The 100 best short story collections by men

No. 11 on this list. The Decameron · Giovanni Boccaccio · 1353

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Ten young Florentines flee the Black Death and tell a hundred stories—bawdy, tragic, satirical—that give prose fiction its first great architecture. Chaucer borrowed from it, and the frame-narrative technique Boccaccio perfected here became the scaffolding for centuries of European storytelling.

No. 12 on this list. Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck · 1937

Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English, Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

One of the most taught works in American secondary and post-secondary education, with 548 syllabus appearances placing it in the top tier of assigned literature. Included in Library of America, Penguin Classics, Everyman's Library, and Penguin Modern Classics. Appears on the BBC Big Read Top 100 and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Its status as core American literary reading is unquestioned.

No. 13 on this list. Bartleby, the Scrivener · Herman Melville · 1853

One of the most taught and analyzed short stories in American literature, a foundational text of literary modernism.

No. 14 on this list. Three Tales · Gustave Flaubert · 1877

"A Simple Heart" is one of the most anthologized short stories in world literature and appears across university syllabi in French literature and world literature courses. The collection as a whole is standard reading in 19th-century realism curricula globally. No scraped syllabus data was returned, but the collection's presence in major anthologies and its continuous critical attention over 140 years place it firmly in the high-canonical range.

No. 15 on this list. Death in Venice · Thomas Mann · 1912

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Death in Venice appears on virtually every German literature, European modernism, and queer theory university syllabus taught in the English-speaking world. It is a standard text in comparative literature programs alongside Kafka's Metamorphosis and Rilke's Duino Elegies. Wikipedia maintains articles on the novella in over 50 languages, and it features on most 'essential modern literature' lists.

No. 16 on this list. Animal Farm · George Orwell · 1945

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, Lesotho literature in English

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Appears on 591 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (69th percentile) and has Wikipedia articles in 95 languages. Listed on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, the BBC Big Read Top 100, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die — a breadth of recognition that places it among the most reliably canonical works of 20th-century fiction.

No. 17 on this list. Collected Stories · William Faulkner · 1951

Collected Stories won the National Book Award in 1951 and remains central to American short fiction canon. These stories appear regularly in anthologies and academic syllabi. While perhaps overshadowed by Faulkner's novels, the collection represents an essential component of his Yoknapatawpha saga and demonstrates his mastery across forms.

No. 18 on this list. A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens · 1843

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

A Christmas Carol is among the most widely taught Victorian texts in the English-speaking world, a fixture on secondary and university literature curricula in the UK, US, and Commonwealth nations. Its Wikipedia article exists in over 60 languages, and it appears on virtually every canonical list of Victorian prose. No other work of comparable length has achieved the same degree of curricular permanence.

No. 19 on this list. The Turn of the Screw · Henry James · 1898

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Essential Gothic literature and James studies text; widely taught in ghost story, Victorian, and modernist courses; definitive example of narrative ambiguity and unreliable narration.

No. 20 on this list. The New York Trilogy · Paul Auster · 1987

The New York Trilogy stands as the defining work of American postmodern noir and one of the most influential experimental novels of the 1980s. It appears consistently on syllabi for postmodern fiction, metafiction, and American literature courses, and is cited as a foundational text in discussions of the detective genre's literary transformation. Published in the US by Penguin Books (1987 combined edition), it has remained continuously in print for four decades. It appears on numerous "greatest novels" lists and is central to critical discourse on identity, authorship, and the limitations of language in contemporary fiction.

No. 21 on this list. In Our Time · Ernest Hemingway · 1925

In Our Time is widely taught in American literature survey courses as the foundational text of Hemingway's iceberg style. It appears on thousands of university syllabi and is the required starting point for understanding modernist short fiction in America. The Modern Library and most major American literature curricula treat it as essential.

No. 22 on this list. The Death of Ivan Ilyich · Leo Tolstoy · 1886

Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Russian FGOS literature standard

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Universally regarded as one of the greatest novellas ever written. Studied across literature and philosophy courses.

No. 23 on this list. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde · Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

One of the most widely taught Victorian texts in English literature curricula at every level, from secondary school to university. The phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' has entered common English as a synonym for dual personality. The novella appears on virtually every list of essential 19th-century fiction and is a fixture in Gothic literature, Victorian studies, and psychology-and-literature courses worldwide.

No. 24 on this list. Grimm's Fairy Tales · Brothers Grimm · 1812

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Rumpelstiltskin from oral sources and fixed them in print, giving Western childhood its permanent mythology. The collection launched the discipline of folklore studies and remains the most influential story anthology ever published.

No. 25 on this list. Call to Arms · Lu Xun · 1923

Lu Xun compressed the anguish of a civilization in crisis into stories so concentrated they read like detonations — a madman who discovers that Confucian morality is a euphemism for cannibalism, a revolutionary beheaded while the crowd scrambles for bread dipped in his blood. These stories broke Chinese fiction free from classical convention and became the foundational texts of modern Chinese literature.

No. 26 on this list. Notes from Underground · Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1864

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

A nameless narrator speaks from his "underground"—a state of consciousness defined by spite, self-contradiction, and rejection of rational self-interest. In the first part, he attacks the progressive utopianism of his age, arguing that humans will always choose suffering and irrationality over happiness if it preserves their freedom. In the second, he recalls humiliating episodes from his youth that demonstrate his theories in action. The Underground Man is vain, cruel, paralyzed by self-awareness, yet somehow sympathetic in his honesty about what he calls the "dark cellar" of human consciousness. Written before Dostoevsky's great novels, this novella established the themes and voice he would develop: the critique of rationalism, the psychology of perversity, the search for authentic existence in a world of ideologies.

No. 27 on this list. A Sportsman's Sketches · Ivan Turgenev · 1852

A Sportsman's Sketches is a cornerstone of 19th-century Russian literature, widely taught in world literature and Russian literature courses globally. Tsar Alexander II credited it with helping shift opinion toward the emancipation of serfs — a rare case of a literary work altering the course of national policy. Though formal syllabus data is absent from this database, its presence in curricula from Moscow to Michigan is well-documented across 170 years of continuous republication.

No. 28 on this list. The Burning Plain and Other Stories · Juan Rulfo · 1953

Taught in schools: UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

In seventeen stories set across the parched hills of Jalisco, Mexico, Rulfo's peasants carry their dead with them — sometimes literally. A man hauls his father's corpse on his back through the mountains. An old woman refuses to believe her son is a murderer. Soldiers and sharecroppers and abandoned wives speak in short, exact sentences, and the landscape answers with dust and silence. The dead narrate their own stories without announcing they are dead; readers piece it together from the wrong temperature of the prose. Rulfo strips everything from his fiction — backstory, explanation, transitions — until only the essential pressure remains. The Burning Plain was published in 1953, two years before Pedro Páramo, and it shares that novel's method: grief without sentimentality, violence without drama, the supernatural arriving with the matter-of-fact normalness of weather. Gabriel García Márquez said he memorized the entire book and recited it to friends. That is the correct response. These stories end before they explain themselves, in the way that real catastrophe does.

No. 29 on this list. Hills Like White Elephants · Ernest Hemingway · 1927

One of the most anthologized short stories in English, taught in high school and college courses as the model of the iceberg technique. It sits just below the novels at the centre of the American curriculum.

No. 30 on this list. The Kreutzer Sonata · Leo Tolstoy · 1889

The Kreutzer Sonata holds a firm place in university curricula for Russian literature, world literature, and gender studies courses. While less taught than Anna Karenina or War and Peace, it appears consistently as required reading in Tolstoy surveys and 19th-century European fiction courses. Its inclusion in countless 'essential Tolstoy' and world literature reading lists reflects its canonical standing.