THE WRITTEN WORD
Short Story Collections
13 books
Thirteen collections of short fiction — the form that demands the most from a writer's technical skill because every word has to carry its weight, there's no room for the extended development that novels can afford, and the ending has to do the work of a full story's emotional arc in a fraction of the space. The list covers American, British, and international collections, the modernist tradition and its contemporary successors, and the specific achievement of writers who mastered the form at the expense of any other form and the writers who used it as one mode among several. The short story is the most underread serious literary form; this list makes the case for taking it as seriously as it deserves.
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The Trial
Franz Kafka
Although more avant-garde and existentialist than traditional entries into the horror genre, The Trial is easily one of the most frightening books ever written. In it, Josef K. one day wakes to find himself accused of “gnostic turpitude,” a crime he didn’t commit and can’t understand. He’s sent on endless fetch quests to obtain obscure paperwork in the hopes of freeing himself from his legal dilemma but repeatedly finds himself in increasingly bizarre and inescapable scenarios. Few novels capture the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare as accurately as The Trial . Buy at Amazon Buy at Walmart
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor was a Catholic novelist writing about the Protestant South, which gave her the outsider's eye for exactly how much violence, self-deception, and grotesquerie the region's religiosity was containing. The stories in this 1955 collection end badly — characters meet escaped convicts, traveling salesmen with prosthetic legs, and their own worst impulses, and the collisions are rarely survivable. The title story, in which a family road trip ends with a grandmother facing execution in a ditch, is the finest American short story of the postwar era and one of the most theologically serious pieces of fiction in the language. Around 251 pages. O'Connor died of lupus at thirty-nine with two collections completed — this one and Everything That Rises Must Converge, the right next step for the reader who finishes this wanting more.
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The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Not only is The Metamorphosis one of the greatest short stories ever written, but it was an important forebearer of the Surrealist movement that would emerge shortly after its publication in 1915. The story of a salesman who wakes up one morning to find, much to his alarm, that he has turned into a beetle, there has been much debate over its meaning, but all agree that it is a masterful look at alienation in the modern age.
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Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
When a fleet of spaceships arrives on Earth, a team of scientists is tasked with figuring out how to communicate with the extraterrestrial pilots. As linguist Louise Banks learns more and more about the alien language, she discovers that the solution to mounting problems seemingly brought with the visitors involves her own personal relationship to time. A pint-sized masterpiece by one of the greatest living science fiction writers, Chiang’s elegant yet complex story was made into an acclaimed feature film, Arrival .
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The Complete Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's short fiction is where the voice was made: the Nick Adams stories in Michigan woods and trout streams, the bullfighting stories in Spain, the African hunting stories, and the late work that strips everything down to what two people are not saying to each other across a table. This complete collection covers the full career and is a different book from The Nick Adams Stories on the Hunting & Fishing list — that is a subset focused on formation and the outdoor world; this is the career retrospective including Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Around 650 pages. The single-author career retrospective entry on this list. The reader who has read Hemingway's novels and not his stories has read the lesser half of the work.
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Dubliners
James Joyce
Most people bounce off Joyce because they try to start with Ulysses. Don't do that. Start here. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible — fifteen short stories about ordinary Dublin life at the turn of the 20th century, each one a small masterpiece of observation and atmosphere. The final story, The Dead, is widely considered one of the greatest short stories ever written in the English language — a quiet, devastating meditation on love, loss, and the weight of the past. If St. Patrick's Day is about celebrating Irish culture, there is no culture more saturated with literary genius than Dublin's, and this is your entry point into it. Read The Dead twice.
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Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges was an Argentine librarian who spent his career writing short fictions that are simultaneously stories, philosophical arguments, and logical puzzles — a library containing every book that could ever be written, a lottery that gradually extends its jurisdiction to every aspect of human existence, a man who can remember everything he has ever experienced and is destroyed by it. Labyrinths collects the essential work and is the most influential short fiction collection of the twentieth century: Carver, García Márquez, Calvino, Eco, and essentially every serious fiction writer of the last sixty years has read it and been changed by it. Around 240 pages. The international entry and the unexpected angle simultaneously — the reader who has never encountered Borges will find the first story disorienting and the second one addictive.
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Selected Stories
Tobias Wolff
Wolff is the finest American short story writer of his generation and among the least discussed relative to his quality — the deep cut entry on this list, which for a writer this good is a genuine injustice. The stories cover soldiers, hunters, failed fathers, and men at the specific moment when they realize who they actually are rather than who they thought they were. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, the opening story, in which a timid academic finally says exactly what he means in front of an audience that cannot stop him, is one of the great short stories in the American tradition. Around 320 pages. Wolff also edited The Norton Book of Modern War, which appears on this list, and wrote the memoir This Boy's Life — on the Coming-of-Age list — making him one of the three or four writers whose work appears across the most categories on this entire project.
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Night Shift
Stephen King
King published this first story collection in 1978 and it remains the most purely effective horror short fiction in American literature: the industrial laundry machinery that is alive and hungry, the trucks that wake up and decide they don't need drivers anymore, the children's toy that kills people. Around 336 pages. The genre entry and the horror entry simultaneously — King at his most concentrated, before the novels expanded his ambitions and occasionally his indulgences. The specific skill on display throughout is the ability to take a completely ordinary setting — a factory floor, a highway rest stop, a suburban bedroom — and locate the specific thing in it that should not be there. The AoM reader who has seen the film adaptations without reading the source material will find the stories considerably more disturbing than the films.
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The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever
Cheever spent his career writing about the American suburbs — the commuters, the country club members, the people with good addresses and hollow marriages — with a sympathy and precision that made him both celebrated and uncomfortable to read. This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection covers his full career: the famous stories (The Swimmer, in which a man swims home through his neighbors' pools and arrives to find everything gone) alongside the less famous ones that are equally good. Around 693 pages and the definitive portrait of mid-century American middle-class life: not satirical, not sentimental, but forensic about what comfort costs the people who achieve it. The reader who thinks Carver's working-class despair and Cheever's suburban despair are different problems will find by the end of this collection that they are the same problem at different income levels.
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The Norton Book of Modern War
Paul Fussell (ed.)
Fussell edited this anthology after writing The Great War and Modern Memory — the most celebrated study of how WWI shaped literary consciousness — which means the selection reflects a scholar's judgment about what war writing actually achieves rather than what it is supposed to achieve. The collection runs from WWI through Vietnam and includes fiction, memoir, and poetry: Hemingway, Sassoon, Heller, O'Brien, Mailer, and dozens of less familiar writers who documented specific wars from inside them. Around 829 pages and the themed anthology entry on this list. Cross-seeds with the WWI, WWII, and Vietnam history lists across this project. The reader who has worked through the war history lists and wants the literary counterpart — what the same events look like when filtered through a novelist's or poet's intelligence rather than a historian's — comes here.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver
Carver wrote about working-class Americans — plumbers, waitresses, mill workers — whose marriages were failing, whose drinking was not quite under control, and whose conversations kept circling around the things they couldn't say directly. The prose is stripped to the minimum a sentence can contain and still function, and the effect is devastating in ways that more elaborate writing rarely achieves. Around 176 pages and the defining American short story collection of the second half of the twentieth century: the book that established what the American short story could do with silence and omission. The AoM reader who thinks short fiction is a lesser form than the novel will revise that opinion by the third story. Start with the title story, which is about four people getting drunk in a kitchen and trying to define love, and which contains more truth about marriage than most novels manage at full length.
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The Essential Tales of Chekhov
Anton Chekhov (ed. Richard Ford)
Chekhov invented the template that every subsequent short story writer has either followed or consciously rejected: the story that ends not with resolution but with a shift in understanding, the prose that trusts the reader to feel what the characters cannot articulate, and the specific focus on ordinary lives at the moment they crack open. This selection edited by Richard Ford — himself a major American short story writer — draws from the full career and includes the essential late masterpieces: The Lady with the Dog, The Bishop, Ward No. 6. Ford's introduction alone is worth the price of the book. Around 352 pages. The origin point of the form: the reader who wants to understand what Carver was doing goes back to Chekhov to see where it came from.