Thanks in part to the rise of ebooks, the short story form is enjoying renewed popularity. Many literary scholars would say the short story is the truest test of a fiction writer’s art and skill, and these collections offer the proof.
100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $14.99)
The Best American Short Stories is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway’s first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write “as an aid to love-making.” Nancy Hale’s story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen’s story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver’s “minimalism,” a term he disliked, and Grace Paley’s “secular Yiddishkeit.” Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot Díaz to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.
Moore writes that the process of assembling these stories allowed her to look “thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history — the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux.” 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories is an invaluable testament, a retrospective of our country’s ever-changing but continually compelling literary artistry.
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The World’s Greatest Short Stories – Dover Thrift Editions (4/5 stars, currently priced at $2.86)
Wonderfully wide-ranging and enjoyable, this outstanding collection features short stories by great nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers from America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Western Europe.
Included are Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters and a lonely customer in a Spanish cafe confront the concept of nothingness; “A & P,” John Updike’s most anthologized story and one of his most popular; “Borges and I,” typical Jorge Luis Borges — imaginative, philosophical, and mysterious; as well as short masterpieces by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, D. H. Lawrence, and ten other great writers.
Prime examples of the classic short story, these enduring literary treasures will be invaluable to students and teachers as well as to anyone who appreciates the finely turned tale. Collection includes:
Bartleby the Scrivener (1853, Melville)
The Necklace (1884, de Maupassant)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886, Tolstoy)
The Man Who Would Be King (1888, Kipling)
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892, C.P. Gilman)
The Fortune-Teller (1896, Machado de Assis)
The Lady with the Toy Dog (1899, Chekhov)
How Old Timofei Died with a Song (1900, Rilke)
The Path to the Cemetery (1901, Mann)
The Prussian Officer (1914, D.H. Lawrence)
Araby (1914, Joyce)
Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law (1917, Pirandello)
The Mark on the Wall (1921, Woolf)
A Hunger Artist (1922, Kafka)
The Garden-Party (1922, Mansfield)
The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket (1924, Kawabata)
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1926, Hemingway)
The Sacrifical Egg (1959, Achebe)
A & P (1961, Updike)
Borges and I (1962, Borges)
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99)
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories span the globe—–from the glamorous Riviera to an Eastern European shtetl, from a Native American reservation to a tiny village in Thailand.
But their characters are universally recognizable and utterly compelling, whether they are ex-pats in Africa, migrant workers crossing the Mexican border, Armenian immigrants on the rough streets of East Hollywood, or pioneers in nineteenth-century Idaho. Accompanying the stories are the editor’s introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. The collection includes:
Finding Billy White Feather – PERCIVAL EVERETT
The Seals – LYDIA DAVIS
Kilifi Creek – LIONEL SHRIVER
The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA – MANUEL MUÑOZ
A Permanent Member of the Family – RUSSELL BANKS
A Ride out of Phrao – DINA NAYERI
Owl – EMILY RUSKOVICH
The Upside-Down World – BECKY HAGENSTON
The Way Things Are Going – LYNN FREED
The History of Happiness – BRENDA PEYNADO
The Kingsley Drive Chorus – NAIRA KUZMICH
Word of Mouth – EMMA TÖRZS
Cabins – CHRISTOPHER MERKNER
My Grandmother Tells Me This Story – MOLLY ANTOPOL
The Golden Rule – LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
About My Aunt – JOAN SILBER
Ba Baboon – THOMAS PIERCE
Snow Blind – ELIZABETH STROUT
I, Buffalo – VAUHINI VARA
Birdsong from the Radio – ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN
The Best American Short Stories 2015 (4/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99)
In his introduction to this one hundredth volume of the beloved Best American Short Stories, guest editor T. C. Boyle writes, “The Model T gave way to the Model A and to the Ferrari and the Prius . . . modernism to postmodernism and post-postmodernism. We advance. We progress. We move on. But we are part of a tradition.”
Boyle’s choices of stories reflect a vibrant range of characters, from a numb wife who feels alive only in the presence of violence to a new widower coming to terms with his sudden freedom, from a missing child to a champion speedboat racer. These stories will grab hold and surprise, which according to Boyle is “what the best fiction offers, and there was no shortage of such in this year’s selections.”
Mulling over the question of character likability, series editor Heidi Pitlor asks, “Did I like these characters? I very much liked reading their stories, as did T. C. Boyle.” Here are characters who “are living, breathing people who screw up terribly and want and need and think uneasy thoughts.”
T. C. BOYLE, guest editor, has published fifteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his novel World’s End and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing. His most recent book is the novel The Harder They Come.
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