Best Short Stories and Essays

In honor of the calendar flipping to May, I'm highlighting National Short Story Month. I've gotta say, I have mixed feelings about short stories. Sometimes they are perfectly bite sized and other times I find myself wishing this was the story of the entire book and I'm not ready to move on to something else.

So while not every compilation works for me, I'm sharing some of my short stories and essays from the past few years (and one that I read 25 years ago).