I love to read short story collections and admire the craft involved. When I tried to write a few myself, I discovered it’s a lot harder than it looks. (I’ll get into some of the reasons why in a later post.) Here are a few of my favorite collections, in no particular order.
- Anything by Alice Munro – she’s simply the best and she makes it look so easy!
- Tom Perrotta’s Bad Haircut and Nine inches both made me laugh out loud. I like his novels too but I like the short stories better.
- Dan Chaon’s Fitting Ends and Among the Missing captured something Midwestern and hard to define. They stayed in my mind for a long time.
- Ron Rash, both Burning Bright and Nothing Gold Can Stay – I like his novels and other collections too but these are favorites.
- Ron Carlson’s The Hotel Eden – and I highly recommend his book about writing short stories, fittingly titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story.
- Laura Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her – great twist-and-turn nourish stories from a female point of view.
- Marly Swick Monogamy and The Summer Before the Summer of Love. Monogamy sat on my bookshelf for years before I picked it up and read it. I loved it so much I immediately ordered The Summer Before the Summer of Love and I wasn’t disappointed. Great stories!
- Molly Ringwald’s When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories. I wasn’t expecting much on the erroneous assumption a talented actress couldn’t possibly write too but I was wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed these stories.
- Alix Ohlin’s Signs and Wonders. A relatively new writer and another great find.
- Jennifer Egan’s Emerald City and A Visit from the Goon Squad (linked short stories in service of a novel.)
