To wrap up Short Story Week here at The Millions, we conducted an informal poll of our contributors, asking them to name their favorite English-language short story collections. The results form a kind of subjective bibliography, a personal pantheon of 45 favorite collections. We’ve added links to our blurbs and reviews where appropriate. We hope this list will be useful, or at least interesting; feel free to add your own picks, and blurbs, in the comments box below.
The List:
- Triumph of the Egg, and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson (especially “Unlighted Lamps”)
- Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
- Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (blurb)
- Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender (especially “End of the Line”)
- Too Far From Home by Paul Bowles (review)
- Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
- Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
- The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (especially “Goodbye, My Brother”)
- Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (review)
- Drown by Junot Diaz
- The Coast of Chicago (two votes) and I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek (blurb)
- The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg (review)
- Jazz Age Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (review)
- Across the Bridge, From the Fifteenth District, and The Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant (review)
- In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass (two votes) (blurb)
- Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (two votes) (review)
- The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
- Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
- All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones (two votes) (review
- Dubliners by James Joyce (two votes)
- Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (review)
- Hard to Admit and Harder to Explain by Sarah Manguso
- The Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield (especially “Bliss”)
- The Secret Goldfish by David Means
- Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels
- Other Electricities by Ander Monson
- Demonology by Rick Moody
- Self-Help, Like life, and Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
- The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (especially “My Mother’s Dream”)
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer
- Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
- Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (two votes)
- Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders (review)
- Aquaboogie by Susan Straight
- Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (two votes) (review)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
- Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde
- Excitability: Selected Stories 1986-1996 by Diane Williams
