I read an autobiography of Dottie a few years back, and it seems that Papa didn’t love her back…disparaged her writing and laughed at her support for Sacco & Vanzetti and the NAACP.
In the late 20s he made a fairly public comment on her “plump Jewish ass,” which I would project would have made Parker want to grab his dick fairly publicly and twist it.
I read BUtterfield 8 as an adult and thought it was utter shite.
For one thing, O’Hara introduced EVERY character by telling you where s/he went to college. The hero attended Yale, his best friend was at Amherst, the heroine went to Mount Holyoke, the skeezy villain was a Harvard man, etc., etc. This was his way of having you immediately judge them.
The background for this crap was that young John in Pottstown, PA, was on the Yale track until his dad died early and the tuition funds went for groceries. For the rest of his life, O’Hara resented not attending a fancy university, which he thought would have given him Class.
To bring Hemingway back into this, he once proposed that all contemporary writers “take up a collection to send O’Hara to Yale.”
Mike Mabes, I think you are well-served by the fact that short stories are so often anthologized, which makes it cheap and easy to read a wide range of authors and find out whose literary voices your mind can sing along with, so to speak. Specific short story writers I have enjoyed include John Cheever (“A&P”) in all his WASPy goodness, Ring Lardner (“The Champion”, “You Know Me Al”) Stanley Elkin (“I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” “Cryers and Kibbitzers”), Philip Roth (“Conversion of the Jews”) George Ade (Fables for Our Time"), Willa Cather (“Why I Live at the P.O.”), George P. Elliott (problematic for some: his most famous and best short story, “Among the Dangs” is a first-person account of an African-American anthropologist studying an isolated and primitive South American tribe, and Elliott himself was white), Ralph Ellison (“Flying Home”), Alice Walker (“To Hell with Dying”), etc. All of these can be found on a book store shelf, often in one volume. And you can’t claim to know the short story without a lengthy look at Bradbury.
For horror, I’d be inclined to start with Stephen Crane, then Ambrose Bierce, then R.W Chambers if you want to get a good look at the evolution of American short horror fiction (and you have my permission to skip Lovecraft entirely).
I’ve been re-reading some of my short story books lately (since I can’t get stuff from the library right now :mad:), and this morning I read The Monkey by Stephen King. It’s never been one of my favorites, but I was still pleasantly reminded of just how good his early stuff was.
I see from Thudlow’s links that I’ve already given you guys substantially the same list of favorites before, so this time I’ll just mention that King’s son, Joe Hill, came out with a terrific short story collection last year, Full Throttle. Two standouts for me were All I Care About Is You, and By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain (which also reminds me of Bradbury’s The Shoreline At Sunset*).
* Ha! Still got in a plug for one of the oldies-but-goodies. 
Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” and “The Dead Past” have long been favorites of mine.
No
The man could write, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about him that would indicate he was a nice person in any way.
It’s somewhat Chicago-centric, but “Pet Milk” by Stuart Dybek has always been one of my favorites. Also, the Nelson Algren collection of The Neon Wilderness, but I wanted to give a link for people to be able to read.
One that always stuck with me: John M. Ford’s Mandalay, encountered in a 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It’s a story set in his Alternaties Corporation universe, of which we only get tantalizing glimpses, wherein humanity has access to myriad alternate dimensions, with customers vacationing in WWII-World, or Superhero-World, or an unnamed abundance of others. Then it all…Breaks. None of the details of this universe are outright stated; it’s mentioned in vague passages by people who don’t know how it all worked and don’t know what happened.
This story revolves around a group of people traveling from world to world, trying to find their way home to their own, true world, which they may well never find. To my knowledge, Ford only wrote 4 stories about this setting, only 2 of which I’ve read (I may be wrong about the number, maybe it is just the 2). IMO, Ford could easily have written novels just about the disaster. Still, the lack of Alternaties Corporation stories and his passing (so no chance of more stories) makes this one (for me) all the sweeter. Or is that bittersweet?
How timely. Just got my first Kindle, no more room for bookcases in my apartment. Just got the sample and it looks good.
Bartleby, the Scrivener is the finest short story I’ve ever read.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is probably right up there, though.
Thanks for the list. I’m also a Lardner kind of a guy. Very few authors have the ability to say so much in so few words. And Bradbury of course is in a league of his own, even for people who (like me) are not big SF fans.
Just one small correction–“Why I Live at the P.O.” was written by Eudora Welty, not by Cather. Still a terrific story.
No. He was also pretty volatile too, from what I understand. He apparently could like people one day, and say nasty things about them the next.
I don’t diagnose people I never met, and at any rate, IANA psychiatrist/psychologist, but it would not shock me if someone in a position to know said that he was bipolar.
FWIW, Sacco and Vanzetti were not Parker’s only leftist causes. She protested the Rosenberg execution, and was passionate about civil rights for African-Americans. She had no children, nor living spouse, so she left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., and Dr. King, in turn, left the rights to all her work to the NAACP, so whenever you buy a copy of her Collected Works, the profit benefits the NAACP. Her ashes are also interred at its headquarters. She had no family to arrange a funeral, so Lillian Hellman, a friend, arranged the cremation, and took charge of the remains for a little while. When the NAACP found out that she hadn’t been given any kind of honors, they offered her a space with a plaque, and their gratitude. I find that so interesting.
If you like fantasy, for years, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling worked together to edit The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and the collections were just spectacular, full of so much goodness.
One of my favorites, which I THINK was anthologized in one of their volumes, is “Singing My Sister Down”, by Margo Lanagan. (The full story is available in multiple places online and in the first few Google hits, but I can’t figure out if those links are fair use, so I’ll not include them). It’s a story of a young boy watching his sister’s slow, beautiful, and terrible execution, and it’s lyrical and horrific and profoundly disturbing and wonderful. It deservedly won the World Fantasy Award.
O. HENRY
“The Gift of the Magi”
Kind of old fashioned but love his sense of humor.
Terry Southern
The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft
Dreams In The Witch House by same author and a few dozen other stories by him.
I usually recommend The Gebbelins and Two Bottles of Relish, both by Lord Dunsany. I love short stories with the punch line in the very last line, and both of these qualify.
There is a collection by Alfred Hitchcock called Never Look A Gift Shark in the Mouth that has several of my favorites of those kinds of stories - Getting Rid of George, Island of Terror, Treasure Trove. I don’t like stories with a build up and no payoff. These are stories with a buildup, and then a pay off like a left hook to the liver.
Regards,
Shodan
I know this thread has turned into a general short story recommendation thread, but I think we should warn the OP that some of the writers being recommended here are decidedly not Hemingwayesque.
Oh, I have hardcover double volumes of his short stories, I’ve read every one half a dozen times! They are brilliant, a lot of tales of the British mixing it up with the natives in the rubber plantations of Malaysia and VietNam, Hawaii, China. ‘Rain’ and ‘The Letter’ (well known movies) are the best known… I always thought the movie ‘Red Dust’ with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable was - or should have been - a William Somerset Maughm story, it had all the elements…Did you read the Ashenden stories? Like very early pre-James Bond secret agent spy stories…great stories to read on a rainy day, some better than others, but a whole LOT of them.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but searched for it and Franz Kafka hasn’t come up yet. Well, I thought of him because like Hemingway was for English, Kafka was a master of the German language and (one of our greatest) and the economical use of it, and I hope that this has been retained in English translations. His major work were short stories, and it’s hard to only recommend a few, but I start with the most famous, “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis). Existential stuf (you can call it a novella or a long short story. About 50 pages). Another one, even more nerve-shaking, is “In der Strafkolonie” (In The Penal Colony). And there’s much more.