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.
- 19 Claws and a Black Bird
- 24 Stories
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: April 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: March 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: February 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: January 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: December 2010
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: October 2021
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: September 2010
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: August 2010
- >The Book of Newcastle: A City in Short Fiction
- The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction
- Bloody Scotland: 10th Anniversary
- The Complete Chronicles of Conan
- Conan Omnibus: The Young Swordsman
- Crossing the Tees: The Sixth Short Story Compilation
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
- The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror
- The Devil and the Giro: The Scottish Short Story
- The Devourer Below
- Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
- Elements of Horror: Air: Book Two
- Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories
- Exhalation
- Extinct Doesn’t Mean Forever
- famished
- The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
- Fen
- First Contact: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1
- Fritz Leiber Super Pack #1
- Ghost Stories of Antiquity
- Ghost Stories of Antiquity Part 2: More Ghost Stories
- Ghostly Tales, Volume 1
- Her Body and Other Parties
- Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories
- Hit Parade of Tears
- Household Tales
- Robert E. Howard Ultimate Collection
- Igifu
- Infinite Stars
- Infinities
- Isolation: The Horror Anthology
- Kick the Latch
- The Kimota Anthology
- Kzine Issue 1
- Kzine Issue 2
- Kzine Issue 3
- Life Ceremony
- Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet
- The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
- The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF
- The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (20th Anniversary Edition)
- The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF
- The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF
- The Mammoth Book of SF Short Stories by Women
- The Mammoth Book of SF Wars
- The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
- Menace of the Monster: Classic Tales of Creatures from Beyond
- Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventure
- Multiverses: An Anthology of Alternate Realities
- My Pen is the Wing of a Bird
- The New Abject
- New Suns
- New Suns 2
- Palestine +100: stories from a century after the Nakba
- Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
- Past the Borders: Collected Science Fiction
- The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
- The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
- Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
- Reverse Engineering II
- Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories
- The Road to Dune
- Salt Slow
- The Sea Cloak
- The Second Conan Omnibus: The Master Swordsman
- The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories
- Snapshots of the Apocalypse
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2016 Edition
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2019 Edition
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2021 Edition
- Space Crone
- A Strange Collection of Stories
- Tales of Dune: Expanded Edition
- Tales of Mystery & the Macabre
- There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
- Things in the Dark: A Fox Pocket Anthology
- The Time Traveller’s Almanac
- Twenty Tiny Tales by Willie Wat
- Twenty Tiny Tales and a few tails
- Twiggy Woman
- Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite
- 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?