"The Last Wish" by Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the first book of The Witcher heptalogy (so far) and it is actually good!  Well, anything would be good compared to "Blood of Elves" so the bar was not particularly high.  This book is presented as a collection of short stories, and it is true that many of the stories have been published before in various magazines, but the first story is an over-arching narrative within which the other stories are presented as chapters in Chaucerian style, as stories told by Geralt to various people while waiting in the temple for his wounds to recuperate.

"The Voice of Reason" is the over-arching story, giving us insight into how the local authorities view the witchers (hint, horribly, which is tenuous, because witchers perform enormous services to the government and the people by taking on monsters that even the bravest (?) knights and soldiers are afraid to do.  In fairy tales witchers would be offered kings' daughters hands in marriage for the things they do, but Sapkowski has them treated as vermin.  Unconvincing.). 

"The Witcher" (Wiedzmin) is the first story about Geralt ever published by Sapkowski back in 1986.  It tells of how Geralt defeated the stryga which was actually illegitimate child of King Foltest's incestuous relationship with his own sister. 

"A grain of truth" is the second story and my favorite, telling about a monster-looking man who is not actually a monster (doesn't react to silver).  He was cursed by a temple priestess to transform outwardly into a monster while he was raping her in order to "become a man" as his father told him.  Nivellen, the monster-man, actually finds out that many merchants are happy to leave their daughters for a year at his disposal, in exchange for a share of his treasure.  The daughters themselves, to the last one, enjoy the sexual prowess of the monster-man quite a lot, after the initial acclimatization.  However Nivellen longs for true love which can lift the curse and that comes in a form of a Bruxa, a super-vampira, which can turn invisible and has a sonic attack that renders people unconscious.  Geralt defeats the Bruxa with Nivellen's help, and with her dying breath she professes true love for Nivellen, who is also mortally wounded by her, and just before he dies, he is transformed back into a man.

"The Lesser Evil" tells the story of how Geralt, undeservedly, got to be called "The Butcher of Blaviken."  He kills a group of thugs who intend to kill the market-goers in the city of Blaviken, but the locals were unaware of the thugs intention, so they think Geralt frivolously committed a massacre.  Renfri, the beautiful leader of the thugs, is actually a princess who cast away by the wizard Stregobor and her evil mother, sent to a forest with a hunter to kill her.  But the hunter, in his "mercy" doesn't kill her, but rapes her, robs her of all she has and lets her go.  The following years Renfri spends begging for food and being raped by various men for shelter, but eventually grows strong and becomes an assassin who now wants to kill Stregobor.  Geralt refuses to choose between the greater and lesser evil, saying all evils are the same.  Renfri sleeps with him saying she will leave town the next morning, but she goes to kill Stregobor.  When Geralt confronts her and tells her to leave town or be killed, she decides to fight him and inevitably is cut open by Geralt.  With her last words she tries to lure Geralt closer, but he doesn't fall for it, and as she dies a sharp dagger falls out of her clutched hand.  Geralt is exiled from Blaviken forever.

The third story, "A question of price" is a precursor to much of what happens later in the books and the games.  Queen Calanthe of Cintra is marrying her daughter Pavetta, who just turned 15, for a political alliance, but a man-hedgehog (urcheon) appears claiming he has a right to her already.  Pavetta turns out not only to have already chosen the urcheon-man, but is already pregnant with his child.  This child is to be Cirilla, or Ciri, who is the main plot device for all the later books and all The Witcher games.

The fourth story, "The end of the world" is probably the weakest, but it sets the stage of how Elves are treated in The Witcher universe and their ultimately inevitable demise.

The fifth story, "The Last Wish" is about when Geralt first met Yennefer, the love of his life.  She has had pretty wild love life before Geralt and initially does't pay him much attention, even being very crude and rude to him yelling "you would like to lick my tits, and something else."  This changes when Geralt saves her from a genie, which she thought she could put under her control, and the genie insists of fulfilling a wish of Geralt's who wishes that he and Yennefer are bound together forever.  At the moment of the wishes fulfillment, he has an insight that Yennefer was a hunchback before becoming a sorceress, which was common at the time, since parents only gave their daughters for sorceress school if there was no chance of them ever getting married.  The sorceress training corrected her physical flaws and made her beautiful (although not conventionally, Sapkowski says).