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This is "Who's Cribbing?" by Jack Lewis. It appeared in Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, so that's the most likely place you might have read it. It consists of fictional correspondence between Lewis himself and various science fiction magazine editors. Every story that Lewis submits turns out to have been previously published by an early ...
24
"Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" by Lawrence Watt-Evans? The plot is:
A young man tells his story about growing up working at a greasy spoon diner near Sutton, West Virginia. Late at night it happened to be a hang-out for unusual travelers from alternate versions of Earth. After being tantalized by descriptions of far-off wonders, the ...
22
The Thing in the Moonlight by Lovecraft. It starts:
Morgan is not a literary man; in fact he cannot speak English with any degree of coherency. That is what makes me wonder about the words he wrote, though others have laughed.
He was alone the evening it happened. Suddenly an unconquerable urge to write came over him, and taking pen in hand he wrote the ...
20
Auto-Da-Fe by Damon Knight. I read it in the anthology Dogtales! but that is quite recent. You would probably have read in in Turning On or The Tenth Galaxy Reader.
This is not a nice story. The last male dog is Roland. We never learn the name of the last man, only that he:
... was nine thousand and some odd hundreds of years old. Long ago, in the first ...
20
"Poppa Needs Shorts" (1964) by Walt and Leigh Richmond, available at Project Gutenberg.
Shorts are useful. They help electrics to work harder.
Shorts you wear, and they are electrics.
Wires are electrics.
Shorts can be made by juice.
Shorts can be made by neatles, that bite like teeth.
Poppa needs more shorts.
Found by browsing the Internet ...
17
The Inn Outside the World by Edmond Hamilton. It was written in 1945 so it was an old story when you read it.
Su Suum spoke slowly. “My word is this: Even though it were possible to transgress the bounds of Earth’s ages without disaster, even though you were able thus to save your peoples from confusion and struggle, would it be great gain?
“I tell you this—...
14
This is "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" (1963) by Alfred Bester.
The story begins:
The girl driving the jeep was very fair and very Nordic. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail, but it was so long that it was more a mare's tail. She wore sandals, a pair of soiled bluejeans, and nothing else. She was nicely tanned. As she ...
12
This is probably Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" (1941), where the main character creates a little world and forces the beings inside - called Neoterics - to evolve and solve problems for him.
This, then, was the answer to his problem. He couldn't speed up mankind's intellectual advancement enough to have it teach him the things his ...
11
This matches up with "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" by Harlan Ellison.
The story includes many seemingly unrelated threads told in omniscient narration, ultimately connecting them with offhand mentions and details. The threads can be categorized as: events on Earth, events in an alien community known as the Concord, and ...
10
Although it doesn't appear to ever have been anthologized, this sounds a lot like "Survival" (1953) by Don Green. It was published in the July 1953 issue of Astounding and only ever reprinted in the British edition the following December.
Philip Jennings wakes up to intense cold and a feeling of suffocation. He finds all 21 of the other ...
6
"Eight O'Clock in the Morning", a short story by Ray Nelson, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1963, available at the Internet Archive. You might have read it in one of these compilations.
At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, "Awake."
Something unusual happened.
One of the ...
5
This might be "The Faithful" by Lester Del Rey.
Humans have surgically, genetically, and chemically bio-engineered dogs and apes until they are sentient, then gone ahead and destroyed their society with another world war. The story is told from the point of view of Hungor Beowulf IV, a descendent of the first sentient dog-person. Hungor leads his ...
5
If this wasn't a complete story in its own right, this sounds like a short summary of Gordon R. Dickson's 1970 short novel Hour of the Horde.
After Miles Vander is recruited from Earth by the aliens of the Center, he is transported to the Battle Line, where he is placed in the smallest, weakest ship with a mixed crew of 22 other aliens also deemed of little ...
5
I believe this is "She Was the Music. The Music Was Him" (1970) by Neil Shapiro; it appears to only have been published in the October 1970 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The main character is Vanessa Insoul, a telepath and newly a "Commander of the Institute." In the opening scene, on Earth, she meets an alien on the Street of ...
4
It could be Warhorse By Timothy Zahn
An ecologically-aware science fiction novel filled with warnings
modern humans can (and probably should) carefully consider. The
Warhorse universe is populated by living starships with telekinetic
abilities. These “space horses” have been tamed and are controlled by
an alien species that keeps tight rein over their ...
4
I believe this is "Curtains" (1974) by George Alec Effinger. First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, it was anthologized in Haldeman's Study War No More.
Performing troupe fighting a staged military conflict (Sargent Weinraub is reading a review of their last performance):
"'And then there's Delta Company,'" said Weinraub, ...
3
Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders.
Escape from Spiderhead is a tale that looks into a dystopian future, where convicts can either enter experimental drug testing programs or serve time in prison. After Jeff was convicted for murder, his mother had spent all her savings to get him out of real jail, and put him to a drug testing program. So Jeff is ...
3
I'm starting to suspect this isn't the correct answer, but this could be one of Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm books.
The Professor was a great (if absent-minded) inventor, always ready to turn his genius to the practical affairs of housekeeping, whether in the matter of a burglar trap of some comprehensive device to get spring-cleaning over quickly. ...
3
Organic Marble mentioned Keith Laumer as a possibility. Laumer wrote a story that appeared in the April 1967 issue of Galaxy called 'Thunderhead'. Earth is at war with a spider-like race called the Djann. 20 years before the story opens, Lt. Carnaby had been dropped on an isolated Rim world to man a one-person sensor station. Unknown to him, the ship that ...
2
"Unnatural Causes" from Callahan's Crosstime Saloon?
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson was published in 1977, so the timeframe matches even though the author is Canadian-American. The book is made up of several stories all set in Callahan's Bar.
The first story in the book "The Guy With The Eyes" deals with a cybernetic ...
1
Sci-fi/horror short story about a disease that took over people’s minds and made their heads explode
I think the novel “Cold Storage” by David Koepp is what you’re looking for. A space fungus gets to earth and takes over victim’s minds, causing them to climb whatever and then burst with fungal spores. It’s actually a fun read.
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