Short Story Recommendations

I met a person on Instagram yesterday who asked me for short story collection recommendations. I spent a few minutes thinking collections I have read recently and put together this list. This list is one person's recommendations, this is not a list of great stories one must read.

Many great stories are printed in the New Yorker. Yes, to see their archives, a subscription is required. However, they have two podcasts where they read stories printed in the magazine.

The Writer's Voice has authors reading their own stories

The New Yorker Fiction podcast has an author read a story someone else published in the magazine followed by a discussion of the story with the fiction editor.

Looking at my own library I found quite a few collections I think are worth reading:

• Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gimpel the fool is often reprinted. I suggest starting with The Bus.
• Bliss Montage Ling Ma
• Stories of John Cheever. Start with The Enormous Radio.
• Suddenly a Knock on the Door: Stories by Etgar Keret. Keret is an Israeli author. His work has been featured on This American Life. You can hear one of his projects on their website
• Flannery O'Connor. She did not live long, but, at least in my opinion, any one of her published stories is worth reading.
• Forever Rumpole by John Mortimer. Humorous stories about barrister Rumpole who defends clients in London's Old Bailey. The stories are adapted from the British television series Rumpole of the Bailey.
• The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes. Hughes is better rembered for his poetry but the stories of everyman Jesse B Semple deserve to be more widely read.
• Tolstoy Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories. Much shorter than the big novels, just as good.
• Ray Bradbury stories. A bit hard to know where to start, but almost all of them are worth reading.
• Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds. Written for people 10 and up, but I suspect a lot of adults will love these stories.
• Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu. Dark and strange. The first story in the collection is my favorite.
• Revenge by Yoko Ogawa. A series of interconnected horror stories.