Changing Planes: Stories -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Rather than a collection of short stories, Changing Planes is a collection of travelogues -- anthropological essays would probably be a closer match, actually -- about other worlds.  A good number of the stories were previously published in magazines.  Kind of like I, Robot -- Asimov took a bunch of previously published stories and wrote a connecting thread to... uh, connect them.  (Except that Le Guin not only wrote the connectors, she also wrote a bunch of new stories.)

The basic premise is that a woman, Sita Dulip, discovered that with the right mix of "tense misery, indigestion, and boredom", people from our world can "change planes" -- visit other worlds.  Unfortunately for us, the only places that create the correct mind frame for interplanary travel are airports.

Le Guin's Author's Note is (of course) wonderful:

This book was written when the miseries of air travel seemed to be entirely the doing of the corporations that ran the airports and the airlines, without any help from bigots with beards in caves.  Spoofing the whole thing was easy.  They were mere discomforts, after all.  Things have changed, but the principle on which Sita Dunlip's Method is founded remains valid.  Error, fear, and suffering are the mothers of invention.  The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

I started typing out a list of my favorites, but I found that I was basically just re-creating the Table of Contents.  It's a good 'un.