What are some short story collections you'd recommend?

The Story of Your Life and others by Ted Chiang.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Great collection of stories.

The Year's Best Science Fiction is a collection of short stories that's been going for decades. An amazing collection of excellent work, absolutely worth reading through!

The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

Strange Itineraries and The Bible Repairman by Tim Powers

Roald Dahl the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and other stories

Books of Blood, by Clive Barker. An inventive horror masterpiece. Not for the faint of heart.

Cosmicomics, by Italian genius Italo Calvino. The stories are whimsical, playful, and delightful takes on scientific concepts, narrating the story of the universe.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut.

The Long Valley by John Steinbeck. A very fun collection of stories from the same region Cannery Row is set in.

Thanks for this post, I've also been wanting to ask for short story recommendations and I'm working on my own list of recommendations! :)

Here are my recommendations so far. All are sci fi / speculative fiction.

Author: Cordwainer Smith

I love everything by Cordwainer Smith (real name Paul Linebarger). His work has a mix of Eastern and Western influences, and his premises are always so wild but he makes it work. His stories are all set in this same fictional world-- a fascinating vision of human civilization in the far future. The worst thing about his work is that I just wish there were more of it (there's a novel and 32 short stories). He unfortunately passed away when he was only in his 50s. Much of his work is now in the public domain.

His life story itself is very interesting! His godfather was Sun Yat-sen. He advised Chiang Kai-shek and John F. Kennedy. He instructed the CIA on psychological warfare. And he wrote science fiction under a pen name because he didn't want people in his industry to know about his creative writing :))

My favorites by him are:

The Game of Rat and Dragon
Telepathic human astronauts partner with cats to fight mysterious psychic monsters that threaten interstellar travelers in deep space.
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/29614

A Planet Named Shayol
A convict condemned to a top-secret penal colony grapples with the agony and the ecstasy of the bizarre punishment inflicted there.
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20170447

All his short stories have been compiled into this anthology:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rediscovery_of_Man (spoilers)

You can read more of and about his work at:
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Linebarger%2C%20Paul%20Myron%20Anthony
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/03/remembering-cordwainer-smith-full-time-sci-fi-author-part-time-earthling/274344/ (spoilers)

Author: Eliza Victoria
Anthology: Seventeen Prayers to the Many-Eyed Mother
https://elizavictoria.com/seventeen-prayers-to-the-many-eyed-mother/

"In Seventeen Prayers to the Many-Eyed Mother, characters seek solace—wittingly or unwittingly—in forces beyond human comprehension. A young woman agrees to make a blood sacrifice in exchange for an American visa. Strangers find themselves stuck in a fatal time loop in a convenience store. A plane crash survivor on a deserted island believes a deity’s name has been carved into the rocks. A broke tourist meets a being untouched by time and space. Diwata, in hopes of assimilation into human society, agree to have their wings surgically removed. And within the darkness of an old mansion, a figure in white appears by the doorway…"

Probably my favorite Filipino author, Eliza Victoria's writing is lush, visceral, and haunting. Her work often blends traditional Filipino folklore with contemporary contexts. It feels very appropriate because even if the Philippines is very "techie" in some ways (we are known to be a very "chronically online" culture), superstitious beliefs are still widespread and commonly practiced.

Series: Philippine Speculative Fiction
https://philippinespeculativefiction.com/

There were several volumes of this anthology. I have hard copies but I don't know where they are available anymore and they don't seem to be available as e-books, unfortunately. The above link contains 11 stories that can be read in their entirety for free online.

I really suggest "Tenth of December" by George Saunders! It's full of really odd stories that range from eccentric to uncomfortable. Some of the stories give me the same vibes as say "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson or "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman if you've read either of those.

don't worry about specific genres

Well, fantastic! I'll throw down Jorge Luis Borges's "Ficciones" - originally an Argentinian work, it is a collection of short stories that are borderline proto sci-fi fantasy (and I use the term extremely loose here), that he wrote during the late 40s and early 50s. Can't go wrong with the classics!

What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky - Lesley Nneka Arimah

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31522415

This collection blew me away! All the stories are heavily influenced by the writers Nigerian background. Some are magical realism (perhaps all? It’s been a while since I read it and some stories have stuck better than others!)

Like Fantasy? Unfettered volumes 1 through 3 are short story anthologies all by great, famous writers. The story of how they came to be is in the wikipedia article.

You should also look into the anthologies edited by the late Gardner Dozois (which include a lot of science fiction) and George RR Martin.

Some writers like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King or Gene Wolfe have their own published short story collections too, such as Fragile Things, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, or The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (these are all examples of collections I like, but they have more!)

Caitlin Horrocks - This is not your city

Eleven women confront dramas both every-day and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks’ This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace―they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language; the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates; and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks’ women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

I enjoyed this book. Sometimes funny, sometimes actually quite disturbing.

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell.

Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson

The Best American Short Stories of 20XX, whichever year you like. They're all decent, IMO.

Sword of destiny and the other short story collection of the book series "the Witcher".

The author started out just writing short stories for a local paper. Enough people really enjoyed them he took the characters and turned it into a book series which is also good. But the short stories are pretty much self contained little bits and I really enjoyed them.

Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century is bar none the best short story anthology I've ever read. It was curated by Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game) and contains fiction written by some of the most influential authors in the genre. There is not a single bad story in the collection, and some of them like Snow by John Crowley still stick with me vividly years after I've read them.

I really liked Tunneling To the Center Of the Earth by Kevin Wilson

Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie (SFF/Weird)

Any of Reggie Oliver's collections e.g. The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (horror/weird)

It's been 20+ years since I read it but Futures Imperfect by Connie Willis, it's 3 short stories and one that is rather prophetical to current events called Remake where all the movies are just rehashes of previous hits and they use technology to put that faces of classic actors on body doubles.

I wouldn't say any of the stories are great but I enjoyed them enough as a teen to re-read them a few times.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories by Mark Richard

It's a collection of slice of life stories from the impoverished US South. Many of the stories are told from the perspective of young, naive kids who have a poetic/fantastical view of their bleak circumstances.

When I was in college I worked for a company that created custom coursepacks, mostly for university courses. My job was to scan and digitally assemble excerpts from different sources. It exposed me to a lot of interesting texts, but one that really stuck out to me was the short story "Strays", which you can actually read in Amazon's free preview. There are a few other great stories in the collection too.