I love Barbara Kingsolver's writing. She has novels and short stories.

Because you like fairy tales, and I still enjoy reading them myself, you might enjoy Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales. They were not the same tales I grew up hearing. Perhaps it is too modern for your reading plan, but John Barth's Tidewater Tales is a fun novel full of folk tales. A blocked writer and his wife, a folktale specialist, are sailing the Chesapeake Bay. To prime his pump, she tells him stories of an evening. (Shades of Sheherazade! Which of course suggests The Arabian Nights.)

Personally I love Poe, Twain, and Bierce.

One must follow up Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" with that classic collection of short stories The Decameron, don't you think? (But skip the academic introductions, just make sure you get a good translation.) Which means you cannot ignore The Canterbury Tales and once again the translation is important. I'll finish with noting that Don Quixote is also a collection of vignettes. Each of these classics lend themselves to reading in small bites over time.

Voltaire's stories are important, Checkov's even more so. Joseph Conrad's short stories I love. Flannery O'Connor's southern gothic tales have a particular appeal to me, so do Carson McCuller's.

I'll stop now, because I'm beginning to sound like a lecturer.

Except to add P. G. Wodehouse - always fun.

The Jungle Books are my favorite.

I love well-written short stories, and I think them a higher art form than the novel, but not on the level of the paragon of all literary forms - poetry.

Below are some of my favourites...

Araby; Two Gallants; The Boarding House; A Painful Case. - James Joyce.

A Boring Story; The Malefactor; Peasant Women; Anyuta; Easter Night. - Anton Chekhov.

Kindling; Cathedral; What we talk about when we talk about love; Gazebo; Feathers. - Raymond Carver.

Hills Like White Elephants. - Ernest Hemingway.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish. - J.D. Salinger.

Rain by W. Somerset Maugham. A delightful story!

Neil Gaiman and Truman Capote have short story collections that feature prominently on my shelves. The short story is such a demanding medium, I am astounded that a writer can produce not just one but many, many terrific ones.

I highly recommend the short stories of Alice Munro.

As well, William Styron wrote "A Tidewater Morning", which is a little tome which 3 of his best short stories in it.

I also liked "The Red Pony" by John Steinbeck.

-picassocat, I cannot agree that short stories are always on a higher level than the novel, but I do agree that it shows the greatness of an author that can write a well-rounded short story. There are some authors I think have, on the whole, created better short stories than novels; some just have a knack of writing short stories.
Has anyone read Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt? It is, in my opinion, the second worst book I have ever had the misfortune to read. I was really surprised at how poorly it was written; I thoght Byatt was suppose to be a fantastic writer. I have to tell you that this one little book has kept me away from her other works, though I am considering giving her another try. The Virgin in the Garden sounds interesting.

Thanks for the ideas everyone! Several are on my list already, but I have gotten quite a few more. Thanks.
CMK

I loved Kurt Vonnegut's collection Welcome to the Monkey House and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. Another collection I enjoyed was Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.

If you like mysteries, try a collection of the best Father Brown stories by Chesterton, the best of Sherlock Holmes by Doyle, and the best Dr. Thorndyke stories by R. Austin Freeman.

For fantasy, I second the suggestion of Neil Gaiman, and would like to add Fritz Leiber (also good for science fiction short stories) and Lord Dunsany.

Then there are classic short story authors like Aesop, Poe, O. Henry, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant and James Joyce ("The Dead" from Dubliners has been called the best short story written in the English language). The A Thousand and One Nights can be seen as a collection of short stories contained withing a framework story, as can The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.

Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is one of the best short stories I have read.

oh netla-shades of senior year English-"The Lottery." Haunting.
Most of the classics have been mentioned, I think.
I know from where picassocat is coming (there's a sentence for you!) in that a poet can express the same truths as a novelist-but in a whole lot fewer words. A novelist can spare some throw-aways but a poet can't waste one. But I agree, it is like comparing Pollock to Seurat. If one of Pollock's dots is out of place, who can tell? But if Seurat accidentally plops a red in the middle of the green green grass, we'll see it. So which one is a finer artist?

I keep a collection of Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" in my car for those traffic jam, got there too early, eating lunch by myself moments. They never fail and don't get stale. It helps, of course, if you can "hear" in your head Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I can also reread the Canterbury Tales with great enjoyment.

rothchild's fiddle by some guy named chekov is one of my favorites.
kudos to all who mentioned wodehouse. if you're any kind of a golfer his golf short stories are the best.

-siobhan, what are your favorite Capote short stories? What did you think of his Other Voices Other Rooms? I found it rather disturbing, what with that pedophile pygmy! Very weird!
CMK

Stan Barstow is in amongst the English classic short story writers of the second half of the twentieth century. THE DESPERADOES is one of his best; anthologies include (thesame title) THE DESPERADOES; A SEASON WITH EROS; THE HUMAN ELEMENT; THE GLAD EYE. Many of these have been set texts in UK secondary schools for many years.

And, on Chekov, of course, there's THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG.

Dido.