Some Essential Short Story Collections (no particular order)
Discover essential short story collections from literary masters, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Highsmith, and J.F. Powers—timeless fiction in one curated reading list.
Book
The Stories of J.F. Powers
by J.F. Powers
Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest living storytellers," J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest. Powers's thoroughly human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption. These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life. Table of Contents The Lord's Day The Trouble Lions, Harts, Leaping Does Jamesie He Don't Plant Cotton The Forks Renner The Valiant Woman The Eye The Old Bird, A Love Story Prince of Darkness Dawn Death of a Favorite The Poor Thing The Devil Was the Joke A Losing Game Defection of a Favorite Zeal Blue Island The Presence of Grace Look How the Fish Live Bill Folks Keystone One of Them Moonshot Priestly Fellowship Farewell Pharisees Tinkers
Book
Babylon Revisited
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A collection of classic short stories by the celebrated American author.
Book
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. This collection, The Short Stories, originally published in 1938, is definitive. Among these forty-nine short stories are Hemingway's earliest efforts, written when he was a young foreign correspondent in Paris, and such masterpieces as "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Killers," "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Set in the varied landscapes of Spain, Africa, and the American Midwest, this collection traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style -- from the plain, bald language of his first story, "Up in Michigan," to the seamless prose and spare, eloquent pathos of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" to the expansive solitude of the Big Two-Hearted River stories. These stories showcase the singular talent of a master, the most important American writer of the twentieth century.