Not a proper ending, as if leading to another tale. Difficult to get into at first but became interesting. ‘The Deceitful Marriage’ by Miguel de Cervantes. Problematic to designate the Bible a work of fiction. You’re welcome to skip to the end of this post and see whether I recommend this book 😉 Those marked with an asterisk* are the ones I thought were great. I might as well use these notes here, so I’m going to list all of the stories. I made notes as I went, about whether I liked the stories or what they were about. Several of the stories featured animal cruelty, which as you know, I can’t stand. I don’t think it usually works very well in a short story. I especially dislike stories which follow someone’s life over the decades. Very few of those in this collection had that.

I like my short stories to have tension, interesting narrative perspectives, beginnings that draw you in and decent endings. Some of the others were OK, some I absolutely loathed, and all the rest were mediocre. Out of 99 short stories (yes, I counted them three times and there is one missing in the edition I read), only 10 of them had the ‘wow factor’ for me. In addition, while some effort has been made to include authors from backgrounds other than white British, Irish or American, it’s still a rather conservative selection, with many of the ‘usual suspects’. I know it’s not always possible to include particular authors in an anthology, for various reasons, but this book could have been so much better. None of my favourite short story writers are included (Thomas Hardy, H G Wells, Daphne du Maurier, Ray Bradbury, H P Lovecraft), which I don’t mind so much as I’ve read most of their work already, but I wouldn’t want a reader who is new to short stories to think that what David Miller has chosen represents the best. There are way too many stories about married men having affairs and too many stories about dogs. There is a single detective story (Sherlock Holmes, surprise surprise). For example, there are a few ghost / horror stories in the earlier part of the book (the stories being in chronological order of authors’ lives except for a couple of odd blips) and none after that. However, the selection of stories was quite limited in content, perspective and genre. In the introduction, literary agent David discusses the impossibility of pleasing everyone. Of course it’s to be expected that no reader will love every story in a collection chosen by one person. I clearly do not share David Miller’s taste in literature or his understanding of what a good short story is. If these are some of the finest short stories ever written, I’ll eat my hat.

Tales of Love & Loss by Knut Hamsun