There’s no way that Of Mice and Men is a short story. Novella or novelette (I can never remember which of those is which), maybe. But it’s an entire book.
Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter.
Chronos,
Agreed, Of Mice and Men is definitely a novel.
I believe The Unbearable Bassington, Saki, would qualify as a novella.
Crane
@ terentii, that’s a great one.
I also love Poison and The Hitchhiker by him.
Where to start? How about some obscure ones?
“‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’”
“Casting the Runes”
Both from The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James
One of my mother’s favorites. I found a bound edition of it and gave it to her as a present.
I read that once many years ago, and fell into such deep depression that I’ve never read it again.
Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor by John Cheever. I read it every December.
It begs for a movie treatment starring Morgan Freeman.
“The Conversion of the Jews,” Philip Roth
“Cathedral,” Raymond Carver
“The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien
“Flowers For Algernon” (the original short story) by Daniel Keyes. Best short story ever.
I am particularly partial to “Elegantly, In the Least Number of Steps”, from Monica McFawn, whose collection Bright Shards of Someplace Else won the Flannery O’Connor award in 2014. Great stories!
Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “Captivity”, by Zenna Henderson. I read it originally as a very young person, in an old F&SF magazine my parents had. I’ve been captivated by her stories ever since, and by “Captivity” the most.
Earthmen Bearing Gifts - Fredric Brown
Interview with a Psycho - Billie Sue Mosiman
The Cold Equations - Tom Godwin
I forgot all about Silverberg. My favorite of his is “Nightwings”.
Another SF favorite is “The Moon Moth” by Jack Vance.
The short stories of Dorothy Parker. ‘Big Blonde’ is a good one.
The short stories of Ray Bradbury - I couldn’t possibly pick one!
The short stories of Roald Dahl - ‘Lamb To The Slaughter’ has been mentioned, but he wrote a story about an antiques ‘picker’ (in England, years ago) who went out to old farmhouses looking for antique furniture. To buy for chump change, and then sell for major money. He made The Find of his life at one farm…
I have two bound volumes of the Collected Short Stories of William Somerset Maughm, which I read cover to cover as a teenager living in distressing circumstances. They are all over the place: English drawing rooms, colonials mixing it up with the natives on rubber plantations in Malaysia, drunks in Singapore and Hawaii, proper types on board cruise ships in the Far East, and a great little group of stories about a pre-James Bond spy, ‘Ashenden’. All written long ago but utterly enthralling, with twists and turns of the human condition. His best known story is ‘Rain’ with Miss Sadie Thompson being persecuted by a blood-and-thunder preacher when a group of travellers is taking shelter from a monsoon.
Can non-fiction be short stories? Any travel book, each chapter, I love. Can pick it up and put it down as needed. ‘At Home’ by Bill Bryson - a history of the house, how rooms in a typical house evolved over the centuries to what they are used for today - very interesting, each chapter about each room.
If that’s the one I’m thinking of, it was nonfiction. As was his first published work, a hilarious first-person account of him getting shot down in flames and burning nearly to death in WWII.
Rudyard Kipling hasn’t been mentioned, though he is a true master of short stories.
I don’t mean only the children’s stories - The Jungle Book, The Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel Rewards and Fairies. (The last two deserve to be better known.) Or the stories written when he was a young man in India. The stories written towards the end of his life, mostly set in England, are very much worth reading.
The Madonna of the Trenches is about PTSD (‘shell shock’) after WW1 - and a strange and disturbing love story.
The Wish House, in the same volume (Debits and Credits) is often regarded as one of his best. It starts out with a couple of old ladies having afternoon tea and chat, but the story that eventually emerges is both powerful and creepy.
Their Lawful Occasions in Traffics and Discoveries is an hilarious story about a British Navy exercise in peace time.
There are many others of his later stories that surpass any of his Indian stories.
Yes, I mentioned that, too.
A great story! It’s “Parson’s Pleasure,” from 1958:
That’s not it – the story is a murder mystery, told from the POV of the very clever criminal. It was adapted as an episode of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.
At any rate, I hope it’s not nonfiction!
Has no one mentioned John D MacDonald? My favorite one of his so far is The Homesick Buick.
There’s another one I think was written by Roald Dahl, where a husband and wife bump each other off around the breakfast (or maybe dinner?) table; she offs him by putting something to which he’s deathly allergic (wool?) into one of his cigars with a knitting needle.
I can’t remember the name of this one. Sound familiar?
No, no, not “A Lamb to the Slaughter”; I meant the one about the antiques dealer. IIRC, the find was a great deal of Roman-era silver, and the copy I had included photographs of the actual items.
Funny, I remember a Dahl story about an antiques dealer, but it features a Hepplewhite commode.