Best Short Shorts

Best Short Shorts is a collection of short short stories--usually running six pages or less as here printed--from the 50s, 40s, and occasionally 30s. While some of the stories are mired in the idealistic 50s world epitomized by "Leave it to Beaver" and friends, the book in general is still very readable for a modern reader. A short short gets one shot at glory, and many of those in this volume don't quite make it, though only a few shoot completely wide of the mark. My biggest complaint is that the editor's lead-ins have a bad habit of revealing more than they should; I got in the habit of ignoring the italics at the start of the story.

Of the three science fiction stories in the book, one was an interesting little piece of alien life--though I'd warn about the italics especially for this one, one is a plot that seems to bewilderingly have come up in 50s science fiction repeatedly, but not since then for good reason, and the third is a classic piece of Asimov's, about schooling in the present and future. ( )