I want to make a case for the short story as a form that requires and rewards different skills than the novel. The best short stories don't feel like compressed novels. They feel like a different thing — more like a poem that uses prose, operating through implication and compression in ways that novels can't.

Alice Munro is the writer who made me understand this. Her stories have the density of novels — the characters have histories that extend before and after the frames of the stories — but they don't read like truncated novels. They read like objects that are complete at their scale. The shortness is a formal decision, not a constraint.

I recommend Lives of Girls and Women as a starting point. It's structured as linked stories and could be read as a novel, which gives you both pleasures at once. After that, The Beggar Maid. Then you're on your own.