I’m looking for a book of short stories to keep in my car so I can read them while waiting for various things.
Can anyone recomend a good book?
I’d like the stories to be fairly short (I don’t know 2-8 pages maybe) because I won’t have a ton of time to read and it won’t be on a regular basis. I wouldn’t want to start a story, then have to finish it a couple weeks later.
My favorite is a collection of the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham.
The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is on my shelf and gets pretty regular use. There’s a lot of outdoors adventure-type stuff in there.
Stephen King has released several large collections of short stories: Night Shift, Different Seasons, Skeleton Crew, Four Past Midnight, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Different Seasons is actually a collection of four novellas (including those that would become the films Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil and Stand By Me), but Night Shift and Nightmares and Dreamscapes are both good collections of short stories, and there’s actually quite a bit of variety in them - much more than just horror.
Roy Blount, Jr.'s books are similar in style and humor to Bill Bryson. Neil Gaiman has a couple of fantasy/horror books of short stories out.
John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Log from the Sea of Cortez aren’t short stories, but they are travel tales that are told as a series of vignettes, rather than a continuous narrative, so you could still read a bit and put them down.
Gene Wolfe has been putting out great short story collections over the years - sci-fi and fantasy. Absolute prime stuff is his ‘book of days’ and ‘the island of Dr Death and other stories and other stories’ from the 80s. The latter one is perhaps a bit heavy for reading in the car. His sci-fi is consistently good whereas his fantasy can be uneven - when he’s on song with it though there is no short story writer like him.
I’m just remembering a very short one he had in a recent collection called ‘starwater strains’ that had a first line something like: ‘My dog can fold time and space.’ Fantastic stuff!
James Herriot’s books, beginning with All Creatures Great and Small, are composed of chapters that are mostly standalone stories, each describing a different experience. It would be pretty easy to go through the books reading a single chapter at a time.
I usually recommend a series of books titled Sudden Fiction. The stories within are between 2 and 6 pages, and they’re all good. When you have 5 pages to tell everything, you get only what’s essential and excellent. These books, along with some from David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, are my airplane / cruise ship / need something quick to read choices.
Sudden Fiction International has three of my favorite stories of all time: Ann Beattie’s “Snow”[sup]1[/sup], Bai Xiao-Yi’s “The Explosion in the Parlor”[sup]2[/sup], and Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”.
[sup]1[/sup]“Snow” has a memorable line in it that I’ve had in my head for many years: “Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up . . . Love, in shortest form, becomes a word.”
[sup]2[/sup]Another great line: “There are things which people accept less the more you defend them. The truer the story you tell, the less true it sounds.”
For variety, I would suggest trying one of the volumes in The Best American Short Stories series - there will always be something worthwhile and you will be able to discover which authors you need to investigate further.