The title is slightly misleading, as only two of the 40 selections here are self-contained short stories - the majority are extracts from novels, with the odd memoir and magazine article thrown in. Like any good anthology - and this one is quite fine - a good number of the usual suspects appear (Remarque, Hemingway, Mailer, Philip Caputo), but they remain fresh, and the collection is taken to a higher plane with the many pleasant surprises: AD Gristwood, Pat Barker, Shusaku Endo. There is, not surprisingly, little enough humour, but Vonnegut can always raise a black smile, and the piece from Captain Corelli's Mandolin is gas. One of the strongest pieces is a non-fiction account from Heller, written in the 1990s, of one terrifying bombing raid which transformed itself into a comic episode in Catch 22. To put it all in perspective, finish with the provocative How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O'Brien.