25 Influential Short Story Collections

Whenever I give readings or conduct a #fictionwriting workshop at the public library, people always ask me about my favorite authors. Like most American #writers who attended an MFA program, I got my start writing #shortstories. To write an effective short story, you first need to read a lot of them.

Among the classic masters of the short story, Herman Melville, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates generally hold up better than the works of Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carson McCullers and John Updike. Given his misogynistic portrayals of women, it's hard for me to truly "like" Ernest Hemingway's stories. Nonetheless, I greatly admire his sparse writing style and embrace Hemingway's iceberg theory of story writing. And though she wrote personal essays, novels and screenplays rather than short stories, no one perfected and built on that theory better than Joan Didion (when she first started out, she used to type out Hemingway's stories over and over to learn how he constructed his sentences), who, apart from National Book Award Winner Charles Johnson who served as my mentor and thesis advisor while I was in graduate school and remains a huge inspiration and influence on me today, has more shaped how and what I write.

While many academics and literary critics rightfully condemn Flannery O'Connor's stereotypes of Black southerners and her remarks in letters to friends about her personal "dislike of Negroes," few short story writers deliver an emotional wallop like O'Connor did, regularly skewering (and ultimately punishing) her white characters for believing in their racial superiority. As for F. Scott Fitzgerald, while most regard The Great Gatsby as his masterpiece, his contributions to the craft of the American short story deserve far more recognition. Fitzgerald's stories such as "Emotional Bankruptcy," "Absolution," and "Babylon Revisited" still linger in my imagination decades after reading them for the first time.

Below are 25 short story collections that I turn to again and again as a reader and a writer:

1.The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

2. Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

3. Come to Me by Amy Bloom

4. The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Edited by Christopher Buckley)

5. What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Love? by Raymond Carver

6. My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers by Kelly Cherry

7. Short Stories by Anton Chekhov

8. Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin

9. Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

10.Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg

11.What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

12.The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Edited by Mathew Bruccoli)

13. American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

14. Life Can Be Both Wave and Particle by Ellen Gilchrist

15. The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway

16. Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

17. Transparency by Frances Hwang

18. Eight Tales from the Major Phase by Henry James

19. Dr. King’s Refrigerator & Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson

20. Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver

21. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

22. A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor

23. The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley

24. Delicate: Stories of Light & Desire by Mary Sojourner

25. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

What's your favorite short story collection?