Someone, probably Steven R. Donaldson, once wrote that the short story is to the novel as champagne is to beer. I don’t know that I entirely agree with the metaphor (as I don’t drink beer and rarely touch champagne) but I understand the thought behind it. There’s something about the way a really well-crafted short can let you get into a character’s skin that makes it magical.
This all came to mind when someone mentioned Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” in a thread I’m too lazy to look up right now. I’d never read it before, but I am inestimably glad to have been led to it. But, as lovely as it is, it still doesn’t compare to Andre Dubus’s “The Timing on Sin,” from his collection Dancing After Hours in which the main character tells her best friend about nearly committing adultery two nights before (I’m not using spoiler space because the first paragraph tells you exactly that). And even that pales beside Valerie Martin’s “The Freeze,” from her collection The Consolation of Nature in which a fortysomething’s hope of falling in love causes her to…well, I don’t want to spoil it. Read the story.
But that’s just me. What are your favorite short stories?
I was a fanatic on short stories for many years. My dad has given me The Best American Short Stories collections every year since 1988 (with a few exceptions where he couldn’t get his hands on one).
I think it’s a near-perfect art form. One particular favorite, Blight by Stuart Dybek, takes place in the neighborhood my dad grew up in in Chicago.
I have a lot of favorites. Too many to mention. I may sit down and re-read the collections one of these days. I’m interested in seeing the other contributions to this thread.
You don’t necessarily have to rank your absolute favorites, just ones that stick out in your mind as especially memorable because of their artistry. And with that I’ll add another: a short from Realms of Fantasy from a few years back, titled the Grammarian’s Five Daughters." After receiving their inheritances–bags containing the various parts of speech–the title characters each go on quests to various realms lacking the part of speech they need.
It’s a better story than it sounds; it simply doesn’t lend itself to a summary.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison
“The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger
“Lost in the Funhouse” by John Barth
“The Pusher” by John Varley
“Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber
“Tell the Women We’re Going” by Raymond Carver
“Understand” by Ted Chiang
“5,271,009” by Alfred Bester
“It” by Theodore Sturgeon (no relation to the Stephen King novel).
“And I Awoke and Find Me Here on the Cold Hill Side” by James Tiptree, Jr.
“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe
“Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler
“Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” by Lawrence Watt-Evans
“What Was the Name of that Town?” by R. A. Lafferty
Some have really stuck with me. As a child, I think “Sredni Vashtar” was probably my favorite, and there are several by Saki that I’d consider great, such as “Filboid Studge”.
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is on a lot of lists with good reason. My favorite story of hers, though, is probably “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts”.
Some of the stories by John Cheever are perfect. Some are just what he wrote in between these.
John Collier deserves more recognition that he’s given.
Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories are better than any of the war fiction by American writer’s who’d experienced the Second World War (including James Jones)
They’re not great art, but I love the short-story-with-a-twist. O. Henry is most famous for these, but I like the science fiction/fantasy ones that were so prevalent in the 1950s, when Fredric Brown, William Tenn, Theodore Coggswell, Richard Mtheson, Charles Beaumont, Robert Sheckley, and others wrere churning these out for the pulp magazines. A lot of original Twilight Zone* episodes are based on these stories (like the classic “To Serve Man”, based on Damon Knight’s short).
I also like short mysteries. Fredric Brown was a master of these, too (although he turned out a lot of sub-par stuff as well). Frederick Forsyth’s short stories are also great examples of wonderfully realized and detailed twist-endings. Read “A Careful Man” or “Money with Menaces” or “Privilege”.
There was a story I read once, and damned if I can remember the name or author, but it was about a lake that was frozen over, but hollow underneath so the characters could walk under it. It had a very eerie feel to it. Can’t remember for the life of me what the title was.
The best short story I have ever read is ***The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber * ** by Hemingway. I remember exactly where I was when I read it and how it blew me away at the end - when I blurted out “oh, shit!” and the other person in the room looked up at me to see what could’ve made me say that…technically brilliant, engrossing situation and characters and dealing with themes of manhood and machismo central to Hem’s writing…
I also love **Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald ** - it captures much of the essence of Gatsby in a lovely, shorter format.
My favorite **Steinbeck ** is **The White Quail ** from his collection The Long Valley - a brutally effective twist at the end…
Sherman Alexie writes wonderful short stories, mostly about Northwestern Native American life with a liberal twist of magical realism. My two favorites from his collection Ten Little Indians are “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” and “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”.
OK, WordMan has already checked in with my all-time favorite, The Short, Happy Life… So I’ll mention one which affected me deeply when I read it in high school, Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken. I need to read it again to see how it holds up, but it impressed me when I was 16.
I think Borges is in a class of his own with the short story - I don’t think I’ve read anyone as consistently as good. I like his earlier stuff the best (wish I had his collected works to hand but I’m moving flat and all my books are boxed up), ‘Ficciones’ is just a work of quality from start to finish - ‘Fumes the memorious’, ‘The library of Babylon’, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius’ etc.
Borges must be a huge influence on SF short stories, maybe short stories full stop. I don’t know enough about 60s, 70s SF to really trace his influence, but the ideas and writing in Ficciones seem ahead of their time.
Does anyone else have the collected works translated by Andrew Hurley? It’s got some pretty scathing reviews as a translation. I don’t speak Spanish, but definitely notice the difference between Hurley’s efforts and an old copy of Ficciones I have.
What’s the name of that Shirley Jackson story, where the wife gets it in her head that she could just up and kill her husband with an ashtray, and she can’t get it out of her mind, so she just goes ahead and does it?
Almost anything by Flannery O’Connor. I just read Revelation a few days ago, and it’s stunning. Also, Everything that Rises Must Converge, both because it’s a great title and because it’s a great, great story.
Does Leaf by Niggle, by Tolkien, count? It’s kind of long, but I love it.
OK I’m re-reading that short story this minute! (Does that tell you something about my life that I can’t even imagine finishing a short story in one sitting? I read during my little one’s bath!) Aiken witnessed his father shoot his mother then kill himself; this tragedy, so says the introduction to the story, informed the writer throughout his life and resonates, particularly in this story. I think you’ll find it holds up, Crotalus!
Anyway, I have in the bathroom drawer 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, which was my college text for the short story class I took. I love short stories. There are several writers whose short stories I have read nearly all of; over the course of reading them all you come to know certain characters like you would in a novel, which I think is rather fun. Ellen Gilchrist comes to mind.
Other gorgeous stories (besides Silent Snow, Secret Snow) in this collection include Cass Mastern’s Wedding Ring, by Robert Penn Warren and The Furnished Room, by O.Henry. While not typically the story-with-a-twist that Cal mentions, it still has a very affecting ending.
One of my favorites, though, is The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers. She’s wonderful to begin with (Member of the Wedding is one of my favorite books) but this story seems to contain every grotesque, beautiful, weird and compelling thing there every was in Southern literature, and ramp it up a notch. Lee Smith is wonderful at this as well.
Another favorite is The Light in the Piazza, by Elizabeth Spencer. I was amazed when I heard this was to be made into a movie (or opera?). Kalhoun if you haven’t read Spencer, dash right out right now and buy The Southern Woman. Read The Finder and tell me it’s not pure delight! So there’s another favorite, I guess. Oh and First Dark.
I don’t remember the title and I’m too lazy to go upstairs to look. It’s in the Nebraska collection by Ron Hansen, and it’s about a blizzard in 1880-something. Maybe the title is Nebraska.
Also The Paperhanger by William Gay, The Stick Woman by Edward Lee (restrained for him but still not a story for the faint-hearted), The Mangler by Stephen King (don’t you judge me!), The Dog Park by Dennis Etchison, and My Dead Dog Bobby by Joe Lansdale.
I like Niven’s “Convergent Series”, just 'cos of the neat denoument. The narrator has conjured up a demon and learned to his horror that he must get it to grant him a wish, whereupon after 24 hours it will teleport off to Hell, report another soul claimed, and teleport back to carry him off. It was conjured into a pentagram, and must reappear in the pentagram when it comes back; if the pentagram has been removed it can appear where it likes, if the pentagram has been redrawn it must appear inside it. So the character asks the demon to stop time for 24 hours for everyone but him, and he gets 24 subjective hours while the rest of the world is frozen in time, and while he is waiting he erases the pentagram and redraws it on the demon’s belly. When the demon reappears it finds that the pentagram is now too small for it, so it evaporates and reforms smaller, only to find the pentagram still too small, which leaves it in an endless loop trying to make itself smaller than the pentagram inscribed upon it.
The final line of Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God” is pretty neat too.
Oh and First Dark.