Henry Prize Stories 2014, Esquire’s Big Book of Fiction). Anthologies collecting both “American” and “International” stories were included, but other geographical organizations were not.
I only considered anthologies that were general interest-no thematic anthologies ( My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, etc.) or generic anthologies (SF, Fantasy, Romance, War, etc.) were consulted. I also excluded the yearly Best American anthologies (but included the more exhaustive 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century) and any other temporal, prize or journal-based collections (i.e. To figure it out, I looked at 20 short fiction anthologies published between 19 (you can see the full list of anthologies I surveyed at the bottom of the page). So perhaps it’s not unsurprising that I see plenty of short stories, albeit primarily classics, designated as “among the most anthologized short stories of all time.” Exclamation, exclamation! But recently, in the wake of “ Lottery Day” and in the midst of our collective summer reading fugue-state, I wondered: which stories are actually most anthologized? The anthology was You’ve Got to Read This.) And we have many chances to do this kind of discovery, because every few years, there seems to be a new big-deal short fiction anthology hitting the shelves.
I myself first read my favorite short story of all time (call it the FSSOAT) in an anthology assigned in a college creative writing class. Yes, we forgive them, and we read them, because pretty much everyone who is a consumer of short stories (or who has taken literature classes) has in their time discovered at least one great story in at least one anthology. But we forgive them, because it’s nearly impossible to fit a nebulous state of literature, with all its complexities of form, subject, race, class, gender, and nepotism (oh the nepotism) into a portable object made of paper. Those that claim to represent the state of short fiction at any given time are typically lying, to whatever extent mute volumes of literature can lie. They have stories sticking out in odd places they have holes in their sides. They are sometimes ludicrous, often ugly, and almost uniformly tyrannical.
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