I have many favorites but I don’t recall ever having been as engaged as I was with the Glass family stories in the New Yorker by J.D. Salinger.

Read with caution: Henry James’s The Altar of the Dead. It always makes me cry. For relief I turn to his The Death of the Lion for the best description of the sort of newspaper editor I used to work for, one whose "sincerity took the form of ringing doorbells and whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at home."

Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss. Because she did it better than anyone. Or The Nine Billion Names of God, a 1953 science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, in which a scientist is hired by a Tibetan lamasery to compute all the names of God on his "mark V" computer. The last line: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

Was The Diamond as Big as the Ritz a short story or a novella? Because it doesn’t get better than that for me. Also, I just read a new collection of short stories by Wells Tower (great name, no?) And the last one is told in the voice of a rampaging Viking and it knocked my socks off. Oh, a collection called, I think, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, by a woman writer named Amy Bloom, and there is a story in it about a mother taking her daughter to a clinic to have a sex-change operation that absolutely killed me.

I have been putting myself to sleep with short stories for a very long time, it is impossible to choose one. I am glad somebody asked this question though because I am going to read all the ones suggested and can’t wait to get Candice’s Wells Tower collection. Whooey.

I love so many short story writers. It’s so hard to pick my very favorite. Let me take this opportunity to pay homage to some of the ones I love the best. Isaac Asimov, Italo Calvino, William Gibson, Philip Dick, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Olen Butler, Raymond Carver, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon. But I can’t leave out Patricia Highsmith, ‘cause I actually knew her, and I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate her or her writing at the time.

Then there are the great masters I read early on that had so much impact, maybe because I was so young when I read them. O’Henry, I guess his surprise endings seem old-fashioned, today, but I remember being surprised with those surprise endings when I first read them. Others I read when I was young, Guy de Maupassant, Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Voltaire. Now, as I look over this list, I would feel bad, of course, if I left out Grace Paley, Louise Erdrich, James Joyce. I still recall being thrilled by his Dubliners.

Oh no, I see I’ve left out two of the most important to me, personally, because I related so deeply to their exquisite, Southern sensibility, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.

I could go on and on … this is the hardest question you’ve ever asked me.