Short Story a Day(ish)

Short Story Books
Short Story Books

I’ve always had a soft spot for a well written short story, the ones that pack a big punch into a small packet.

When I was growing up I used to raid my uncle’s collection of fantasy and horror stories and as I started getting into buying my own books found I was drawn to genre short stories the most.

Genre fiction has always felt like a natural area for the short story format due to the old prejudices of it not being an area for serious writing and the proliferation of magazines like Astounding Tales and such.

Science fiction, fantasy, crime, horror, and western saw reams being written for them and are still going strong even when now people appreciate that writing a well-crafted tale is the same whether fantasy or otherwise.

This has changed in recent years to see the acceptance and growth of the short story format in other areas of writing especially literary, and the discovery of short stories from around the world within the area of translated fiction

So what I’m going to do with this blog is to explore the wealth of the world of short stories and try to read and review a story as often as I can with at least one a week.

I thought it would be interesting to see how many short stories I can read in a year…

This will all kick off properly at the start of 2024 but I will add a bit of content before this to keep people interested and build the framework of the project.

Then I thought that the posts I would do would be a bit too big for Twitter and a bit too short for a blog post and was wondering what to do.

First of all there will be the obligatory list of books I’ve already got to read from (in progress) and each book will get it’s own page, and the way I’m going to choose is to use a random number generator to choose a book and then the same to choose a story in the book.

Then when I’ve read a story I’ll add a mini review to the book’s page until the book has been completed.

  1. 19 Claws and a Black Bird
  2. 24 Stories
  3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  4. Asimov’s Science Fiction: April 2011
  5. Asimov’s Science Fiction: March 2011
  6. Asimov’s Science Fiction: February 2011
  7. Asimov’s Science Fiction: January 2011
  8. Asimov’s Science Fiction: December 2010
  9. Asimov’s Science Fiction: October 2021
  10. Asimov’s Science Fiction: September 2010
  11. Asimov’s Science Fiction: August 2010
  12. >The Book of Newcastle: A City in Short Fiction
  13. The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction
  14. Bloody Scotland: 10th Anniversary
  15. The Complete Chronicles of Conan
  16. Conan Omnibus: The Young Swordsman
  17. Crossing the Tees: The Sixth Short Story Compilation
  18. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
  19. The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror
  20. The Devil and the Giro: The Scottish Short Story
  21. The Devourer Below
  22. Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
  23. Elements of Horror: Air: Book Two
  24. Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories
  25. Exhalation
  26. Extinct Doesn’t Mean Forever
  27. famished
  28. The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
  29. Fen
  30. First Contact: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1
  31. Fritz Leiber Super Pack #1
  32. Ghost Stories of Antiquity
  33. Ghost Stories of Antiquity Part 2: More Ghost Stories
  34. Ghostly Tales, Volume 1
  35. Her Body and Other Parties
  36. Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories
  37. Hit Parade of Tears
  38. Household Tales
  39. Robert E. Howard Ultimate Collection
  40. Igifu
  41. Infinite Stars
  42. Infinities
  43. Isolation: The Horror Anthology
  44. Kick the Latch
  45. The Kimota Anthology
  46. Kzine Issue 1
  47. Kzine Issue 2
  48. Kzine Issue 3
  49. Life Ceremony
  50. Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet
  51. The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
  52. The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF
  53. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (20th Anniversary Edition)
  54. The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF
  55. The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF
  56. The Mammoth Book of SF Short Stories by Women
  57. The Mammoth Book of SF Wars
  58. The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
  59. Menace of the Monster: Classic Tales of Creatures from Beyond
  60. Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventure
  61. Multiverses: An Anthology of Alternate Realities
  62. My Pen is the Wing of a Bird
  63. The New Abject
  64. New Suns
  65. New Suns 2
  66. Palestine +100: stories from a century after the Nakba
  67. Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
  68. Past the Borders: Collected Science Fiction
  69. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
  70. The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
  71. Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
  72. Reverse Engineering II
  73. Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories
  74. The Road to Dune
  75. Salt Slow
  76. The Sea Cloak
  77. The Second Conan Omnibus: The Master Swordsman
  78. The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories
  79. Snapshots of the Apocalypse
  80. Some of the Best from Tor.com 2016 Edition
  81. Some of the Best from Tor.com 2019 Edition
  82. Some of the Best from Tor.com 2021 Edition
  83. Space Crone
  84. A Strange Collection of Stories
  85. Tales of Dune: Expanded Edition
  86. Tales of Mystery & the Macabre
  87. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
  88. Things in the Dark: A Fox Pocket Anthology
  89. The Time Traveller’s Almanac
  90. Twenty Tiny Tales by Willie Wat
  91. Twenty Tiny Tales and a few tails
  92. Twiggy Woman
  93. Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite
  94. Evelyn Waugh: The Complete Short Stories

plus many more sci-fi, horror, and fantasy collections I got on the Kindle ages ago, and I’ll be adding more collections/anthologies to this list as I go along.

So the plan is to read a short story a day(ish), write something about it on the anthology/collection page, and tweet about that post when I’ve finished.

If you have a favourite collection or anthology that I’ve missed why not let me know?


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