After asking for recommendations, raiding friends bookshelves, and trawling other blogs about short stories, i have cobbled together a nice starting stack of books. These will more than likely be the first of many collections i choose from. As i toggle between these books, i assume i'll find a method of choosing my daily story. I also expect an avalanche of other works to come my way as i make "short stories" my new hobby. Once you inject yourself into a certain world it becomes the only thing you see.
Perhaps i will complete all of these anthologies. More likely however, these will be a platform or a foundation for others that come along. Here is what i'm looking at right now on my reading/typing desk:
O’Henry- 100 Selected Stories
HP Lovecraft- Omnibus 1
Mark Helprin- Ellis Island
TC Boyle- If The River Was Whiskey
Philip Dick- Selected Stories
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche- The Thing Around Your Neck
Anton Chekhov- Stories
Various- Glimpse of Truth (100 greatest short stories collection)
Nathan Englander- What We Talk About…
Alice Munro- Runaway
Jon McGregor- This isn’t the sort of thing…
Joe Frank- The Queen of Puerto Rico
Nam Le- The Boat
Jorge Luis Borges- Collected stories
Raymond Carver- Fires
Haruki Murakami- Blind Willow/Sleeping WomanHalf of these authors are entirely new for me. All of these stories, with the exception of some of the O'Henry works (and these I will skip over) will be first time reads. For the sake of diversity, i will probably limit my O'Henry consumption to a few dozen.
I will also dip into The Best American Series. These are yearly anthologies of published short stories printed yearly and edited by famous authors. I have ones edited by Stephen King, Sue Miller, Walter Mosely and a few of the Non-required Reading series edited by Dave Eggers.
That should be more than enough to start out. As always i encourage recommendation and input as the year goes along.
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