None of these collections of short stories from literary greats are bargain priced, but they’re all worth owning, even at full retail prices. Short fiction is perfect for these last few dog days of summer, when you’ve got only an hour or two to spare between running back to school errands, and these collections are all bestselling and award winning classics.
The Stories of John Cheever (4.5/5 stars, $13.99 for this 61 story collection) – NATIONAL BESTSELLER, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, it has become a classic. Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” Cheever tells us everything we need to know about “the pain and sweetness of life.”
The Early Stories: 1953-1975: John Updike (4.5/5 stars, $14.99 for this 103 story collection) – A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms,” reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story. “Contemplating John Updike’s monumental achievement in the short story, one is moved to think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps William Faulkner—writers whose reputations would be as considerable, or nearly, if short stories had been all that they had written. From [his] remarkable early short story collections . . . through his beautifully nuanced stories of family life [and] the bittersweet humors of middle age and beyond . . . John Updike has created a body of work in the notoriously difficult form of the short story to set beside those of these distinguished American predecessors. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks are due to John Updike for having brought such pleasure and such illumination to so many readers for so many years.”
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (4.5/5 stars, $13.99 for this 60 story collection) – THE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR
In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, readers will delight in the author’s most beloved classics such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection. For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor (4.5/5 stars, $8.51 for this 10 story collection) – The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. Flannery was particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O’Connor’s body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters.
Get one or more of these great short story collections, and you’ll never be lacking for a quick, quality read.