The New Granta Book of American Short Story

There's a story about Ring Lardner, told of him (or against him) by his editor, Harold Ross, that claims his method of writing a story was to put down a few wildly distinct phrases on a piece of paper, leave them to stew, then go back later "and fill in the spaces". Admittedly, any writer who calls his first collection How to Write Short Stories is probably askin g for it, but true or not, such whimsicality about the form is notably absent from much of Richard Ford's formidable New Granta Book of the American Short Story.