A Clean Well Lighted Place - Hemingway
Report on the Barnhouse Effect - Vonnegut
To Build a Fire - London
Those are the ones that stand out. I will re-read both Vonnegut and Hemingway’s collections every few years.
Somehow I acquired several Playboy paperback anthologies of short stories from the ‘60s and ‘70s. High quality writing very unlike that found in “Men’s” magazines of the time.
A lot of my favorite short stories have already been mentioned but I don’t think anybody has mentioned “They’re Made of Meat” by Terry Bisson, or ”The One Thousand Dozen” by Jack London.
Playboy paid its contributors very well, which resulted in some really good literary and interview pieces and was one way that it elevated itself above the typical “men’s” magazines of its era.
Some authors who published in Playboy: Atwood, Bradbury, Fleming, Nabokov, Le Guin, Updike, Oates, Murakami, Palahniuk, Singer, Borges, Malamud, AC Clarke, McGuane, King… i’m sure I’m missing a ton.
Good point. I used to read Playboy, and to be honest, it was mostly for the articles, as trite as that sounds. Great short fiction, interesting interviews, items on music and theatre and movies. There was a lot more to it than nude girls in pictorials, though those were nice too. Still, there were no more than 20 pages of those in a magazine that must have been 250 pages. The rest was filled with articles.
I really enjoyed a book I borrowed from the public library: something like “The Best of the Playboy Interviews.” And there were in-depth, incisive, interviews with Alex Haley, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, John Lennon, and so on. Some I had read in the magazine; others were new to me. But either way, none were the kind of thing you’d find in “Stag Monthly.”
“The Gilgul of Park Avenue” by Nathan Englander.
“The Cats” by John Updike.
The original Omni had a lot of good stories. For some reason, I occasionally think about a scenario (from faulty memory) in which a time traveler presents Newton with a pocket calculator and he freaks out.
The Colossus of Ylorgne by Clark Ashton Smith
Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard
I’ll agree to the multiply-suggested Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, but there are others of his I like as much – The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, and (although it’s really a novella) The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I can’t believe that didn’t get published during his lifetime.
The Careful Man by Frederick Forsyth
Silver Blaze and several others by Arthur Conan Doyle.
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum
Uncommon Sense by Hal Clement
Why doesn’t someone here contact a publisher to persuade them to publish a book called something like Great Short Stories? It can include all the stories mentioned in this thread which are out of copyright. It can also include all the ones where the authors (or their estates) are willing to publish their stories for the right payment. If you can get permission for the right ones, it will be the best collection of short stories ever published.
I haven’t, sorry.
Yeah, these two are good too.
I read them at the same time actually, in an anthology of American short stories.
Alexander Pushkin
The Queen of Spades
Truman Capote
A Christmas Memory
Such compilations already exist, though most specialize; great short mystery stories, great short science fiction stories, etc.
The scope is just too broad, and the publisher would be deluged with complaints that the complainer’s “best story ever written” wasn’t included. My volume of all of Arthur C Clarke’s short stories is about the size of an old-school Manhattan telephone directory, and I’d be hard-pressed to find one to exclude from a “best of” collection.
Isaac Asimov edited a collection of SF from the 30s titled something like “The Golden Age of Science Fiction”, because that’s around the time that SF really took off and it reminded him of his youth. Even with that limitation, it had to be published in three volumes. (It’s a great collection, BTW, both revelatory of some of the scientific naivety of the 30s and just downright entertaining in its own right.)
There are dozens of similar collections out there, of course. A couple that I read off of Project Gutenberg were “The Great English Short-Story Writers” (quite good) and “The Best American Humorous Short Stories” (casually racist by today’s standards).
I have that one. And there were a bunch of other such collections; best short SF stories told in the first person, best short SF stories that are in the form of letters, and so forth.
And I think there are annual collections as well; best short stories of 2025, for example.
The short-story anthology Points of View has its contents arranged by first-person POV, omniscient third-person POV, epistolary narrative, and so on. It’s been a high-school English staple for decades.
Profession (I guess usually listed as a novella) by Isaac Asimov. Excellent illustration of “training” vs. “education”.
The Story of the Old Ram by Mark Twain. We were reading this in class in high school, taking turns reading a paragraph or two out loud. I got to read the section:
Parson Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece.
She wouldn’t let them roll him up, but planted him just so–full length. The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn’t bury him–they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument. And they nailed a sign on it and put–put on–put on it–sacred to–the
m-e-m-o-r-y–of fourteen y-a-r-d-s–of three-ply–car—pet–containing all that was–m-o-r-t-a-l–of–of–W-i-l-l-i-a-m–W-h-e–"
I couldn’t get through the last sentence - I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. The funniest industrial accident of all time…
I still think this must have been the inspiration for Grandpa Simpson’s “onion on my belt” monologue.
Harlan Ellison: “Mom”, “Djinn, No Chaser”, “Working With the Little People”
Larry Niven: “Inconstant Moon”, “The Meddler”, “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?”
Robert Heinlein: “The Long Watch”, “Life-Line”, “The Green Hills of Earth”, “The Logic of Empire”
H.P. Lovecraft: “The Silver Key”, “The Street”, “The Strange High House in the Mist”
Ray Bradbury: “Night Meeting”
I have most of the Best American Short Stories going back to the 80s, plus some random older ones.