What a great, diverse collection of short stories! Although I had read a few of them prior to this, they really spanned a broad spectrum of moods and voices, including Nobel Literature Prize Winner Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tobias Wolff. Each purchase also benefits 826NYC, a non-profit organization in Brooklyn that promotes literacy and writing skills. Highly recommend.

Oh my good heavens to mercy what an amazingly entertaining book. Fantastic writing from many different voices, very refreshing.

This is a diverse collection of short stories by a variety of authors, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. Very enjoyable bedtime reading.

Beautiful collection of short stories. Really, one brilliant piece after another. The Yates got me all choked up (that ending is a punch in the gut). So did the Lori Moore. Stories by Lahiri, Mansfield, Thomson, O'Connor, Highsmith, Baxter, Woolf, are all excellent and highly memorable. Features work by some of the masters (O'Connor, Dorothy Parker), but also serves as a great introduction to some lesser known talents (Akhil Sharma, whose novel I picked up right after closing this volume).

Stories by Munro, Parker, Oates, and Gannon left me a little cold, but everyone who reads this will find their own favorites.

The astonishing "People Like That" by Lorrie Moore is worth a full five stars, but a couple of other stories in this collection fell flat for me, so that I left them after a few pages. I love getting reading recommendations from my brilliant reader friends--the Tuesday update from Goodreads is my favorite email of the week! So this collection is just the embodiment of that for me--I've always enjoyed what I've heard from David Sedaris on the radio and consider this collection an addition to that weekly email recommendation. Even better, the (new) book sales support a children's literacy charity. Take a dip and see what you think!

Not a bad collection of short stories, although the last one was slow at times and took up a whole disc. Would recommend for short story lovers.

A collection of David Sedaris's favorite short stories, with proceeds from sales going to a NYC literacy project.
The authors range from Flannery O'Conner to Tobias Wolf to Joyce Carol Oats to two Indian writers I had not heard of but plan to read more of.
The best part of the collection was discovering a few new writers to read.

I'm not a short story fan, so you might be justified in wondering why I read this one. I blame George Eliot. I kept trying various things to pull me out of the Grand Canyon sized reading slump that Middlemarch abandoned me in; I could clearly see the rim but seemed unable to get up there.

I'm a Sedaris fan, and his writing almost always makes me smile, so why not try this collection of short stories curated by him? I read somewhere that this audiobook is an abridged collection - it only has 5 of the 17 stories in the book - but that's OK with me. If you are a Sedaris fan, you'll totally understand why he loves these stories - they are in his wheel house.

1. Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out by Patricia Highsmith, narrated by Cherry Jones. 3 stars.

This is the story of woman in New York getting ready for the arrival of her sister. Classic domestic fiction, with Highsmith's whiff of tension.

2. Bullet In the Brain by Tobias Wolff, narrated by Toby Wherry. 2 stars.

A short look at the last moments of a man's life while he robs a bank.

3. Gryphon by Charles Baxter, narrated by David Sedaris. 4 stars.

Life went along its usual boring way until a substitute teacher with crazy notions walked in. Sedaris is excellent at narrating this one, and it is my fave of the collection.

4. In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel, narrated by Mary-Louise Parker. 3 stars.

A story of illness and loss, and the inability to be the person we want to be for others in their time of need.

5. Cosmopolitan written and narrated by Akhil Sharma. 2 stars.

This is a strange (Sedaris kind of strange) story of an Indian man and his shapely neighbor. My least fave narration of the lot.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked this collection as much as I did, and I might seek out the book to read the stories I missed.

What a magnificent collection of short stories! David Sedaris has an immaculate taste for profound and intense short stories … in a way, this is the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen David Sedaris, stripping down his signature wit and humor and letting us see the complexity and turmoil within … Most of these stories involve the theme of the main character trying to please others and ultimately disappointing themselves … The short story by Joyce Carol Oates particularly illustrated this theme, in which the kidnapping victim has an opportunity to escape but fails to do so because the kidnapper has demonstrated the trust he has in her …

I would highly recommend this book not only to David Sedaris fans, but to all readers who appreciate a wonderful collection of short stories …

A solid collection of short stories.

The first four stories in this collection are stunning examples of why I don't write fiction; the language, the occurrences, the essential sense of place and time--all are there. While I knew of most of the writers of stories in this collection, I had never taken the opportunity to explore their work. Thank you, David Sedaris, for putting together this collection and introducing it in such a way that I actually laughed out loud during my morning commute after a week away from work; no mean feat, that.

The Patricia Highsmith story (read by Cherry Jones, one of my favorite character actors) placed me solidly in New York City of the late 1940s-early 1950s and in the shoes of a working woman of the era, while a Tobias Wolff one made me gasp with the audacity of subject. Charles Baxter is every bit as wonderful as I'd been led to believe, and Sedaris reads his story beautifully, but it was finally--finally!--experiencing an Amy Hempel short story--read by Mary Louise Parker--that clinched this collection as one of those, "I'm so glad I took the time to listen to this!" revelations.

The last story keeps me from rating this "Amazing". It was fine and heartbreaking, but placed at the end of such company...only okay. But that's fine...the other four more than made up for this.

“Pint sized fanatic” bows down before the Hercules of short fiction, indeed. Each short story in this anthology is so moving and each is so different. Tobias Wolf’s bullet in the brain is indescribably humorous and stunningly beautiful. It goes from light humor to the devastating grief of recognition of something pathetically human in a flash of lightning. Don’t know what is happening to me, was it me howling at its close?