
Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories
Book
Vengeful ghosts, ravenous rats, gypsy curses, and the walking dead await you in Dracula's Guest &...

The Lottery and Other Stories
Book
This is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories, including 'The Lottery' - one...

Short Stories For Kids
Education and Games
App
Five fun short stories for kids are there in this interactive audio storybook app. With sounds,...

The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 (The Complete Short Stories #1)
Book
First in a two volume collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of ‘Empire of the...

The Ugly Duckling Classic tales - Premium
Book and Entertainment
App
Version without ads. We offer your kids with the best selection of classic short stories and fairy...

Phil Leader (619 KP) rated A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction in Books
Nov 8, 2019
The basis for this seems to be that the nugget of an idea behind a Pratchett book was rarely simple enough to be encapsulated neatly in the short story form; his characters and ideas took time to develop and that's before the addition of the amusing footnotes and his skill at producing pastiche, parody and satire of many different things without the narrative stumbling or swerving.
This collection shows that although relatively few in number, the Pratchett short story was just as fine as could be expected. Sometimes they could be a little rushed to get to the point before the end (best seen in his tale of a gnome from the country that finds other gnomes in a department store - the story that was later rewritten fully as Truckers)
This is also a somewhat eclectic mix. There is the first story that he was paid for about the devil wanting to promote hell, which he wrote at school but it is clear that he already had the flair for writing even then. A few science fiction stories including the prescient and dark #ifdefDEBUG "world/enough" "time" about someone retreating to a virtual reality world. There is the story that formed the first ideas that would eventually become The Long Earth and of course some Diskworld shorts and related notes.
Taken together they show that over a long span of time Pratchett was coming up with great ideas. There is a little uneveness but part of this is due to his writing style being different between Diskworld and his more science fiction based stories (something that confused a lot of Diskworld readers when they read The Long Earth, but goes back even to The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata both of which are very different to Diskworld in tone.
To this end the editors have been wise to have the Diskworld stories as the second half with the 'other' stories at the beginning. This avoids the tone changing too much between stories.
This sounds like it might be for the Pratchett 'completist', like one of those greatest hits albums that comes out with just one or two rare tracks, but really this is a great collection of short stories by any measure. A couple of these are fairly well known - Troll Bridge and Theatre of Cruelty - but there is nothing gratuitous here. And of course there are plenty of laughs and subtle takes on society and humanity.

Murder at Sea
Book
Fear naut, the next Destinations Murder collection is here: Murder at Sea. Third in this...

Sherlock Holmes: Volume 3
Arthur Conan Doyle and Daniel Stashower
Book
This great series addition of Sherlock Holmes includes a full-length novels and short stories....

The Beautiful Indifference
Book
From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the...

Midwinter Mysteries
Linda Stratmann, Cora Harrison, David Field, Graham Brack, Marilyn Todd, J. C. Briggs, Keith Moray, Seàn Gibbons, Gaynor Torrance and Kim Fleet
Book
Eleven authors. Eleven stories. One festive collection! Perfect for fans of crime fiction, short...