Best of Short Stories

There are plenty of "Best Books of 2007" lists floating around out there, so I'm not going to duplicate them. Instead, I'm just going to talk about some of the best short story collections I read this year. While not all of them were published this year, most of them are pretty recent. I decided to take a stab at highlighting some of the best short fiction collections because 1) they get the short end of the stick financially and 2) I took a look at my reading sidebar and realized I'd read about twenty short story collections this year, and that's not counting all the stories I read in literary journals and magazines. So why not give them some press?

Benjamin Percy: Refresh, Refresh. Uber-masculine. Gritty, warlike, rough-and-tumble, testosterone-filled. Prose that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy.

Ben Fountain: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Great example of a themed collection, all spun around similar characters (people who visit the third world with do-goody intentions) and similar environments (third-world countries trying to build infrastructure). These are the type of stories that are wildly entertaining without sacrificing craft.

Roberto Bolano: Last Evenings on Earth. Love how he writes about writers. Love his use of time, how he can shoehorn months or years into a short story and make it work.

Deborah Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes (and everything else). This year I started with Twilight of the Superheroes and worked my way back to everything else that's she written. I don't know how she can break every rule of fiction and still make it work, but she does. One of the best short story writers out there.

Jess Row: The Train to Lo Wu. Why not write a themed collection about Hong Kong? Why not write about girls using echolocation? Why not make it so good you get named as one of the best young authors by Granta?

Charles D'Ambrosio: The Dead Fish Museum. Those of you who read The New Yorker need no introduction to D'Ambrosio. Let's just say that he writes terse prose about tough men and makes you believe it all, even that a refrigerator could be called a dead fish museum.

Comments

[Guy Hogan]

Yes, short story collections can definitely use more exposure. I've always thought that a good short story is more difficult to write then a good novel. The length of the novel is more forgiving of mistakes the writer might make. Just read This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The lenght of the short story is not forgiving. And if you're a flash fiction writer like myself...Well, every word has to count three or four ways and the hint of a mistake will capsize the story.