© Daryl Barko Barnett

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. – Flannery O’Connor

I loved going to the dentist’s office when I was a child because it was there in the waiting room that I first discovered The New Yorker magazine and the literary short story genre within its pages.

Below are the short story books that I return to again and again:

1.  The Collected Short Stories of Colette, edited by Robert Phelps
2.  The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher
3.  High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates
4.  Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Short Stories
5.  The Portable Chekhov, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky
6.  The Portable Dorothy Parker, introduction by Somerset Maugham
7.  The Night in Question: Stories by Tobias Wolff
8.  Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
9.  The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
10. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition
11. Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Model: Lauren DiMarco