Book Riot Readers’ Top 67 Favorite Short Story Collections
Sponsored by Random House with The Buzziest Short Story Collections of 2018.
From New York Times bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld’s dazzling first collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, to National Book Award winner Denis Johnson’s final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, there’s a short story collection for every book lover from Random House.
Loved Phil Kay’s Redployment? Will Mackin’s mesmerizing debut collection Bring Out the Dog will transport you to the front lines with beautifully outstanding prose. George Saunders calls it “a near-miraculous, brilliant debut.”
And Carmen Maria Machado raves of Anjali Sachdeva’s (such-deva) exhilarating collection, All the Names They Used for God; “completing one [story] is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.”
All are available this spring from Random House, wherever books are sold.
Short story collections make excellent entry points into unfamiliar genres, they’re a great way to discover and fall in love with the works of under-the-radar authors, and they come in handy as quick escapes from the office.
Maybe you enjoy massive science fiction and fantasy anthologies or contemporary fiction collections featuring some of the best short stories by your favorite author. Or perhaps you’re partial to bite-sized tales of terror read in between freezer sessions.
We challenged you to name the best short story collections you’ve ever read, and you responded. We tallied up the results, and present your picks—quite the range—in order of popularity, then alphabetically by title:
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Machine of Death by Matthew Bennardo and Ryan North
Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Alice Munro (any collection)
Almost Famous Women: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
Baby mother and the king of swords by Lorna Goodison
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories by Terry Bisson
The Best of Roald Dahl by Roald Dahl
Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler
Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis
Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor
Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill
Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
Diving Belles and Other Stories by Lucy Wood
Dragon Tales and Other Stories by Jane Yolan
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr
How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
If the River Was Whiskey by TC Boyle
Looking for Jake by China Mieville
Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr
O. Henry (anything)
Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
Salsa Nocturna by Daniel José Older
Selected Stories by Alice Munro
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez
Tenth of December by George Saunders
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Collected Short Stories of Grace Paley by Grace Paley
The Collected Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Diving Belles by Lucy Wood
The Highway Kind edited by Patrick Millikin
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Inheritance and Other Stories by Robin Hobb
The Leaving and Other Stories by Budge Wilson
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
Tomorrow’s Children by Isaac Asimov
Twisted by Jeffery Deaver
What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite
You Know When the Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
