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If you want to be a good short story writer, I suggest reading everying written by Anton Chekhov and Alice Munro. They are the two ABSOLUTE gold standards in short story writing over the last 100 years or so.
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http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-st...ndexframe.html
This site has a lot of stories available online for free. In addition to the two mentioned in the quote, I'd recommend James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield.
edit: okay, I checked and Joyce and Munro aren't available on that site, due to copyright or whatever, but you've still got a ton of material to look through there and elsewhere on the internets
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You can't leave Raymond Carver out.
Also, I'd recommend strongly people who may not be credited as being great artists, but who can simply write a very enjoyable story. Too often a writer "settles" for being artistic and somewhere along the way loses the ability to keep momentum and maintain the continuous dream of a story, keeping it sparking and supple and fun. Telling a good story well is, perversely, one of the less esteemed talents of today's storytellers. Story is in large part communication, and parking your story in a narrow though perhaps exalted intellectual or stylistic ghetto with little other appeal ensures that you will in important ways miss your mark as an artist by keeping your talents largely to yourself.
Few writers wouldn't benefit from reading and a thorough study of imaginative and entertaining pure storytellers like Charles Beaumont, Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, Richard Price, William Goldman, and Ira Levin. A little Homer, Hans Christian Andersen, and The Brothers Grimm wouldn't hurt either. A good storyteller reaching toward art can sometimes get there handily and be timeless regardless, but a poor or middling storyteller, however great his talents elsewhere, is so much a part of his time that he may even vanish during it.