10 classic short-story collections

These collections share a taste for the strange and the closely observed: a rented room that won't leave a woman's mind in «The Yellow Wallpaper», a wolf-raised boy learning the laws of the jungle in «The Jungle Book». They suit you if you like short fiction that turns on a single decision or a small, unsettling detail, and if you'd rather meet a writer's range in twenty pages than five hundred.

1.Short Fiction

Mary Shelley, 1829

Mary Shelley's short stories: revenge, shipwrecks, immortals and social climbers—gothic invention in miniature, with the same fierce eye for guilt and longing as Frankenstein.

Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a grey hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age.
2.Short Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920

Fitzgerald's short stories are where he tried everything — jazz-age comedy, a man born old, first love, a girl who bobs her hair — in twenty pages or less.
3.The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, 1850

Poe's detective Dupin, a whirlpool, a black cat, a revenge vow: tales that made detection and dread into modern literary pleasures.
4.The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892

A woman on enforced rest in a rented house starts reading the wallpaper like a text. Short enough for one sitting, and unsettling for a long time afterwards.

It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning thehouse—to reach the smell.But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is likeis the color of the paper! A yellow smell.
5.The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling, 1894

A boy raised by wolves, a mongoose at war with cobras, a seal hunting for a beach with no men — India's animals, and the laws they keep.
6.Dubliners

James Joyce, 1914

Fifteen short stories of ordinary Dubliners, from a boy's first crush to a party that ends in a quiet shock, written with a precision that makes small lives feel enormous.
7.Short Fiction

Thomas Hardy, 1888

Hardy's short stories: farmers, milkmaids, hussars and ghosts, where a fog-bound night or a small decision quietly decides a whole life.

Her monotonous milking at the dairy was resumed, and followed for many long years, till her form became bent, and her once abundant dark hair white and worn away at the forehead—perhaps by long pressure against the cows. Here, sometimes, those who knew her experiences would stand and observe her, and wonder what sombre thoughts were beating inside that impassive, wrinkled brow, to the rhythm of the alternating milk-streams.
8.The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers, 1895

Stories from 1895: a forbidden play that drives its readers mad, a future New York with a suicide chamber, starving Paris under siege. Weird fiction before Lovecraft.
9.The Happy Prince, and Other Tales

Oscar Wilde, 1888

Five short fairy tales where a statue, a nightingale, a giant and a boastful firework teach tenderness and vanity with a sharp wit, in less time than a commute.
10.Short Fiction

Nikolai Gogol, 1831

A clerk's nose walks out on him, a pig steals a lawsuit, devils complain of the cold: Gogol's short fiction is village farce and genuine dread in the same breath.