A review by maineyankee
The Best Short Stories of All Time - Volume 1 by Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Connell, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ring Lardner

2.0

In this volume: Jack London, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Poe -- great works. Ring Lardner, de Maupassant, Hawthorne -- good enough. James Joyce, boring. FScott Fitzgerald -- too mesmerized by the pompous and arrogant of the world. Oscar Wilde -- baffling. I'd put To Build a Fire (London) and Three Questions (Tolstoy), maybe also The Purloined Letter (Poe) in the best of all time, but the rest are disappointing -- and two by Joyce in the same volume?? It's just my taste in stories, I guess. I write short stories, too, and maybe mine are lacking as well, but I want more than just rambling faux-polite dialog at the dinner table of a rich British overlord in Ireland.