Collections of Short Stories

While many anthologies you’ll encounter in classrooms feature short stories, often these are of the “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (Fitzgerald) and “The Necklace” (Guy de Maupassant) variety, really written for adults (and often long ago, too). More recently, we’ve seen an increasing number of collections written just for young adults. I’ll collect those that I’m familiar with here. I have many of these in my office if you’d like to peruse them, and I’m sure some can be found in the HBLL.

Don Gallo was one of the first that I’m aware of who actively sought out YA authors and asked them to write short stories; he’s the editor of quite a few collections. Gallo’s author page on Amazon will list all of his titles available at the online bookseller, but I’ve linked a few that I think are stand-outs here:

Historically, Gallo wasn’t the only one collecting short stories (although he was the main one), and some prominent YA authors were writing stories and publishing collections. Here are some that I’ve read and would recommend:

More recently, we’ve seen popular young adult authors collaborating on short story collections or publishing their own within worlds that they’ve created in full-length novels. Some that have grabbed my attention lately:

Jon Scieszka, a renowned children’s book writer, has created a series of “Guys Read” books that collects themed short stories from a variety of popular authors: