The Last Day of the Month Book Club discussion

How do you feel about short story collections? Is there a difference between short stories intended to be collected together and anthologies of authors' works?

I really enjoy short story collections. They are so easy to digest. You can pick the book up, drop into a story and drop out again ten minutes later. As you suggest above, some collections feel more like they are "meant" to go together and New World Fairy Tales is one of those. Although it wouldn't matter which order you read the tales in, the fairy-tale theme runs through them all, and the "interview" style narration. It feels cohesive, which was pleasing.

I dont usually choose short stories as I love long complicated stories, that I can really get my teeth into. However I did enjoy these and found them more satisfying than I other collections I have read, which have left me feeling short changed on detail and depth. I think part of this was that there is a link and running theme through the collection, which meant I wasnt starting from cold with each new story.

I really like short story collections. I prefer anthologies as they
tend to have more variety in than stories intended to go together, which can sometimes feel a bit same-y.

Lots of useful advice for short-story writers in this book. Not sure how useful it was to me as a reader.

Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story. Edited by Vanessa Gebbie

Inclusion in multi-author anthologies is the quickest way to build your Goodreads bibliography! One snag is too much variety: it's difficult to imagine any one reader enjoying stories that display wildly different and mutually exclusive sensibilities.

As I am finding out the hard way, single-author anthologies are tough to market.

I like short story collections. I do a lot of reading, and I read everywhere - on the bus, on my lunch break, in the bath, and in bed, as well as around the house during my time off work. Short stories are perfect for pre-bedtime, bus or lunch-break reading - you don't get too deeply involved and can finish a story quite easily.
That said I think there's less time to get to know the characters, and it takes a really talented author to create a short story which has great characters and not just a great plot. With fairy tales it's easier because they are really more about the plot and the message behind it than the characters. Fairy tale characters can be cardboard cutout goodies and villains, and that works for them. Though I thought some of the characters in Parkin's stories were surprisingly complex (by fairy-tale standards), I think she had more freedom to play with them as the stories were re-tellings of original classics.