Library patron's short stories collection request

Today a customer asked: "I'm not into long stories. Can you suggest some good short story collections?"

We offered For Esme with love, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple Collection, and Line Dancing. What would you have suggested? And why?

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth (haven't read this one yet), and Haruki Murakami, After the Quake, The Elephant Vanishes, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

They're both terrific writers and storytellers, and the roles of Indian and Japanese culture add to the enjoyment. Murakami often is surreal, which I like.

If the patron was the sort of person likely to read Agatha Christie, I might have suggested something by Kipling, Saki, or P.G. Wodehouse. Unthreatening but very good writers, from the days when there was real money in the magazine short story market.
For someone who was up for something a bit more adventurous, maybe Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Patricia Highsmith, Borges, Somerset Maugham, Maupassant.

Raymond Carver's my man when it comes to short stories. And I'll second the nomination of Haruki Murakami, brilliant at whatever he turns his hand to.

Here's my answer: Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green.

Or Chekhov. Sweet lord, I love me some Chekhov.

Mark Helprin, Gene Wolfe, Fred Chappell.

I would have suggested a themed anthology and then suggested that the customer make note of the authors of the stories s/he liked the most so that you could help them find more books by those authors.

I'd agree with the original suggestion of For Esme with Love and Squalor (Nine Stories in the US), but would add The Rainy Moon by Colette - fabulous stuff!

I'd have to know a lot more about the person's reading tastes, but here are a few of my favorites:

High Spirits, by Robertson Davies, a collection of ghost stories in an academic setting
Arguing with the storm:stories by Yiddish women writers, edited by Rhea Tregebov
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by A.S. Byatt
The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales, by Elizabeth Spencer
pretty much any collection of short stories by P.G. Wodehouse

I love reading short stories. I agree with the Miss Marple collection suggestion. Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories is one of my favourites. In the same genre Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories is also good.

Roald Dahl’s short stories are good. I read The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories earlier this year and liked it.

If someone was looking for something more complex than I’d suggest The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E.M. Forster if it were available. It was one of my favourites last year. Anton Chekhov's short stories are marvellous too.

A short story is how many pages, technically? The shortest story I read last year was Washington Square vs the longest Portrait of a Lady. For my reading challenge I have some of the Harvard Classic Shelf of Fiction and will be looking for the shortest novels:))

I'm learning to like short stories; I really enjoyed Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro and Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris.

Anything by William Trevor. Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett.