The Best Short Story Collections
Fifteen single-author story collections, ranked by how hard the form is working inside them. Vote the order around if your own reading disagrees. Multi-author anthologies are excluded on purpose: a collection here is one writer's book, cover to cover, which is why no Best American volume turns up. The span runs from Joyce in 1914 to Escoffery in 2022, and reaching back that far is the whole point, because the short story did most of its inventing long before 2000 and a list that started in the last twenty years would credit the wrong people. Ordering logic: books that changed what a story could do sit above books that perfected an existing mode, and ties go to whichever one I would press on a reader tonight. Translators are named. Where the catalog holds only an omnibus or the original-language record, the item says so.
James Joyce — Dubliners (1914) is #1 on “The Best Short Story Collections”.
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James Joyce — Dubliners (1914)
Fifteen stories that took nine years to get into print: between 1905 and 15 June 1914 Joyce sent the manuscript out eighteen times to fifteen publishers, and a Dublin printer burned the sheets rather than set them. The closing story, The Dead, runs long enough to count as a novella, and Gabriel Conroy's evening collapses the moment Gretta names a boy called Michael Furey.
DublinersJames Joyce - 2
Alice Munro — Runaway (2004)
Eight stories, three of them (Chance, Soon and Silence) tracking Juliet Henderson across decades until her daughter walks out of her life, a biography delivered in instalments with the connective tissue removed. McClelland and Stewart published it in 2004 and it took that year's Giller Prize. The Swedish Academy called Munro a master of the contemporary short story when it gave her the 2013 Nobel.
RunawayAlice Munro - 3
Jorge Luis Borges — Ficciones (1944)
Published in 1944, and the reason a story can now be a fake book review, a library catalog or the constitution of a lottery. Pierre Menard sets out to write Don Quixote, not copy it but write it, and arrives at a text identical to Cervantes' that Borges then praises as the richer of the two. Grove Press issued the 1962 English translation: Anthony Kerrigan editing and translating alongside Anthony Bonner, Alastair Reid, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd.
FiccionesJorge Luis Borges - 4
Flannery O'Connor — A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
Ten stories from 1955, and the link here goes to that book rather than to the posthumous Complete Stories, which won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction and swallows this one whole. The Misfit, an escaped convict who stays courteous while his two men walk the family into the woods in pairs, is the clearest thing O'Connor ever wrote about grace arriving as violence.
A good man is hard to findFlannery O'Connor - 5
Raymond Carver — Cathedral (1983)
Finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 1983 collection where Carver stopped cutting everything to the bone. Twelve stories, and in the last one a blind man named Robert takes the narrator's hand and makes him draw a cathedral with his eyes shut, television still on. A Small, Good Thing hands the baker a second chance the earlier version of that story refused him.
CathedralRaymond Carver - 6
Denis Johnson — Jesus' Son (1992)
Narrated by a man everyone calls Fuckhead, these eleven linked stories came from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1992. In Emergency, a hospital orderly called Georgie pulls a hunting knife out of a man's eye socket and the patient walks away fine, which sets the register for the whole book: catastrophe handled with the flat calm of someone extremely high.
Jesus' sonDenis Johnson - 7
Ted Chiang — Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)
Tor Books gathered Chiang's first eight stories in 2002, and the volume took the 2003 Locus Award for best collection. Story of Your Life gives a linguist a heptapod written language with no direction in time, so learning it means remembering her daughter's death before the child is conceived. That is the story later adapted as the film Arrival.
Stories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang - 8
Angela Carter — The Bloody Chamber (1979)
Ten fairy tales prised open rather than retold: Carter said her intention was to extract the latent content from the traditional stories, not to write adult versions of them. Gollancz published it in 1979 and it won that year's Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. The Company of Wolves became a 1984 Neil Jordan film she helped script; the wolf-girl of Wolf-Alice closes the book by licking the beast clean.
Bloody Chamber and Other StoriesAngela Carter - 9
Jhumpa Lahiri — Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, first published in 1999 and reported to have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Nine stories, and the title one sets Mr Kapasi, a doctor's translator who drives tourists at weekends, beside a woman who mistakes his job for absolution and confesses something he has no idea what to do with.
Interpreter of MaladiesJhumpa Lahiri - 10
Katherine Mansfield — The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Dying of tuberculosis at 34, with a pulmonary haemorrhage taking her on 9 January 1923, a year after Constable put this collection out, Mansfield wrote the first English stories that trust an ending to arrive sideways. Laura carries leftover sandwiches down the hill to a dead carter's cottage in the title story and cannot say what she has understood. Nobody in 1922 was finishing on that note.
The Garden Party and Other StoriesKatherine Mansfield - 11
Italo Calvino — The Complete Cosmicomics (2009)
Penguin Classics gathered the lot in 2009, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver: the twelve pieces of Le cosmicomiche from 1965 plus the later Qfwfq stories out of t zero and elsewhere. Weaver's American edition of the original had already won a National Book Award. Qfwfq narrates nearly all of them, once as a mollusc growing a shell so that he can be seen.
The complete CosmicomicsItalo Calvino - 12
Isaac Babel — Red Cavalry and Other Stories (1926)
Attached to Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army as a journalist during the Polish-Soviet war, Babel kept a diary and turned it into Konarmiya, published as a book in 1926. Penguin Classics issued David McDuff's translation, edited by Efraim Sicher, in 2006. Two-page stories carry the load: in My First Goose the narrator crushes a landlady's goose under his boot so the Cossacks will let him eat with them.
Red Cavalry and Other StoriesIsaac Babel - 13
Carmen Maria Machado — Her Body and Other Parties (2017)
Graywolf Press published these eight stories in 2017 and the National Book Award for Fiction made it a finalist. Especially Heinous rewrites Law & Order: SVU episode by episode using only the one-word titles, until Benson and Stabler are being haunted by girls with bells for eyes. Machado has said she began by rewriting the episode descriptions, then realized the titles alone would carry it.
Her Body and Other PartiesCarmen Maria Machado - 14
Mariana Enríquez — Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)
Megan McDowell's English translation appeared in 2017, from Hogarth in America and Portobello in Britain; the Spanish original, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, dates from 2016, and that Spanish title is what the catalog record carries. Argentine women start burning themselves in public in the title story, so that disfigurement stops being something only men get to do to them.
Las cosas que perdimos en el fuegoMariana Enríquez - 15
Jonathan Escoffery — If I Survive You (2022)
Eight linked stories about a Jamaican family in Miami, published by MCD on 6 September 2022 and shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, which a collection almost never is. Trelawny, the younger son, gets asked what he is by schoolmates, girlfriends and landlords, and the second-person story that opens the book turns that question into a room he never gets out of.
If I Survive YouJonathan Escoffery
How this list was ranked
Readers rank this list by voting items up and down. Items are ordered by reader votes.
