Brevity is the Soul of Wit: Recommended Short Story Collections

Nobody does hard-boiled as well as Chandler. A master stylist, he was a schoolboy with P.G. Wodehouse and, with Billy Wilder, co-invented film noir. Plots as swift and efficient as a Pierce Arrow.

Acid, dryly comic, madcap, impeccable, remorseless short tales about the English upper class at play.

Veering skillfully between light comedy and cold-bloodedness. The Lottery is chilling, but not the most chilling story in the bunch.

Surreal situations, eccentric characters and surprise endings; The Twilight Zone by way of Noel Coward.

Nobody painted a clearer picture of 20th century America. Subtler and more authentic than Cheever, less showy than Salinger. Most appeared first in the New Yorker.

Ripping yarns set in Napoleonic Europe, told by a shameless and astonishing soldier and written down by the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Andersen was a peculiar man, and these are peculiar stories, much more literary, amusing and suggestive than the sanitized Disney versions.

No crowd has better gossip than a literary one. Also rivalries, feuds, fist-fights, bad reviews, foolishness, odd coincidences, indiscretions and misadventures told with panache and enjoyable malice.

These are not the Stephen King variety of ghost story. Instead of shock and violence, they rely on the unsettling realization that things are not what we thought.

Neatly drawn pictures of English domestic and public life during wartime: bravery, humor, camaraderie, resentment, despair and the usual stiff upper lips.

These mysteries might be the best introduction into the intensely complicated Gothic South of William Faulkner.

Bengalese poet Tagore wrote these stories a century ago and a world away, To read them is to live for an hour or two in that intense heat and quiet. Tagore was the first Asian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.