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The 5 Best Single-Author Anthologies
Novels tend to get all the attention. Sure, they can absorb us for long periods of time, but short stories are often more challenging to write, because writers have much less room to develop a setting and characters or outline a plot. There are many anthologies of great stories by multiple writers—but those who can create enough successful short works to fill an anthology all their own deserve to be celebrated. Here are five single-author anthologies that will keep your attention as long as a novel does, but offer you a variety of stories, styles, and ideas.
Skeleton Crew, by Stephen King
Stephen King is consistently one of the most entertaining and surprising writers in the world. He’s also a master of the short story—in fact, he launched his early career selling short works to magazines of a distinctly adult nature. It’s no surprise he has several anthologies out there, but for our money, his best collection remains the awesome Skeleton Crew, which contains three of the most chilling short stories ever penned: “The Mist,” “The Jaunt,” and “Survivor Type,” the story that ruined the McDonald’s jingle for everyone.
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Want to feel classy and entertained at the same time? Pick up a copy of this collection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works. Not only will you get to read one of the world’s most famous stories, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” you’ll also get several of Stevenson’s best shorter works, including “Lodging for the Night,” “The Suicide Club,” “Thrawn Janet,” “Markheim,” and famous story “The Body Snatcher,” which offers up an ending that’s still pretty shocking today, more than a century after it was written.
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Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, by Neil Gaiman
One of the great things about anthologies is that they collect stories from a wide range of sources into one convenient, affordable place. Neil Gaiman is, of course, a global treasure, and his short stories pop up all over the place—which makes tracking them down difficult. That is, until they’re collected in an awesome anthology like Fragile Things, which contains some of Neil himself’s best short work, like “The Problem of Susan,” which explores Susan Pevensie’s absence from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, and the Locus and Hugo Award–winning stories “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” “Sunbird,” and “A Study in Emerald.”
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The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
You know what’s also great about short stories? They’re short. Tim O’Brien’s reality-based, metafictional exploration of the Vietnam War and the men who fought and died in it is at turns brutal, grim, hilarious, and thoughtful—often all at once—and his approach to the semi-autobiographical material is singular, as is his voice, which recedes so far into the background you have the illusion of being the person thinking the thoughts on the page. Absolutely American, rightfully lauded, and still taught in many schools, this is definitely an anthology you should read at least once in your lifetime.
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The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
Put simply, Flannery O’Connor is the greatest modern short story writer, and if you’re unfamiliar with her work, you’re doing yourself a disservice. O’Connor wrote two novels—both tellingly assembled from shorter works, making them essentially tightly bound anthologies—but it’s her 32 published short stories that remain among the best ever written. This anthology won the 1972 National Book Award for good reason: it contains her most famous works (“A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “The Life You Save May be Your Own”) as well as several lesser-known stories that don’t appear in other anthologies. If you’re going to read one book this year, make it this one.