There are some great short stories.

For someone well read, any thoughts on what criteria to use to include a short story in a 'great' anthology book?

I'm reading a Great American Short Story book and I'm not really enjoying most of the stories. But I did like Gift of the Magi and many other short stories. I'll look up The Lottery (it's not in the book I'm reading).

I know he's a complete d-bag politically, but the best collection of short stories I've read was Stephen King's Different Seasons. It's not horror fiction like his normal genre, and it spurred two fantastic movies:

Shawshank Redemption

Stand By Me

It also spurred the movie Apt Pupil, but it's pretty disturbing story of a Nazi concentration camp commandant.

If you do decide to read it and I recommend you do, please find a way to read it so Stephen King doesn't make money off it (e.g. check out from Library).

Found it. There is a waiting list. I can probably check it out in a month or so.

ETA: I found it on something called the Palace Project and is available as an ebook to check out earlier. I don't know what it is, only that the library allows use of it to check out books. Privacy and safety issues?

My favorite 3 short stories:

To Build a Fire by Jack London

The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

Wonderful writing, great stories.

Adding to list w/ suggestions above. thx.

Most of my recreational reading is books borrowed from the county library via Kindle e-reader.

I just finished a book that is a collection of short stories by John Grisham. I really like his writing; he uses the English language better than most contemporary authors.

Berto mentioned Hemingway. He is probably my favorite writer. Two collections of short stories and vignettes by Hemingway are In Our Time, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and Other Stories. Both are great.

My favorite short story author, Robert E. Howard. "Conan", "Solomon Kane", "Kull" and a lot of others.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is a fantastic Hemingway short.

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury is one of my all-time favorite shorts.

Steinbeck's The Pearl is really great but is more novella-length at 25k words.

Ian Fleming penned a few decent short stories. For Your Eyes Only and Risico contributed a lot of story to the film For Your Eyes Only. A couple of others (From a View to a Kill and Quantum of Solace) lent their titles to films but no plot.

One of my favorite books is “Great Action Stories”. It has stories ranging from an alternative theory of the Cooper hijacking’s to sci-fi, and off all things a chess game.
I can’t recommend it enough. I got a used copy from Amazon.

Good Luck,
OZ

I like the series "the Best American Mysteries of 20--", each assembled by a famous author. I get these from my library and read on Kindle. I bought "The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century" but it's almost 800 pages, soft cover and I haven't dug into it.

I have enjoyed shorts by most of the authors mentioned, and would like to throw in Vonnegut. He did a few really good short stories. I really enjoyed "Harrison Bergeron." As far as King goes, I liked a lot of his early work, published under the name Richard Bachman.