Fifteen(ish) Short Story Collections to Edify, Enjoy, and Instruct

There’s a new tradition a-brewing round these parts: the evening armchair short story read. I’m even following through with it! I've read dozens so far. Fingers crossed I’m not jinxing myself, here, with a giant Mission Accomplished banner. It’s easy to come up with what sounds like a good or workable routine and another thing to actually and successfully integrate it into one’s other routines, especially if one is lazy or set in his ways, or if one's kids are prone to cranking various YouTube mayhem. 

So far so good, though. For at least one portion of any evening, you'll find me parked in the blue chair by the window, reading and heroically tuning out the chaos and trying not to choke from the emanations of the ancient, dusty radiator in that corner of the living room.

It all started (sort of) with this:

Got that freshman year at URI, September 1992. Finished it, I forget, sometime around 2016. This is the book that more than any other opened up the world of short stories to me. It was the assigned reading for a class that I think I ended up failing, I honestly can’t remember. (I mostly blew off school in favor of an endless 80s-movie party, that first year at URI. Je ne regrette rien.) 

A few years down the road I finished getting that English degree at Rhode Island College and took several more courses on the short story. Is it my favorite of all the writing genres? It might be. Stephen King once lamented in the intro to one of his collections that books of short stories rarely make the bestseller lists, and that seems true. Why, though? They’re so portable, and you get a whole bunch of stories instead of just one. Moreover, you’d figure it would follow the general trend of ADHD/ character-max-limit/tik-tok-clip of everything else: the shorter, the better. Why don't they top the charts, more often than novels? Maybe this says something about people, I don't know.

Here’s fifteen(ish) short story collections that have kept me occupied lately. Not an exhaustive list of either what I’m reading, have read, planned to read, what’s to recommend, yadda yadda. (If it was I’d find room for Life After God by Douglas Coupland or the Collected Stories of DJ Breece Pancake, John O’Hara - one of the best, right there - or many more. My friend Joe will undoubtedly write "You missed one" when I post this link to Facebook; that one's worth reading, too.) Just the usual McRigamarole.

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One of the brightest lights of France’s Troisième République, Maurois had heretofore managed to stay almost completely off my radar until recently reading Bridge Over the Rivew Kwai reminded me of the literary creation Colonel Bramble. I had this book of short stories hanging around for many year but had never looked into any of his other works. One of which (The Fall of France) I just finished and heartily recommend. It’s a book of non-fiction dispatches from the Phony War, i.e. those Sunday newspaper pieces that appeared in France from declaration of war 1939 to the German invasion May and June 1940, and then a second part written “on the run” during said Invasion. 

Okay, I already did my WW2 post, and the one listed here is not The Fall of France (or the other very interesting Maurois books I picked up: Illustrated History of the USA, The Miracle of England, and bios on Disraeli and the Hugo families) and I can’t say too, too much about it yet, as I’ve only read a single one (the first). 

I liked it, though, and beseech you to join me in reintroducing one of the twentieth century’s intellectual giants back into the cultural conversation. Faisons Maurois Formidable Encore!

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My wife got me this one years ago. Some are little more than sketches, others (like the opener) are as powerful as any of her novels. 

I first heard of her at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, Vermont, smoking a butt in the middle of some zero degree afternoon, and this guy out there with me was reading her and we struck up a conversation. These sort of things (smoking butts in zero degree weather, conversing with strangers at bus stations and actually entertaining their recommendations) I did in my youth. I think these days you couldn’t get to my age then (19 or 20) without having read her in school; she’s had quite the renaissance in the past ten to fifteen years. Well-deserved. I think either of the Parables especially are up there with The Martian Chronicles or Neuromancer or whatever you like in the American Contributions to the Twentieth Century Sci-Fi Conversation.

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Hey now! Recent library sale pick-ups. What a score, plus her memoir (Clear Springs) all for like $6. I have always loved Miss Mason. I read her the same semester I flunked that short stories class aforementioned. A different class ("The Novel") where we read In Country. I suspect I'm not the only person to keep turning in homework for classes failed decades ago, right? That's not weird, right? Well, weird or not, Bobbie Ann Mason is a national treasure and I'm happy to spend any amount of her time in her writing company.

"They share a love of Fudgsicles, speedboats, and WKRP in Cincinnati." 

Favorites from the above in no particular order: "The Secret of the Pyramids," "Midnight Magic," "Airwaves," "Proper Gypsies," "Tunica," "Night Flight," "Shiloh," "Detroit Skyline 1949," and "A New Wave Format." 

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This guy came onto my radar by tripping over a box of forgotten donations at the VFW. I've told the story before. These were books meant for soldiers overseas but never made it over there. The VFW was a place where a lot of things (and people) never reached their final destination. Among the Missing was in there, and I read it on one of my shifts and was like ‘holy crap.’ (Put that as a blurb on the cover!) Fantastic stuff, start to finish.

For years after that I followed Chaon on Tumblr and he’d post a lot of interesting and varied things, but I almost got the impression he retired or gave it up. How wrong I was: now he’s got a lot more books available. Good! I haven’t read any from Safe House yet, but if they’re only half as good as the ones in Among the Missing, I’ll be more than satisfied.

If you read nothing else by this guy, read “Big Me.”

“I suppose this tells you a lot about what I was like as a boy, but these were among the first ideas I considered. I believed wholeheartedly in the notion that time travel would seen be a reality, just as I believed in UFOs and ESP and Bigfoot. I used to worry, in all seriousness, whether humanity would last as long as the dinosaurs had lasted. What if we were just a brief, passing phase on the planet? I felt strongly that we needed to explore other solar systems and establish colonies. The survival of the human species was very important to me.

“Perhaps it was because of this that I began to keep a journal. I had recently read The Diary of Anne Frank and had been deeply moved by the idea that a piece of you, words on a page, could live on after you were dead. I imagined that, after a nuclear holocaust, an extraterrestrial boy might find my journal, floating along among some bits of meteorite and pieces of buildings that had once been Earth. The extraterrestrial boy would translate my diary, and it would become a bestseller on his planet. Eventually, the aliens would be so stirred by my story that they would call off the intergalactic war they were waging and make a truce.

“In these journals I would frequently write messages to myself, a person whom I addressed as Big Me, or The Future Me. Rereading those entries as the addressee, I try not to be insulted, since my former self admonishes me frequently. ‘I hope you are not a failure,’ he says. ‘I hope you are happy.’ He says.

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Just the other day I sat down to read one of the ones I haven’t yet and found myself instead three quarters of the way through “The Mist”. Again. (I mean, I just re-read it last year or the year before. And not too long ago before then and on and on.)

What can I say? I love “The Mist.” More than many, it takes me back to being however-old and reading The Stephen King Companion over and over. But more to the story than that, of course, and more to this collection than “The Mist.” of course. I can vouch for the Joe Haldeman one (suitably disturbing) and the Russell Kirk one – the rest all look (and I’m sure are) fantastic.

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Richard Matheson? ‘Nuff said. 

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The master. One of, anyway. These three right here are all gold.

Actually, that picture up there is wrong: my version is this one, which has two selections from The Crack-Up as well as the eternally awesome "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. To Number ____" One of the best titles, ever. There are about forty movies wrapped up in that one story, and about a hundred scattered throughout the above in general.

Taps From Reveille is a gem, not only for “Babylon Revisited” (arguably FSF’s best work this side of Gatsby) but for "Family in the Wind," which has some of the best hurricane writing I've ever read. There's a whole race-conflict movie in there, too - it's amazing stuff. The "Basil" and "Josephine" stories are little remarked on today, but those familiar with Scott and Zelda's bios can find lots of intriguing things between the lines there.

And The Pat Hobby Stories, I’ve been reading this one every few years since the summer after I graduated high school. Still wonderful. The last time was a few years back and I remember thinking, okay I might be good for awhile / maybe I'd outgrown them, but just the other day I reread "Boil Some Water - Lots Of It" and was shaking my head at how good it was. Someone needs to turn those into prestige-TV gold. Any actor who achieved fame in the 90s would be perfect for it in the 2020s. 

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At one point in time I’d have said JD Salinger or Raymond Carver or Guy de Maupassant were the undisputed masters of the medium. I mostly lost my taste for Salinger, still chapeau Carver (though hardly ever read him anymore), and some of the bloom might be off the vine for these de Maupassant tales. That’s just from dipping my toes in them again now, though, after many years. I could discover I love them more than ever.

The first time I heard the famous “Necklace” story was in a tent in a campground in or near Munich, I think, but it might have been Frankfurt, on AFN Radio. I like that I have an Old Time Radio memory from when I was eight (I think) for a Nineteenth Century author. Like all the 50s and 60s music in my 80s memories, it lends a disorienting time travel aesthetic to revisiting such things. I’ve tried to pinpoint which radio version of “The Necklace” that might’ve been many times over the years - I think it's this one but honestly, who knows. (UPDATE: I listened to it last night and I'm almost positive it was. Another childhood moment preserved in amber! Thank you, internet.)

That reminds me: I have a different hardcover (somewhere) of Maupassant’s short fiction that I’ve never been able to find on any list of published works, published 1930-something. I don’t have a picture of it, but I’ve looked up all the details therein and nothing. I like to think of it as something an interdimensional traveler left behind. I hope he or she comes back and leaves more books.

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Larry Niven’s a very smart guy who I keep meaning to read more of. I loved "The Jigsaw Man" when I read it in Dangerous Visions and have lurked on his website quite a bit. 

"Bigger Than Worlds" is essential stuff, though. It's an essay that really gets the imagination going. Science fact that hits you like science fiction, or the work of Shusei Nagaoka or the Terran Trade Authority books. I like "Bigger Than Worlds" enough that the other day when I meant to read a different story from this volume, I... well, you guessed it. I'll get there, I promise. And all his other work, too. 

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That’s not the set I have, above. (That one's hard to come by.) I just have Pook of Puck’s Hill (a hymn to English heritage and landscape from his later years) and a different Collected Short Stories. Just a generic blue volume, about five hundred pages, not any of these.

I also have a Complete Kipling on the Kindle that would take me forever to get through if I dedicated myself to it, but I look at all like an endless National Park. Or museum. A wholly immersive, quality place to visit and lose myself in, reliably. No need to move in or map it out in any more depth than whatever each individual jaunt wants to show me.

He's sometimes a bit too dialect-y for my liking. But hey, so's Chris Claremont. Or Robert Burns. Or Dickens, I guess. But he's still pretty easy to read. Easy as in accessible, not that it's simplistic. The themes of empire and identity and adventure are all dealt with sensitively and intelligently, if you have eyes (and heart) to see it. 

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Chimamanda really hit the big time a few years back, and it’s been interesting seeing her navigate the heights. As Ken Kesey once observed, those high-intensity celebrity spotlight beams can really throw a writer’s eye off. Or blind or otherwise bedazzle them. So far so good in Chimamanda's case, and fingers crossed.

I have not read more than this one collection of stories, but I’m getting there. The title story is the kind of thing often imitated/ often attempted, and is wonderful. Start there if you never have. Great details. 

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Sometimes you just need some old-school sci-fi. Myself I only need it in small portions spread out over a long enough timeline. Nothing against it, it’s just a very specific taste and production approach, like Old Time Radio or anything old school.

A few of these were gifted to the Omnibus a few years back by a buddy of mine who doesn't seem to read these blogs anymore, despite having more or less the exact same interests and writing me about the same topics in emails. Such confusion I will definitely not miss when I shrug off this blogging coil in thirty-three short days. I found the Merril one in one of the little free libraries in my neighborhood; come to think of it, I found a paperback of DC Fontana's novelization of The Questor Tapes in the same bin. Must be some sci-fi fan in the neighborhood.

John Wyndham wrote The Day of the Triffids and the Midwich Cuckoos and more, of course, but this book (and its companion volume, although I don’t have that one) should be its own season of BBC sci-fi. I wish they’d do some anthology TV show of all Wyndham’s works. Ditto for:

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This collection is lots of fun and was really the hook for me after several baits (the original Planet of the Apes movie, of course - although in retrospect it I was responding more to Rod Serling's adaptation  than Boulle's original prose; a fortuitous collaboration, that - and getting assigned The Face of a Hero in Mrs. Wimms' class in tenth grade) to become a lifelong Boulle fan. 

I don’t know if the science in “E= MC2” really makes sense, but it’s a hell of a story. Otherwise his short fiction is hit or miss to me. Truthfully some of his longer fiction, too, but when he was on, he was on. Everyone should read "E=MC2", though, and wrestle with both the science and its implications. 

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Tobias Wolff is great. Every story has a little something or one particular line or several.

“In the Garden of the North American Martyrs” turned out to be remarkably prescient. Two of the ones in The Night in Question are probably top five short stories all around for me: “Bullet in the Brain” and “Two Boys and a Girl.” This won’t make any sense out of context, but it’s about as well-chosen an angle of ending as any I’ve ever read:

"They painted through the morning and into the afternoon. Every now and then Mary Ann would back off a few steps and take in what they'd done. At first she kept her thoughts to herself. The more the painted the more she had to say. Toward the end she went out into the street and stood there with her hands on her hips. It's interesting, isn't it? Really different. I see what you mean about picking up the bricks. It's pretty red, though.

It's perfect.

Think my Dad'll like it?

Your Dad? He'll be crazy about it.

Think so, Gilbert? Really?

Wait til you see his face."

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This guy got on my radar with In the Land of Israel, which someone had recommended to me when I first started to read up on Israel. Or maybe I just randomly picked it up, I don't know. That book’s more of a Studs Terkel sort of affair - and very eye-opening - whereas this one is a literary creation, i.e. straight fiction. 

Like the state of Israel itself, an evocative blend of the ancient ("Upon This Evil Earth") and cutting-edge ("Strange Fire," "A Hollow Stone"). The more Israeli context you have the better, I guess, but I don't think you really need it. If you know how to read a short story, you'll get all the salient points and enjoy them all just the same. (Similarly, I don't know how much Nigerian context you need for Chimamanda, or French/twentieth century context for Boulle or Maurois, or nineteenth for Kipling or de Maupassant. But the more you have - in fiction as in life - the deeper your appreciation will be. Learn all that is learnable, folks.) 

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Well, that's a wrap. Here are two late arrivals, though, that I’ve yet to crack open.

The Dick I’m sure I’ll love. (Go on and make your jokes.) I kind of doubt I’ll enjoy the Koch (which also lends itself to the same range of jokes, I guess, although I think he pronounces it ‘coke’). Koch was a poet and not a prose stylist, but these were his offerings in that arena, I think from the New School archives, if the blurb on the back is to be believed. 

Should be interesting cocktail fodder if nothing else, if I ever went to cocktail parties.

Thanks for reading. Got any to add? Lay 'em on me.