What do you think, as readers, are short story collections still something you'd seek out and read? From one of your favorite authors I assume of course you would, but what about someone on the fringe? What about a new author you'd like to read for one reason or another? Or a name you know, but haven't really read a lot of their work? Do short story collections have any real place on bookshelves today, or are they a slowly fading remnant of the past?

I'd like to read more, but they're tough to find around here. The only time I really seek them out, though, is when I'm planning to write, just so I can get a feel for the pacing.

I am torn about short stories. Like to write them. Don't always like to read them. The show on radio - Selected Shorts. Can't listen to it. All right, I hate the theme music, that is part of it. But I should love the show. Maybe it is the readers. I want to hear the voices in my head, not someone else's interpretation.
Anyway. Short stories. Perfect for magazines. Blogs. Maybe they don't need to be on book shelves and crammed into collections.

I think my preferred short story source is in singles in a magazine, selected with care by a quality editor. New Yorker is my favorite current source. I wish more magazines ran one short story per issue.

Then, I do like the compilation of short stories by a single author, if the author is one I like. Not practical to track down all the stories, so it's a good service to the fanbase.

Not so much on the variety compilation.

I do.

Nuff said.

I love short stories and anthologies. Always have. Especially if they're ghost stories! Unfortunately the loss of 99% of the magazine market for them a few decades back means that venues for nurturing new short fiction talent are limited. Apart from the self-consciously literary and experimental little magazines and college creative writing anthologies, that is, but frankly they don't publish a lot that I find interesting.

Stories come in all shapes and sizes. There should always be a place for all different kinds of them to find readers.

I guess I never would try them out from someone new, even in a theme i like, whereas i would if I already liked the author.

Which makes no sense. Why would i be more likely to try an author's 300 page story?

I do read short story collections by authors I like. Gaiman, Gibson, Chabon and such. When I do buy anthologies, they tend to be "Years Best..." collections, and usually in general fiction, since I get bored with genre anthologies.

So part of the reason why I asked is because at some point I'll have a slew of short stories sitting around and nothing to do with them. Some may have been taken out of the submission circulation as newer stories replace them, some I feel like it would be tough to market and so never bothered to try, some were just written for me and I have no intention of ever pitching, and so on.

But I'd still like people to read them, you know?

I've got this ridiculous pipe dream that as things start to click for me I can take some of the published shorts and fill things out with unpublished shorts and, wala, a short story collection.

Of course, it doesn't help that they're all over the map, from fantasy to magical realism to science fiction to straight up normal everyday drama to bizarre experiments. Seems to me like a short story collection ought to have a prevailing theme or tone. At the moment, I couldn't accomplish that. I could fill a volume with short stories, but there would be no cohesion there. You'd get a nostalgic romp through childhood sitting next to a story with fairys and tree spirits next to a story with drugs, profanity, rape and murder. That doesn't work.

Anyway, yeah.

At some point I'll probably bundle a bunch of these up and get Lulu to print a few volumes, just for me, and select family and friends.

In the days of mass magazine fiction short stories were often how a writer got started. Today you basically have to publish a couple of popular novels and THEN somebody might be interested in publishing a collection of your short stuff!

This thread reminds me.. I need to start watching ebay and craigs for Asimov and Astounding lots.

I think they're certainly still viable. I think if someone were to recommend an author to me, I'd be more likely to try a short story collection that allowed me to read a bite-size chunk of someone's work.

I think it's an attractive proposition, actually. Novels are so daunting for me these days. They seem so thick. (Geoff Klock has a great line about how a thick novel giving him the same reaction George Costanza had when a bank told him he needed to count his jar of pennies before giving it to them to cash in. "What am I supposed to do, quit my JOB?")

Personal answer: I LOVE a good single-author collection. Short stories are tasty. And I've been turned on to some very cool new authors through their collections, like Kelly Link ("Magic for Beginners") and Theodora Goss ("In the Forest of Forgetting").

Market answer: They are a hard sell if the author is not a familiar name with a fanbase. Not impossible. But hard.

Give it pictures and call it a manga and it would fit right in!

Like 'em. I think they're viable as a single author collection, even if the stories fit no theme.

This year, I read Neal Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors and most of Saul Bellow's Collected Stories (Penguin)

I LOVE 'em. Single author or gathered together under a theme. I like 'em because you can treat them like a snack. Just got a few minutes to kill? Read a story. It ends nicely and you're free to concentrate on other things. Unlike reading a chapter or two in a novel where you have to leave it wondering what happens next.

Taft, I better get a copy of that SS collection.

I've decided that I want this year to be a fresh start as far as my fiction is concerned, so with that in mind I'm going to take about 10 years worth of short stories, give them one final pass, and bring them together on Lulu or Booksurge or some such into a short story collection.

I'm not a fan of self-publishing. It's not a preferred route for me. But I want to put this stuff behind me.

See, I have this little quirk when it comes to creative things (music, writing, etc.). I can't put something behind me and move on until I've put it out there in some way, shape or form. Whether it's putting a batch of songs on a cassette or posting some stories or whatever, I can't close the door on something until I've given it a title and made it "official" and put it in front of other people.

That doesn't mean this is a bunch of junk. I think there are good stories here, stories worth reading. I just don't want to sit on them anymore. And since the earliest is from around 1998 or so, it looks nice to say 1998-2008. (Yes, that's 11 years, not 10.)

So, I dunno. I think that's what I'm going to do. I haven't set a date for myself. I think I want to finish the first draft of my SF dystopian novel first. But this year, I think it's something I'll do, just to sort of set this stuff to teh side and say, "Yes, this is now complete. I should stop thinking about these because they're done now."

I think.

Still doing this -- in fact, I'm almost done with my reviewing/editing of this stuff -- but changing gears a bit. Not going to use Lulu or some such, for reasons I mentioned in this thread. Will instead search out a different small run printing and/or binding option, since really all I'm looking to do is get a copy or two for my shelves, and maybe for a few friends and family.

I like short stories of all the same stuff, if that makes sense -- for example, I like the collections of short Conan stories and I liked I, Robot, which are all robot short stories.

But an athology of different short stories from differenet guys with different themes/characters? Probably not.

That makes sense.

Hope that project goes well for you. I'd love to do that some time myself.

I'm not a big fan of short stories, both reading them and writing them. It seems that when a writer, for whatever reason, chooses to restrict a story to a particular word legnth, it seems to resemble "product" more than anything else--fiction geared for short attention spans. As a result, ideas seemingly get ignored, characters are underdeveloped, conflict becomes hyperconflict, and the whole thing is generally structured around some sort of plot twist in the final five hundred words or so. Perhaps part of my personal problem is that I've tried (and failed) to write them--although I'm fond of what I've churned out, they seem to fall more into "novella" territory, hovering around the 10,000-word neighborhood. And there's not much you can do with a novella, although I do have a vague plan someday to throw three of them together and putt them up on Lulu.