Let's squelch this idea that short story collections are not as important as novels. Though 2006 has been a vibrant year when it comes to short stories, in the grand scheme of the publishing industry these collections are often frowned upon. They don't sell as well as novels, some say. No one reads them anymore, others say. Many of the collections coming out are from young guns straight out of MFA programs, or "puppy factories" (as one editor I talked to called them.)

Yet, there is an apparent resurgence of the short story, as signaled by new collections by entrenched authors such as Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro and Neil Gaiman. I asked a group of authors, some of whom have new story collections of their own, what their favorite individual story of the year is so far. If stories were songs, these would make a wicked mix for your iPod.

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ELISSA SCHAPPELL, AUTHOR OF "USE ME," AND THE HOT TYPE COLUMNIST FOR VANITY FAIR:

As a child of the Northeast suburbs, the stories of John Cheever — loaded with crazy, depressed upper-middle-class WASPS — strike me at my heart. Reading Kelly Link's "Stone Animals" (from her book, "Magic For Beginners"), a fantastic tragicomic reinvention of the classic unhappy-family-in-the-burbs story, struck me at my marrow. Though surreal — I've not yet had the pleasure of spying a lawn a swarm with tiny men on the backs of angry rabbits — I recognize this world as the true face of the suburbs. Left and right, Link's sentences soar and zing like LSD tipped arrows. Everywhere they land, a new crazy kaleidoscopic Linkian view of America explodes before our eyes.

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BENJAMIN KUNKEL, AUTHOR OF "INDECISION," EDITOR FOR LITERARY JOURNAL N+1:

The last story — and the last line of that story — in Deborah Eisenberg's collection "The Twilight of the Superheroes" blew me away. The story is called "The Flaw in the Design" and it conveys something of the lurching, nauseated feeling of someone waking up, too late, to an awareness of what's happened to this country politically over the past few years.

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SCOTT SNYDER, AUTHOR OF "VOODOO HEART":

Karen Russell's "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" from her book, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves," is a wildly inventive piece — the whole collection is dazzling for its originality. It's narrated by a young girl named Ava, who helps run the family gator park down in the steamy, mysterious swamps of the American South. It's got everything: alligator wrestling, sex-starved ghosts and spirit possession, swamp boats, and gypsy bird-men.

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STEPHEN ELLIOTT, AUTHOR OF "MY GIRLFRIEND COMES TO THE CITY AND BEATS ME UP":

"Disquisition On Tears" by Stephanie Reents from "The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006." The story is about a woman dying of cancer visited by a headless woman selling tears. I don't know Stephanie very well, but a few years ago I was in a workshop with her and I read this story while it was in progress. I didn't like it at all. I couldn't see the promise in it or the point. But Stephanie worked on it, changed it somehow and I was shocked reading it by how good it is and how much it has to say about sickness and fear.

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JON RAYMOND, AUTHOR OF "THE HALF LIFE" AND "OLD JOY":

"Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson is practically a novella. It was published in The Paris Review and it works as a kind of Cormac McCarthy-ish western history that is at once gorgeous and violent and hilarious. As beloved as Denis Johnson is, I think he remains underrated.

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PATRICK SOMERVILLE, AUTHOR OF "TROUBLE":

George Saunders' "Brad Carrigan, American," which appears in "In Persuasion Nation." Granted, it is somehow more contrived and technically intense than his already refined, dense theme-park stories, and it asks you to empathize with a yuppie sitcom character within a short story, but it worked for me. I finished the last page feeling somehow better about life. This is the opposite of what ends up happening to Brad, who becomes conscientious, concerned with the world around him, and more in-tune with the inequalities of living in a developed nation, and for his efforts is demoted, ostracized, cuckolded and written out of existence entirely.

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AIMEE BENDER, AUTHOR OF WILLFUL CREATURES:

I recently read Miranda July's story in The New Yorker called "Something that Needs Nothing" and loved it (July's story collection, "No One Belongs Here More Than You," is due out in spring 2007). I approached it with the trepidation I feel when artists jump genres, but she is such a natural writer, and my favorite part of it was how she made the feelings into tangible events on the page. There are some true beauties of sentences in there, ones that take loss and all its forms and make it real and highly specific, like: "We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery."

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ARIEL GORE, AUTHOR OF "THE TRAVELING DEATH AND RESURRECTION SHOW":

In school they taught me that novels were symphonies while short stories were just single notes, but ZZ Packer stories are these compact little symphonies you can read yourself at bedtime to guarantee deliciously disturbing dreams. I'm thinking of the story "Brownies" from "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." "By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909." The rhythm of the language lulls you in, you're a camper, but then the piece has become this far-reaching meditation on power. A symphony on power.

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Kevin Sampsell is asap's Book Pusher, reporting on the word scene from the inside. Sampsell is an event coordinator at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore. He also runs a micro empire called Future Tense Publishing.

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