Short Story Anthologies: Best, Favorite, Essential, Most Famous, and/or Recommended?

[J-Sun]

Basically, this thread is for anything anyone can say about any non-trivial anthologies of "literary" short stories.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont
The Specialty of the House and Other Stories by Stanley Ellin
Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison
Dreams of Dark and Light by Tanith Lee
Dangerous Visions by various
Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow by various
The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories by various
And several Alfred Hitchcock books

 

[Guttersnipe]

Did you mean non-speculative and/or classics?

 

[BAYLOR]

Nightshade and Damnations by Gerald Kersh
Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
John The Balladeer by manly Wade Wellman
Coldprint by Ramsey Campbell
In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner
Adrift on the Haunted Seas by William Hope Hodgeson
The Sower of Thunder by Robert E Howard
Xiccarp By Clark Ashton Smith
The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin by Seabury Quinn
H P Lovecraft the Complete Fiction

 

[J-Sun]

Did you mean non-speculative and/or classics?

Yep, I was thinking of non-speculative/classics and also anthologies (or multi-author books) rather than collections (or single-author books). Things like The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, the various Penguin books, etc. (I mean, those usually have a Le Guin and Bradbury story or whatnot, but they're generally non-speculative.)

 

[Guttersnipe]

Great Short Stories of the Masters, collected by Charles Neider.

 

[dask]

How about Stories To Remember, volumes 1 and 2, and More Stories To Remember, volumes 1 and 2, all four “selected” by Thomas B. Costain and John Beecroft? Each two volume set contains six novels and thirty plus short stories.

Then there’s this which I have without the dust jacket:

 

[Extollager]

Basically, this thread is for anything anyone can say about any non-trivial anthologies of "literary" short stories.

Good topic, if people can stick to it.

Norris Houghton's Great Russian Short Stories is recommended. I believe this book introduced me to Turgenev's wonderful "Bezhin Meadows." Abebooks.com has multiple copies on offer.

 

[Extollager]

Paul Negri's Great American Short Stories published inexpensively by Dover is a handy gathering of classics.

 

[dask]

Not my copy. I moved some stuff around in the garage and now can’t find it. But it’s there somewhere.

 

[hitmouse]

Granta Best of Young British Novelists (1983) is full of great material, and is pretty amazing when one considers the selection.

Salman Rushdie had won the Booker Prize 2 years earlier for Midnight’s Children, but the others were little-known at the time.

 

[hitmouse]

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2 (1993) is also an excellent read.

 

[J-Sun]

How about Stories To Remember, volumes 1 and 2, and More Stories To Remember, volumes 1 and 2, all four “selected” by Thomas B. Costain and John Beecroft? Each two volume set contains six novels and thirty plus short stories.

Then there’s this which I have without the dust jacket:
View attachment 90873

Those Costain/Beecroft (and Costain) anthologies look really neat. I'll keep them in mind. (I have a couple of volumes of Kipling - I think maybe a sort of YA thing - edited by Beecroft. Never occurred to me to wonder if he'd done anything else.)

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2 (1993) is also an excellent read.

View attachment 91017View attachment 91018

Wonder what it's like to be an English author named Shakespeare these days?

I'd already ordered a few anthologies before this thread occurred to me (something's wrong with my brain, but that's not news) and, if you're interested, there are pictures in the Book Haul thread. If quantity equals quality, they should be great.

A Treasury of Short Stories, Kielty (1947, 70 stories)
The Art of the Tale, Halpern (1986, 82 stories)
The McGraw-Hill Book of Fiction, DiYanni/Rompf (1995, 121 stories)
The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, Oates/Beha (2008, 48 stories)
The Story and Its Writer, 8th Ed., Charters (2011, 148 stories)

 

[Dave Vicks]

Gardner Dozois Anthologies.
Harlan Ellison collections.
JG Ballard collections
Thomas Hartwell Anthology.

 

[Bick]

Gardner Dozois Anthologies.
Harlan Ellison collections.
JG Ballard collections
Thomas Hartwell Anthology.

Literary, non-genre short stories?

 

[dask]

A few more for your consideration. Unfortunately the Maugham lacks a dust jacket.

 

[Randy M.]

Tellers of Tales, ed. W. Somerset Maugham

I haven't even dented this, but it's a wide-ranging anthology. The link will take you where you can see the contents. Authors include Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Balzac, Poe, de l'Isle Adam, Mirbeau, Babel, Zweig, Gorky, Faulkner, Chekov and some Russians (?) whose names I don't recognize. The stories appear to be a mix of what in 1939/40 would have been high literary and commercial fiction, from "The Monkey's Paw" (W. W. Jacobs) to "The Jolly Corner" (Henry James) to "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (Tolstoy) to "Haircut" (Ring Lardner) to "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (A. C. Doyle) so it doesn't avoid genre, it pretty much just ignores it in favor of Maugham's stated intention to offer well-told tales.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2 (1993) is also an excellent read.

View attachment 91017View attachment 91018

Great anthology. I'm a big fan of Amis, Banks, McEwan and Swift. But does anyone know if Clive Sinclair took to writing before or after he brought us the C5?

 

[Astro Pen]

Okay Its a school book, but just look at the list of authors in the contents.

++++

 

[Bick]

Super line-up indeed. I wonder what was in Volume 1?
(Not sure 'modern' is the correct adjective for the stories, though. Vanka and Grief were first published 136 years ago.)