You can tell that someone only listens to safe, contemporary, mainstream music when they say that they like "any kind of music except country or rap." Those are not adventurous people. Likewise, most booksellers can tell that they're not dealing with the most imaginative customer when said customer asks for recommendations with the qualifier "I read anything except for short stories."
Virtually any anthology of short stories begins with a claim that the form is in trouble, and of course whatever anthology it is—wonder of wonders—is living proof that they're alive and well. But most are bad: They're like the abominable NOW That's What I Call Music samplers that are always topping the music charts. For readers who are willing to take a chance, two recent short-story collections do some excellent, interesting work.
John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence is a pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction. The title story is a wry, mature continuation of The Wizard of Oz. The last story, "Pride and Prometheus," is a miscegenation of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen wherein Victor Frankenstein tries to woo Mary Bennet. It's the kind of writing that only a serious reader could do, and the latter story avoids the fan-fiction trap by convincingly emulating Austen's prose. "The Last American" is a history of America's poisoning itself to death with its own ideas, told from years in the future. The last president's life ends scandalously: "[t]he cross, the taser, the Shetland pony."
Literary short fiction is in worse shape than its genre relatives; the Raymond Carver–esque short story that concludes with an ambiguous-yet-slightly-depressing nonending has dominated the consciousness for decades now. Nobody's doing more to deliver new ideas than Israeli author Etgar Keret. In his most recent book to be translated to English, The Girl on the Fridge, there are almost 50 stories packed into 171 pages, but this isn't the typical, unsatisfying flash fiction; in stories of three pages or less, Keret unveils little universes of weirdness and sorrow, but unlike, say, Carver's stories, they don't feel like they were written 30 years ago. A woman longs for a lover who is made of nothing. The dumbest Mossad agent in the world tries to outsmart himself. A scientist develops a pornographic way to make monkeys play along with her experiments. A mob boss hosts a child's birthday party.
Though the content doesn't resemble Carver's at all, Keret's stories resemble Carver's in all the ways that matter. They feature people feeling paranoid, or depressed, or any of the other things that people feel. But the stories all involve some sort of change, either in the reader's perception of a character or in a character's relationship to the world, which is exactly what short stories are supposed to do. 
