Types of Short Story Collections

(One note, before this whole thing gets started: this post is focused on collections of short stories by just one author. I’m not going to be discussing the “Year’s Best Horror Short Stories” or “The Best American Short Stories of 2017” or anything of the sort here – just single-author collections.)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read an article written by an author – or, at least, an interview with an author – who says that their preferred medium of writing is actually the short story (as opposed to the novel). From the publisher’s standpoint, though, short story collections simply don’t sell as well, and so they’re wary of publishing too many of them. It’s an unfortunate discrepancy, which is basically our (consumers’) fault. *Big sigh.*

But, luckily, many short story collections still see the light of day. Yay! (Sometimes yay, at least.)

We can generally sparse these single-author collections into one of four main categories (and with one sub-category, to boot):

• Unrelated – As this sounds like, this is a collection of short stories that don’t have any relation to each other. They might all be in the same genre, but even if so, that’s the extent of their similarities. A recent example is Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
• In-Universe – These stories all take place within one literary universe, and may or may not feature any of the same characters, settings, etc. A popular example is The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling.
• Single Protagonist – This is a sub-category of In-Universe, the difference being that all of these stories feature the same main character in a variety of scenarios. A fantastic example of this is Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, which all feature the character Qfwfq in a series of unrelated misadventures.
• Thematic – In a thematic short story collection, the stories are connected by literary themes, rather than by plot, characters, or even literary universe. My personal favorite such collection is Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, all the stories of which somehow relate to the idea of – you guessed it – labyrinths (whether physical, psychological, mythological, etc.).
• Frame Story – This is a collection of short stories which also have an overarching frame story that ties (or at least attempts to tie) them together. Perhaps the most common example of this is The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Often for these collections, the author will combine various stories s/he’s written over the years and try to link them all together into a single narrative. (By the way, you may have already thought of it, but: this is how most television shows are structured.)

Of course there’s no way to definitively say that one type of collection is better than another. They all have their strengths and weaknesses; there are many popular examples of each type.

That said, personally, I’m most likely to pick up a Thematic collection or a Frame Story collection, but that’s mostly because I like feeling as though there’s some sort of motive to the collection, rather than just being a collection of whatever stories the author just so happened to write recently.

What about you, friends? 

What types of short story collections do you enjoy reading? 

Any specific collections you like to recommend?