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Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges, 1962
As recommended by Rory Finbar, robjam, herero, and Matt Bluemink
Translated from Spanish to English and published in 1962, Labyrinths was the most popular suggestion among our readers. Written mainly during the second world war, the collection contains some of Borges’s most celebrated work, including The Library of Babel, the story of an unimaginably vast library that contains every possible variation of a 410-page book. The story would go on to inspire many other writers, including Umberto Eco and Terry Pratchett, to use a variation of the concept in their writings.
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson, 1919
As recommended by Yosserian, petersalmon and JumbleBuns
Known as a “short-story cycle” because of the way in which its stories are all united by location but do not form a cohesive novel, Winesburg, Ohio is considered to be one of the earliest examples of modernist literature. The characters in the collection are all struggling to overcome the loneliness that is a feature of living in the eponymous town. Anderson said he wrote the first of the stories while naked, and that he finished each of the pieces in one sitting. It is “brilliant, discursive and moving,” says petersalmon, who claims to be reading it “for about the 10th time”.
Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
As recommended by safarikent and Steve Petherbridge
The oldest collection in this selection, Dubliners had a chequered history, sent to 15 hesitant publishers, one of whom deliberately burned the papers after deciding not to go through with the printing. And this was the book deemed to be Joyce’s most accessible, using none of the stream-of-consciousness with which the author would later become synonymous. The tales in Joyce’s only short-story collection are united by a preoccupation with paralysis and death. Steve Petherbridge calls Joyce “peerless and ageless” and highlights The Dead and Eveline as shining examples of the author’s prowess.
Home Truths
Mavis Gallant, 1981
As recommended by neutralobserver
Mavis Gallant is “the best short-story writer of all time”, in the words of neutralobserver, and she is praised also by herero and CharlesLambert. The much-loved Canadian author, who died this year at the age of 91, wrote a dozen short-story collections and won the Rea Award for the Short Story as a result. Home Truths zones in on Canadian identity, the narrator targeting for criticism the English-speaking Canadians of whom Gallant was nominally a member. It is, like the rest of her work, the writing of someone with a fine ear for conversation and a gift for deceptively clever prose.
The Quantity Theory of Insanity
Will Self, 1991
As recommended by Rory Finbar
Will Self shot to fame in the early 90s with The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which caught the eye of Martin Amis and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1993. Self’s debut comprises only six stories, of which Ward 9, about a psychiatric institution, is the longest by a country mile. The collection is bleak, satirical and host to Self’s famously extensive vocabulary. As with a lot of his work, it divided opinion: the New York Times said, “To be alive and British, it seems, is as unattractive and dull as being dead.”
Steps
Jerzy Kosinski, 1968
As recommended by sglennon
In sglennon’s words, “Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps is a superb and haunting collection of sories from the darker side of humanity.” Devoid of any names of either people or places, the collection by the Polish-American was a commercial failure but won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1969. Kosinksi’s narrator asphyxiates butterflies, throws bottles at old men, and watches an octopus slowly eat its own tentacles. David Foster Wallace, whose work sglennon cites in the same breath, said that Steps was “a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever”.
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz, 2012
As recommended by TreesAreGood
TreesAreGood champions This Is How You Lose Her, the second collection by Pulitzer prize-winning writer and professor Junot Diaz. The stories centre around a character named Yunior, and all examine infidelity and the difficulties men face in creating lasting relationships with women. “It’s not exactly cheerful, I’ve got to say,” says TreesAreGood, “but in the end I felt rewarded for reading all the stories – and not stopping after one or two.” Diaz’s work, peppered with slang from the author’s native Dominican Republic, is widely praised for its lyricism and dexterity.
Elephant and Other Stories
Raymond Carver, 1988
As recommended by Dragonluck
Carver is acknowledged to be one of the writers that revived the dying art of the short story, and Elephant, published in the year of his death, is examplary of the straightforward, spare style Carver employed throughout his career. His writing has been described as “dirty realism” – a form of fiction concerned with “the belly-side of contemporary life”, in the words of Granta’s Bill Buford. The stories in Elephant are largely unremarkable in subject matter and evince Carver’s gift for shining a light on the lives of ordinary people.
Kiss Kiss
Roald Dahl, 1960
As recommended by Daniel Carpenter
Readers mention Roald Dahl three times but Daniel Carpenter is the only one to recommend a specific collection: Kiss Kiss, Dahl’s particularly macabre compendium. Unlike the work for which Dahl is most famous, these tales are for adults (though one – Champion of the World – would later become a children’s book in its own right). They include Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat, a story that was adapted for the screen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Edward the Conqueror, a tale about a cat that might be Franz Liszt reincarnate. KelvinH calls Dahl “the master of tightly written stories. One page, two pages...gripping.”
Jesus’ Son
Denis Johnson, 1992
As recommended by davidseaman
davidseaman is pretty sure about this one; Jesus’ Son is “(and I don’t care what anyone else thinks on this subject; if you disagree with me, you are wrong and I am right) the single greatest short story collection there is”. Johnson came to prominence with this, his first collection about addicts in rural America told through a frenetic and anonymous narrator. davidseaman says that the collection’s strength lies in the fact that “there is not a story in it that could be removed, replaced or altered for the better”. Because it is like a novel to perhaps a greater extent than any other collection on this list, it was adapted into a well-received film in 1999, directed by Alison Maclean.
