25 Significant Collections of Short Stories and Tales

Explore 25 significant collections of short stories and tales that every book lover should read. Discover timeless classics and hidden gems in this curated list of must-have short story anthologies.

Collected Fictions Cover
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Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Stories of Ray Bradbury

by Ray Bradbury

An imaginative group of stories that often bridge the gap between fantasy and science fiction. One hundred of Bradbury's science fiction, fantasy, horror, and midwestern short stories.
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The Canterbury Tales Cover
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The Canterbury Tales

by Geoffrey Chaucer

Nevill Coghill’s masterly and vivid modern English verse translation with all the vigor and poetry of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Middle English A Penguin Classic In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. Rich and diverse, The Canterbury Tales offer us an unrivalled glimpse into the life and mind of medieval England. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Miss Marple Cover
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Miss Marple

by Agatha Christie

All twenty of the short stories featuring Miss Jane Marple are collected in this work.
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The Best of Roald Dahl Cover
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The Best of Roald Dahl

by Roald Dahl

Includes the story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" now an ACADEMY AWARD®-winning short film from Wes Anderson on Netflix A collection of the best short stories from a writer with "an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation" (The New York Times Book Review). If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with "The Landlady," the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written "Pig," a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in "Man From the South," who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife. But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.
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Seven Gothic Tales

by Isak Dinesen

Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.
The best short stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Cover
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The best short stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

No summary available.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Cover
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Over one hundred years have passed since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intoduced his inimitable sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, to the world--and his popularity has never waned. This oversized commemorative volume contains the entire canon of Holmes adventures, both before and after his creator's attempt to dispatch him in print. Just as the character, Holmes, prevails and defies even death, these detective stories featuring him and Dr. Watson have withstood more than the test of time: they defined and changed the way modern crime writers approached detective fiction.
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The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales Cover
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The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

 

No summary available.
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ID: 0679413383
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The Lottery Cover
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The Lottery

 

No summary available.
James Joyce Cover
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James Joyce

by James Joyce

An omnibus edition containing three acclaimed works by the author of Ulysses features fifteen short stories from Dubliners, including "The Dead," as well as his classic novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Chamber Music, an anthology of thirty-six lyrical poems.
The Complete Stories Cover
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The Complete Stories

by Franz Kafka

The complete stories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. “An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.” —The New York Times The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. “[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” —from the Foreword by John Updike
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Death in Venice Cover
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Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella.
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ID: 0075492040
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Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Cover
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Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

U.S. poet/writer 1809-1849.
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ID: 072324734X
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The complete shorter fiction of Virginia Woolf Cover
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The complete shorter fiction of Virginia Woolf

 

No summary available.