A Personal Anthology offers no guidelines on what exactly constitutes a short story for the purposes of constructing your ideal anthology. This is as it should be, because sometimes it seems like there are as many definitions of the short story as there are practitioners of the art form.
For my own part, I have defined a short story as this: a self-contained piece of prose of less than approximately 40,000 words in length. This is quite a bit longer than most would allow, but I cannot stand the strange and slightly dismissive term ‘novella’ (the less said about ‘novelette’ the better) which, for me, tends to mean that the author either does not have the confidence to declare his or her work a novel, or that they are slightly ashamed of having written a short story.
I have chosen these stories based on personal preference and ordered them from the earliest publication (1950) to the last (2022). That I think you should read them all goes without saying, but you should also read the collections of which they are a part. Not one of these represents all a given author has to offer a reader.
I hope you enjoy the stories when you do read them, and I hope they lead to the discovery of more beauty than you expected to find in such short pieces of work. There are stories below which do more with half a page than some novels do with 500. This is the wonder of the short story. The TARDISes of art, they’re always just so much bigger on the inside.
A Personal Anthology 