Rating: 
Summary: Totally brilliant!
Review: After the much disputed list of America's best one hundred novels of the past century, Updike's "list" is pretty much immaculate--he's got all the good ones in here including the hot contemporary writers like loorie moore, thom jones and tim o'brian. Updike's intro, the placement of the stories and the quality of the work leaves little doubt that this anthology is one of the best short story anthologies you can get your hands on, now or in the much distant future. Buy this book now! You won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Totally brilliant!
Review: After the much disputed list of America's best one hundred novels of the past century, Updike's "list" is pretty much immaculate--he's got all the good ones in here including the hot contemporary writers like loorie moore, thom jones and tim o'brian. Updike's intro, the placement of the stories and the quality of the work leaves little doubt that this anthology is one of the best short story anthologies you can get your hands on, now or in the much distant future. Buy this book now! You won't regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: Overall a good selection--some stories that are outstanding
Review: All in all I really enjoyed my reading of this collection. A few stories will stay with me always, and they were not the ones I expected to like the best when starting them--which I think is the key to a really good story! The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall stands out especially---one of the most chilling and realistic accounts of a horrifying happening you can imagine. Another standout was The Rotifer by Mary Ladd Gavell. From the notes I found this was her only published story, published after her death. I wish this wasn't the case---she writes a story about seeing what is about to go wrong and being unable to stop it in a way I will never forget. Updike seems to avoid including the stories you expect to read, which I can understand, but in a way I'd like a collection which included a few more of what we think of as the classic stories of the century. Also, the stories almost without an exception are quite dark, sad, depressing and/or about sickness and death. Why not a few more O'Henry collection types stories---maybe not quite as high brow, but I'm sure there are a FEW short stories this century with merit that are not quite so downbeat! However, I was glad to have spent the time reading this selection, and I felt it was well done overall.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Had to be Done ... Or Not
Review: An alien picking up this book to learn about 1900's American short ficition would draw the following conclusions: (1) Everyone's dying. (2) There is no humor. Some country!I did like 5-6 stories a lot, making it percentage-wise little better than picking 55 stories out of a hat. My own list overlapped Updike's in one place ("The Things They Carried"). The real problem: the exercise was misguided. Too many excellent short stories did not appear in Best American Short Stories of 19xx, which was the criteria for making the first cut here. (Best Essays of the Century doesn't suffer from this problem.) At the very least, they should've been picked by a committee - committees are horriby bad at designing airports, but really good at picking Best lists. This book is a worst case scenario.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Had to be Done ... Or Not
Review: An alien picking up this book to learn about 1900's American short ficition would draw the following conclusions: (1) Everyone's dying. (2) There is no humor. Some country! I did like 5-6 stories a lot, making it percentage-wise little better than picking 55 stories out of a hat. My own list overlapped Updike's in one place ("The Things They Carried"). The real problem: the exercise was misguided. Too many excellent short stories did not appear in Best American Short Stories of 19xx, which was the criteria for making the first cut here. (Best Essays of the Century doesn't suffer from this problem.) At the very least, they should've been picked by a committee - committees are horriby bad at designing airports, but really good at picking Best lists. This book is a worst case scenario.
Rating: 
Summary: typical garbage
Review: As usual, Updike manages to assemble another collection of words that is pointless, meaningless, and useless. The stories are zero in style and meaning and full on melodrama. Of the numerous stories he has collected, only a few are worth their weight in paper, but even they are NOT deserving of their inclusion in the BEST SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY. Rather, it should be called GARBAGE, and once again demonstrates Updike's lack of talent: He can't even produce decent literature if other people write it for him.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid the audio version
Review: Collectors interested in hearing the authors read their own stories might enjoy this production; but if you want to appreciate the stories for their own sake, steer clear of the audio version. The decision to use some of these authors as narrators was a huge mistake. Jill McCorkle's dreary monotone could sedate a grizzly (don't listen to "Theft" while you're driving). James Alan McPherson is essentially unintelligible. He does a poor impersonation of Demosthenes having a bad pebble day. If you really want to hear these stories read by someone, give yourself a break: buy the book, and read it aloud. You'll do a far better job than this crew.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid the audio version
Review: Collectors interested in hearing the authors read their own stories might enjoy this production; but if you want to appreciate the stories for their own sake, steer clear of the audio version. The decision to use some of these authors as narrators was a huge mistake. Jill McCorkle's dreary monotone could sedate a grizzly (don't listen to "Theft" while you're driving). James Alan McPherson is essentially unintelligible. He does a poor impersonation of Demosthenes having a bad pebble day. If you really want to hear these stories read by someone, give yourself a break: buy the book, and read it aloud. You'll do a far better job than this crew.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book, but not the book it should have been
Review: From the well of short stories written by Americans in the 20th century, which were the best? The title of this book led me to believe that in it John Updike would attempt to answer this question. But he doesn't. As the introduction reveals, he asks, rather, which stories by Americans were the best in each decade, intentionally giving each decade roughly equal weight. He also intentionally excludes stories that don't take place in America (or inexplicably, Canada), with two (inexplicable) exceptions. So, if one decade was particularly heavy with great fiction, another particularly light, that is not reflected here. American writers' perceptions of foreign countries in large part are also not here for the (again inexplicable) reason that such stories do not reflect "an American reality". We have instead the best short stories of each decade, so long as those stories take place in America or Canada, considered separately decade by decade. Thus, the title of the book becomes misleading and "the best short story" people who have been keeping a watch over the short story world for nearly a century and therefore are probably the only people capable of producing a book of the best American short stories of the century have lost their opportunity to do so. I do not think this is a small concern. It would have been fantastic to see how each decade measured up against the other in terms of the quantity of great stories in each. This book, like so many, is a collection of lots of fine short stories, but it is not the collection that it purports (via its title at least) to be.
Rating:
Summary: Nice selection but could have been better.
Review: I am ambivalent about this collection. On one hand, each of the writers in this collection is famous for one reason or another, making this a very good record of our literary tradition for the last 100 years. On the other hand, these stories had to be culled from the Best American Short Stories annual, which is a limiting and somewhat misleading proposition for the consumer. Most readers, I suspect, will recognize the obvious omissions and curious substitutions this makes. However, there are some interesting gems that are well worth the read. I do recommend it, but don't believe the title. Think of this book as a good sampler.
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