taut, third-person short story, while "Zooey" is mainly Franny and the reader being lectured by Zooey (although the revelation about several Nine Stories characters being Glass siblings seems entirely appropriate). Never got through Raise High etc; Buddy Glass, droning on, seemed like one of my high school teachers. I should try it again, though.

Third-person is more likely to provide perspective, and breathing room.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is as good as anything else of his!

ballard - complete
barthelme - sixty stories
borges - labyrinths
hemingway - snows of kilimanjaro
vonnegut - welcome to the monkey house

Ballard was my big discovery last year, thanks to ILX.

Nine Stories is awesome too!

yeah, i felt kind of like a jerk putting ballard on my list because i've only read two of his novels and about 15 of the many short stories in the Complete collection. but i'm such a huge fan of what i've read so far ("storm-bird, storm-dreamer" in particular), i'm confident i'll enjoy the rest just as much.

which novels?

High Rise and Empire of the Sun.

i never read anything after "empire," but definitely read "crash" and "crystal world" and probably "drowned world" too. i'm guessing the "atrocity exhibition" stuff is in the collected shorts book. can't remember offhand.

"high rise" is probably the best, though.

about 3/4 of the atrocity exhibition collection is also in the "complete" short stories book.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is as good as anything else of his!

― beef richards (Mr. Que), Friday, December 7, 2012 10:39 AM (4 hours ago)

yes, and i love seymour too

the only mature salinger i don't like is 'hapworth.' i've gotten through it twice and i still don't understand wtf he was trying to do there.

i feel like there's a big gap in his work between published and unpublished. and by published i mean in book form, not just the stories in the new yorker

yeah i need to read hapworth. that's the summer camp one, right?

yeah, it's basically just seven-year-old seymour glass writing home from camp and asking his family to send him books and using lots of big words. it's kind of hilarious inasmuch as you can't believe that salinger is really devoting an entire story to this letter and nothing else, and that he's letting it go on for as long as it does -- it actually filled up an entire issue of the new yorker! i've got lots of love for all the other glass stories, though.

I don't know if I even have five, but Denton Welch's (out of print last time I checked) collected stories would definitely be one. Oh yeah, looking upthread, Borges' Labyrinths would be on there too.

Also his journals are great. I love how he's always providing very detailed accounts of meals consisting mostly of sweets.

robert walser to thread

Borges - The Book of Sand
Shirley Jackson - The Lottery and Other Stories
Will Self - Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
A. E. Coppard - Collected Short Stories
Joyce - Dubliners

Self kinda sticks out like a sore thumb, oh well. Yes I know that's six books. I feel like a Salinger should be in there, and a de Maupassant, and a bunch of other stuff. Hard to get it down to a handful.

Totally forgot about Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which my teen self loved to bits and is fairly perfectly-formed.

volumes of short stories I have loved:
- Borges, Collected
- Barthelme, City Life
- Flaubert, Three Tales
- Beckett, Stories & Texts For Nothing

weird things that may or may not count as "short story collections":
- Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator
- Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
- Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String

... but tbrr I am not really a short story reader, something about the form doesn't appeal to me. idk.

oh, I forgot to put Murakami on there—Elephant Vanishes probably best, but I read After the Quake before it so sentimental pick

& maybe Cervantes' Exemplary Stories...?

(these are all turning out to be things I read in, or around, college)