Short story collections are pretty big right now. George Saunders book of short stories, Tenth of December, you may recall, was talked about in the New York Times magazine under the headline, “The Best Book You’ll Read All Year.” And of course, there’s everyone’s favorite WNC writer Ron Rash’s collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz has a short story collection out. Even Jess Walter, who until this point had written mostly novels, came out with a collection.

What’s the deal? As our pal Ron Rash said, the short story is America’s big contribution to literature. We pretty much invented it (Go ahead and check out William Boyd’s take on the genesis of the short story). But at the same time, many readers struggle with short story collections. When you read  a novel, you have the same group of characters all the way through. When you read short story collections, you get a new set of characters, a new set of circumstances, and often a new setting every twenty pages or so. It’s tiring. Plus, a novel can take anywhere from a day to a couple weeks, and so generally by the time you’ve finished reading you’ve invested so much time that the novel becomes part of you. If it’s a particularly good novel it seeps into your skin and bones and changes how you see the world (at least for a while, until you read the next great novel).

You could make the case that, in a way, novels are like our friends. We spend more time with them, get to know their ins and their outs. We think about them when they’re not around. And conversely, short stories are like people we see on the way to work, or when we’re traveling. Occasionally one or two will stand out, you may have a fun conversation with one of them, but mostly they get lost in the fray. The next day’s commute or the next connecting flight brings an entirely new crop of commuters and travelers.

So then why bother with short stories at all, you say? The simple answer is: because short story collections can be great. Really, they can. Think about this. If you don’t like a short story in a collection, you can skip it and move on to the next one no problem. If you skip a chapter in a murder mystery, say, you might lose vital plot information. Plus, you can read the stories in order, out of order, in any order you choose. You can read some stories twice and others not at all. If you’re crunched for time, you can choose to read the shortest story in the collection.

Perhaps the best way to think about short stories, I’ve found, is to think about a collection as an album. Each story in the collection is like a song. Sometimes the songs on the album are thematically related and feel like one big movement (say, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon), sometimes they aren’t and don’t. Sometimes one song can be good enough for you to buy the entire album. And its the same with short stories. Occasionally, there will be a story that stands out among all the others and makes an entire collection worthwhile.

So with that, here are a few of my favorite short story collections, old and new.

The Miniature Wife by Manuel Gonzales

The first story in this collection is about a hijacked plane that’s been circling Dallas, Texas for 20 years. Yes, years. In another story a man shrinks his wife (accidentally) and can’t figure out how to unshrink her. In the meantime, he makes her a dollhouse to live in. The wife gets angry and starts a kind of guerrilla campaign: cutting the buttons off of his shirts, burning down the dollhouse, etc. The stories are hilarious and inventive. The whole collection is pure fun.

Lost in the City by Edward P Jones

Edward Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World. But before that, he wrote Lost in the City, which may be one of my favorite books ever, short story or otherwise. The stories in Lost in the City, which are about the lives of African Americans in Washington DC, are pretty much perfect. If you’ve ever spent time in DC, you may hear people talk about the two different cities: the one with all the monuments and politicians and money, and the one with the poor, working class (mostly black) residents. Edward P Jones writes about the second one, and does it so well, that it will change the way you think about our nation’s capitol.

Airships by Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah may be the finest Southern writer you’ve never heard of, and Airships is considered by many to be his masterpiece. Whether he’s writing about Korean War veterans, or old men fishing on a pier, or teenagers in the middle of a fistfight, he is always compelling and original. I’ve never read anyone that sounds quite like Barry Hannah. Like Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah was a disciple of the great editor Gordon Lish. Also worth noting, Hannah was primarily a short story writer, saying once that he didn’t like people that wrote novels just to write novels. He believed that novels should only be written if they had to be, if there was no other way to tell the story, and that most novels didn’t fit that criteria.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor

This isn’t technically a collection in the way that I’ve used the term. It’s more of an omnibus, but no library of Southern fiction (or any library for that matter) would be complete without Flannery O’Connor. Wonderful quirky characters drawn with rich detail.