My personal anthology has twelve short stories by women. So many of the stories on this list emerged from me trying to make a snap-decision list about the short story writers I love, and seeing which stories emerged organically. I didn’t plan on making a women-focussed list initially, but it’s fair to say that the decision to harden that—as all canons are hardened eventually!—is reflective of my reading patterns. And as Joanna Russ says, “There is much, much more good literature by women in existence than anyone knows.”
A Personal Anthology 
I’ve come to your page to make a comment about Eisenberg’s story “Rafe’s Coat,” but let me say something first Re your – I think – “hardened”decision to focus, here at least, exclusively on stories by women. It seems unnecessarily “activist” or even “political” and inappropriate for a venue dedicated to the genre as a whole.
Re the Eisenberg story, I wonder if you noticed in the second to last paragraph that the narrator, musing about an offspring of Heather’s just announced wedding (to be), imagines that the child might also be Rafe’s. “What a marvelous-looking baby it was going to be, with parents like Heather and Brent…Or Rafe.”
This struck me as a very odd thing to add in, tho perhaps not entirely out of place given the narrator’s gossipy turn of mind. Had Heather appeared to be pregnant or is there a slight implied as tho they “had” to get married? (Agreed though: a wonderful story. Says so much.)
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