A high-level checklist for evaluating the substance of a collection (or anthology) of short stories

When reviewing a collection of short stories, whether for an awards program or for the purpose of writing a review, you’ll want to consider all the essential elements that go into the spinning of a fine story, short-form style.

Questions to consider

The questions here are generative: meant to help cue and prompt. Reading through them before you begin, or occasionally as a refresher, can help you focus your attention on the most fruitful aspects and — where you sense a weakness — to diagnose cause.

Holistically

• Did the stories pull you in? Hold your attention, keep you engaged? Did you sink into them like a dream? Or perhaps remain aware of the act of reading, but most delightfully so? (In literary fiction, typically this has to do with the language and the delight that language can evoke.)

• If these stories represent life realistically, do they feel natural? If parody, is that approach clever and spot-on, smooth and unforced? If an example of magical realism, are the observations sharp, the quotidian “magic” resonant? Whatever the type or genre, how closely do these stories succeed at what they set out to do?

• Are the characters sharply drawn, clear, unique? True to life, yet indisputably themselves? Is the narrative voice fresh and engaging? Strong and individual?

• Are the stories compelling?

• Does each story fulfill its aims? Is the collection overall strong?

• Does the collection or anthology work as a coherent whole? (Do these stories make sense collected together in one volume? Is there some organizing principle, whatever it might be?)

. . .

Titles

• Does the title of the collection forecast or reflect the substance of the collection in some way? Is it creative or intriguing? Further revelatory once the book has been read?

• Do the individual story titles likewise forecast or reflect? Do they promise what is then fulfilled? Are they creative, intriguing?

Foreword, preface

These are far less likely in fiction, outside of well-known and classic works.

• If either (or both) of these appear, are they distinct and to standard? (That is, the one isn’t misconstrued for the other, one doesn’t duplicate or overlap with the other, and a person appropriate for the task has written the foreword.)

• Are they useful or artfully creative? Or do they seem superfluous or ill-advised?

• If appropriate, to standard, and useful, are they also well-written? 

The particular strengths of the short story

• Do the stories demonstrate a compression of form?

• Does each explore an aspect of its character, or aspects of its characters, that seem particularly important, interesting, revealing? Does this unfold well, serving the story the author wants to tell?

• Do they each explore some key event that serves, in microcosm, to reveal an idea, a theme, character?

• Does each effectively limit its cast to the few characters who most matter?

• Does each effectively focus its lens on those characters, that event?

• Do the details of each story work together to create a unified whole, without any one or more being out of place or failing to serve a function?

• Are these details well-chosen? Does the story give an impression of full and rounded characters? Of a full and rounded story?

• Do the characters drive the plot, or do they instead seem to be puppets in the author’s hands? (Unless, of course, this is the point of a particular story, whether that be to illustrate a bleak, nihilistic, absurd, or horrific world.)

• Is the endpoint of each story used well? Does it, too, add resonance to the story? Cause you to rethink it or to understand something additional?

• Is the structure of each story — the use of inciting incident, development, resolution — successful? Is it designed to work well for short fiction?

• If something about the form or approach is unusual or experimental, does it work?

• Are these stories that are fully realized as short stories? Or do they instead have that thin aspect of synopsis? Or of sketches that would be more successful as longer works?

The characteristics of fine story, in general

• Do the stories unfold engagingly from start to finish? Or do they lose narrative drive, or falter in other ways, at any point?

• Is there a “story beneath the story”? A deeper thematic thread running below the surface, or some subtext that gives greater resonance to the surface-level story?

• Is the emotional cadence handled well?

• Does the author avoid info-dumping? (Noticeable chunks of exposition; awkward, perhaps prolonged, flashbacks; or “As you know, Bob” dialogue.)

• Does the author avoid frequent or prolonged flashbacks? (Unless, of course, that’s a deliberate feature of a particular story, and a feature that’s used well.)

• Is POV handled well? Does it serve to tell the story the author wants to tell? Does it work well, given the genre? Is it maintained throughout?

• Are the characters believable? Do they have agency?

• Does the dialogue unfold naturally? Does it sound natural?

• Is the resolution of the story, whether open-ended or closed, satisfying? Is it earned? (Does it seem to arise organically out of all that has gone before? Is it both believable and in some way delightfully surprising? Does it bring the story to a close in the best and most satisfying way?)

• Does it answer the main narrative question(s) of the story? Or if not, is that deliberately and artistically done? Does it serve the story?

Writing style

• Is the writer’s voice strong and clear? Individual, compelling, unique?

• Whatever the writing style, is every word in the sentences doing work? Such that language is distilled and compressed.

• Does the writing seem to be highlighted, foregrounded, as would be the case with literary fiction? And if so, does that work? Is there enough strength in the writing for that treatment?

• Alternatively, does the writing tend to fade into the background such that the story “tells itself” or does it simply take a back seat to a compelling story? And if so, does that accord with the story’s aim? Is this a work of genre fiction?

• Does the style of the narrative, and its voice, hold steady throughout? Or does it waver, does it change?

• Does the level of diction hold steady?

• Does the style work for the story being told?

• Is it engaging?
  

Final thought

• Would you recommend this collection to a friend?

• To a friend who is a careful and exacting reader?