Short Works Collections

Hi Everyone,
The past couple of years we have listed the short story collections which we read. This year let's broaden it a bit to be collections of various kinds of short works: short stories, essays, plays, poetry, or a combination of genres. Please when you report on a short work collection read, state what kind of genre it is. It is fine to include short works collections which you read earlier this year.

I will list the collections we have read below.

1. Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin -- short stories -- 2.5 stars -- >2 sallylou61:.
2. The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis. -- sermons/essays -- 4 stars -- >3 Majel-Susan:.
3. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor -- short stories -- 4 stars -- >3 Majel-Susan:.
4. Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith -- very short stories -- 2.5 stars -- >4 dudes22:.
5. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury -- series of short stories -- 5 stars -- >5 Majel-Susan:.
6. The hidden Girl by Ken Liu -- short stories -->6 chlorine:.
7. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- short stories -- 5 stars -- >8 sallylou61:.
8. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter -- Gothic retelling of fairy tales -- 5 stars -- >10 JayneCM:.
9. Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers -- detective short stories -- 3 stars -- >13 Majel-Susan:.
10. On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement edited by Bettina Friedl -- 3 stars -- >14 sallylou61:.
11. In other rooms, other wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin -- short stories -- featuring Pakistanis. -->15 chlorine:.
12. The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror by H.P. Lovecraft -- positive review -- >16 LisaMorr:.
13. Yama Loka Terminus by Léo Henry and Jacques Muchielli -- French short story collection -- positive review >18 chlorine:.
14. Some of the best from Tor.com: 2019 edition -- short stories from free e-book -- >19 chlorine:.
15. Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks -- short stories each mentioning a typewriter -- >20 dudes22:.
16. Je veux aller dans cette île (I want to go to this island) by Korean author Lim Chul-woo -- short stories -- >21 chlorine:.
17. Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood -- short stories -- 4 stars -- >22 sallylou61:.
18. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie -- short stories -- favorable review -- >23 rabbitprincess:.
19. Deep Waters: Murder on the Waves --short stories by various authors in British Library Crime Classics series -- mixed review -- >24 rabbitprincess:.
20. Stories from Suffragette City edited by M. J. Rose and Fiona Davis -- collection of stories by 12 different authors, all featuring the suffrage parade in New York City held Oct. 23, 1915 -- 4.5 stars -- >25 sallylou61:
21. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson -- 4 stars -- >26 Majel-Susan:
22. Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, which was a compilation of twenty-two short horror stories by famous writers of the Victorian era -- 4 stars -- >26 Majel-Susan:

Last month I read Mouthful of Birds: Stories by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. These short stories by an Argentinian author were all very strange. Although the stories have different themes, they are probably horror stories, a genre which I do not usually read. All of the stories are relatively short even for short stories; there are 20 stories on less than 230 pages, and if a story ended on an odd numbered page, the next page was blank. The title story is about a girl who would only eat live birds.

Last month, I finished The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis, which is a collection of nine sermons. I didn't enjoy it as much as some of Lewis' more prominent philosophical works, but at this point, I'm incredibly partial to his writings. Aside from the main essay "The Weight of Glory," which came first in the book, the rest of the essays were in a chronological order, and reading through them, it was interesting to see how Lewis' ideas were further developed and refined over the years, and how some of these ideas would eventually be incorporated into his later celebrated works, in particular Mere Christianity. Ah, C.S. Lewis, how could I not love him! ❤️ 4/5.

I've also read A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. I quite enjoyed her stories, especially "The River," "A Stroke of Good Fortune," and "The Artificial Nigger." There was a strange and touching quality to them which seems to just narrowly escape me. I liked it. 4/5.

Last month I read Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith which is a collection of very short stories based on a Celtic myth. I can't say I enjoyed or even understood most of what it was supposed to be about. I only gave it 2.5 stars.

I've just finished The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which is a kind of cross between the short story and the novel. It was a very unique narrative told in a series of short stories. Personally, I think that The Martian Chronicles is better than Fahrenheit 451, though 451 does have the advantage of being more engaging, as there was a plot I needed to closely follow. One thing I felt about both, though, was that their endings were their weak points. 5*

I was disappointed by The hidden Girl by Ken Liu, after loving his first collection, The paper Menagerie. The stories were nice but only one or two had that spark that made almost all of the stories in the first book so special, so moving, or made me reconsider my take on things.
Moreover one story is an excerpt of The Veiled Throne, book three in his series that begins with The Grace of Kings. I wanted to read that series but this excerpt did not encourage me in that direction...

So all in all it was a good collection, with a consistence between some stories that broached the same theme or were part of a larger story, but I'm still a bit sad it wasn't great like the first one.

>5 Majel-Susan:, I agree, I liked The Martian Chronicles so much more than Fahrenheit 451.

I've just finished reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an excellent collection of short stories set primarily in Nigeria, featuring strong women characters. 5 stars

>8 sallylou61: - For some reason, I don't tend to read a lot of short stories. These sound really interesting and the book was available on Overdrive. I'm hoping to start this afternoon.

I have just finished The Bloody Chamber, a collection of Gothic horror inspired retellings of fairy tales. I loved it, 5 stars for me.

>9 dudes22: I hope that you enjoy The Thing Around Your Neck. I was reading various short stories for a seminar at our retirement community for over a year before we had to maintain social distancing. I find that I prefer to read collections by authors I choose instead of just one or two stories by those I don't. I decided this year to make an effort to read more short story collections, especially those in by tbr collection.

>10 JayneCM: The bloody chamber seems great!

Yesterday I finished a collection of detective short stories, Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers. I read it for the Lord Peter Wimsey series read for April in this group, and it was pretty fun to try something new. I liked some stories better than others, but I overall found that the quality was a touch too varying and inconsistent for my liking. 3*

On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement edited by Bettina Friedl which I read for the RandomCAT challenge fits into this challenge also. When we discussed whether this challenge should be only short stories or any kind of short works, I didn't realize I would be reading so many other kinds. (I'm planning to read a collection of letters for bingoDOG also.) As with many collections, I found this to be uneven in quality. 3 stars

In other rooms, other wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin is a short story collection. Each story is set around different pakistani characters. Some are rich while other are poor, but they are all linked to the same rich family. This gives a sense of consistency to the collection.

I thought the first two stories were not so well written, but they already do give a sense of the place. The other stories were beautiful and I really liked this glimpse of pakistani life.

I finished my first H.P. Lovecraft collection, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror. Seven short stories, representing a variety of Lovecraft's work, including a science fiction story (the only one he wrote) and a story ghost-written for Harry Houdini. I enjoyed the introduction and each story had a short introduction as well. There was really only one story that I didn't like very much - 6/7 is a pretty good collection.

>16 LisaMorr: I used to be a fan of Lovecraft when I was in high school and remember being completely terrified by his short stories.
I re-read a collection a few years ago and I liked it but I was not as taken by it as I have been when I was younger, unfortunately.

Yama Loka Terminus by Léo Henry and Jacques Muchielli is a French short story collection that was given as a free ebook (pdf and not epub, unfortunately), during the confinement.
I had never heard of these authors and this was a really exciting surprise. The short stories are all about the fictionalised town Yirminadingrad, probably located somewhere in the Balkan. The stories are very diverse, some have a surreal elements to them. The writing is very good and the authors managed really well to create a strong atmosphere throughout the collection.
There are other books connected to this setting and I definitely want to read them.

Some of the best from Tor.com: 2019 edition was given as a free ebook in the beginning of the year.
It features 24 short stories and my my ebook reader estimates the length at 600 pages. Looking at the tor.com website it seems they have published 36 short-stories and novelettes in 2019 and my main reaction to this book is that there's too much of the best in this book.
The quality of the content varies greatly and though I liked some of them a lot I feel like there are more that did not make it for me than ones I liked.

Still a worthwhile read if you read a lot of short stories I would say, to discover new authors as everyone's taste is not the same and reducing the book further would remove some gems for some readers.
One of my favorite stories was As the last I may know by S. L. Huang. I was apparently not the only one to like it since it received the Hugo award for short stories.

I sort of forgot about this thread as I don't read a lot of short stories. But I did just finish recently Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. Each story has a mention of a typewriter somewhere in each story. I enjoyed it.

Je veux aller dans cette île (I want to go to this island) by Korean author Lim Chul-woo is a collection of short-stories that was given as a freebie by a group of editors during the confinement.

These stories are autobiographical and tell of the author's childhood in a very small village, in a remote island of a region that is different in culture and religion from the main of Korea, and has been oppressed for it if I understand correctly. This area is so remote that to the author, born in 1954, a bike is a sight of wonder.
This was a very interesting book for learning a bit about this region of Korea and how the people live from day to day. As a book to read for the pleasure of reading, this didn't quite work out for me unfortunately. Maybe this was partly due to the translation but I felt it was not really well written and tended to veer to the overly lyrical.

As a side note the ebook edition of this is terrible, with the typography changing from paragraph to paragraph, and a phonetic symbol used for Korean would appear in two dramatically different forms. Ugh.

I've just finished reading Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood. The subtitle on the cover is Nine Wicked Tales. The first three stories in the collection were interconnected since they featured some of the same characters, but could be read separately. Several of the stories ended with the reader uncertain what would happen next. The last story, "Torching the Dusties," about people in an old folks' home ends in horror. 4 stars

I read Partners in Crime, by Agatha Christie, a collection of short stories featuring Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The stories feature Tommy and Tuppence running a detective agency, and each story riffs on a different 1920s detective, including Hercule Poirot (who is apparently a fictional detective in the Beresford-verse). I found this collection especially enjoyable in audio, as narrated by Hugh Fraser. The fact that he plays Hastings in the David Suchet Hercule Poirot adaptations made the last story even funnier, and he does a good job conveying drama and managing different voices.

I also read Deep Waters: Murder on the Waves, a short-story collection published as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. This had a decent selection of stories, but I found the formatting a bit wonky; the introductions to each story (providing background information about the author, their detective, and the publication of the story) were not always clearly delineated from the story itself.

I just finished reading Stories from Suffragette City edited by M. J. Rose and Fiona Davis, a collection of stories by 12 different authors, all featuring the suffrage parade in New York City held Oct. 23, 1915. New York State granted woman suffrage in 1917, but this year is the 100th anniversary of woman suffrage in the United States, which is probably the reason this collection was just published in October. The stories feature women (and men) from different social classes including the wealthy, the poor, immigrants, and blacks (called colored then). One character, a seven-year-old girl, appears prominently in two stories, and is mentioned in at least three others. 4.5 stars

Bummer. I meant to add these sooner...

I finished The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson back in September, and I think I've gained some familiarity with Jackson's themes and the nature of her characters. Her characters live seemingly mundane, but fragile lives, and there is always something vibrating beneath the cord of their reality, ready to upset that equilibrium. They are thoroughly human in their curiosity, sympathetic in their dreamy wishfulness, and painfully relatable in their anxieties that expand and metastasise out of proportion, so much so that I found at least a few of the stories, more discomforting than enjoyable to read. Very provoking stories, to say the least. 4*

For my Halloween reading, I also read Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, which was a compilation of twenty-two short horror stories by famous writers of the Victorian era. A very enjoyable collection for the most part. 4*

A fantastic year of reading for me overall!

Thanks for setting up this Short Works Collections thread, by the way, sallylou61!

>26 Majel-Susan: You are welcome. Thanks for letting me know about the last two collections you read.