I’ve really been enjoying Rachel Swirsky’s guest posts over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Her latest piece is a review of Cat Rambo’s collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Midnight (Paper Golem Press, 2009) which engages directly with another review of the collection from Publisher’s Weekly. Swirsky moves fluidly between defending Rambo from the scathing remarks of the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer to agreeing with aspects of what they say, and it makes for a very dynamic review.

One of the points Swirsky makes is that a collection can be weakened by extra material. Or, to be perhaps more accurate, a collection can be made stronger by leaving out some of the material. Her belief is that Rambo’s collection would have benefited from containing the twelve stories she considers excellent, and not the other eight stories she sees as less-excellent padding.

This is something that I’ve been harping on about for some time, whenever I can pin people down long enough to listen. There’s a tendency in small press (and not only in small press, it has to be said) to try to offer “value” for money through sheer quantity of words, or number of stories. But the older I get and the higher my reading pile teeters, the less interested I am in books that feel the need to be completionist, to pack in lots of material at the expense of the overall vibe.

I’ve read a lot of anthologies over the course of the last few years, thanks to Last Short Story as well as my own interest in short fiction. Apart from ‘best ofs’ which are another thing again, it’s hard to think of any that couldn’t have been improved by having fewer stories. This is particularly the case of theme anthologies, where 8-10 excellent stories exploring variations on a theme works much better than 20 stories that do the same. Even if the second 10 are *almost* as excellent as the best 10, the theme becomes diluted and well and can easily wear out its welcome.

I love it when publishers big and small go with a small, intense selection rather than an overpadded one. The Twelfth Planet Press books tend to do this. I also like the X6 novella anthology (yes I hear the book is huge, but it’s only 6 actual stories, which is a really good number of stopping and starting points). I’ve also been enjoying several anthos-packaged-for teens which include between three and six long-short stories from very recognisable name authors, and come in as slender volumes.

My opinion on this comes from my own reading experience. I read a *lot* of short fiction. Most of the time I’m not thinking about anthologies or magazines in of themselves, I’m reading the stories almost independently of each other. But when I go back and look at which anthologies or collections left their mark on me – one with 4 brilliant stories and 6 quite good ones is going to stand out far more in my mind than one with 4 brilliant stories, 6 quite good ones, 10 that were mildly interesting to so-so and another 5 I don’t even remember because they were that ordinary.

The most coherent argument I’ve heard against the ‘quality is better than quantity’ theory when it comes to anthologies and collections is that, quite simply, people are more willing to shell out money for the thick books than the thin books. Value or “perceived value” still counts for a lot in the general marketplace.

This is fair enough, I suppose. My privilege is definitely showing in that I receive so many review copies and freebies of the year’s short fiction that I don’t actually need to choose between purchasing one book and another. My limitation is time, rather than money. I already buy more books than I have time to read, never mind the review copies… Those of us who examine the genre critically are a very small group compared to the ordinary readers lining up to buy books – we like to think that our opinion matters more because we also buy a hell of a lot of books, but… publishers have to listen to the majority rather than minority response.

(cough there’s also the possibility that different readers will find a different ‘favourite ten’ out of an anthology of twenty stories, but unless you’re talking reprint anthologies my experience with LSS has shown that while readers might differ on which their favourite couple of stories might be, picking which half they thought was really not worth having in the book at all is usually pretty consistent)

I’m used to the idea that thick fantasy books sell better than thin ones, and that trilogies sell better than standalones, but do people really want that level of ‘value’ from their short fiction collections? Do you prefer a wider range of stories so you’re more likely to find ones that you do like? Do you weigh up the best stories vs. the so-so ones? Does size matter?

And while we’re at it, what collected works of short stories did you love this year, and why?

Tags: anthologies, collections, last short story, rachel swirsky, reviews, short stories