Near 700 pages, The Stories of John Cheever is the latest collection of story collections I have acquired, albeit on loan from the local library. This volume begins with “Goodbye, My Brother” and ends with “The Jewels of the Cabots.” It is organized chronologically–in the order the stories were written. This differs from some other collections that simply take the original short story collections, as titled, and place them next to one another in the book, maintaining the original story order within each section–Eudora Welty’s Stories, Essay, Memoir comes to mind.

Below is a list of my favorite hefty collections. What are yours?

• The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)
• Stories, Essays & Memoir (Eudora Welty)
• High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 (Joyce Carol Oates)
• Maps in a Mirror (Orson Scott Card)
• The New Yorker Stories (Anne Beattie)