- “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence
- “Deathbird Story” by Harlan Ellison
- “A Rose for Emily” by Wiiliam Faulkner
- “Rape Fantasy” by Margaret Atwood
- “The Demoness” by Tanith Lee (who is one of the best short story writers ever; if you haven’t read her, give her a try)
1…Diabologic by Eric Frank Russell.
2… Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke
3…Resurrection ( or The Monster) by A E Van Vogt
V
I second the vote for “Big Blonde” by Dorothy Parker.
It’s hard to pick favorites because half the time I can’t even remember the titles of things, but here I go anyway with four more that I like…
“Memento Mori,” author currently escaping me.
“Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” Sylvia Plath.
another vote for “The Price,” by Neil Gaiman.
“Lunch at the Gotham Cafe,” by Stephen King.
Maybe not the best, but very good anyway.
“Sredni Vashtar” by Saki
“Blackbird Pie” by Raymond Carver
“Death” by Ivan Turgenev
“Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka
“A Painful Case” by James Joyce
The Dubliners are all great, but I enjoy The Dead the best. (Joyce)
Also, there’s a great short story called The Overcoat by, Chekov, I believe, or some other Russian.
“My Old Man” Hemingway
“Heavy-Set” Ray Bradbury
“The Twenty-Seventh Man” Nathan Englander
“Tip on a Dead Jockey” Irwin Shaw
“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” Edgar Allen Poe
“Barn Burning” Faulkner
Great thread!
I like just about anything I run across by Alice Munro. And Bartleby and Usher have already been mentioned. But doesn’t anyone like Henry James? The Beast in the Jungle will give you the willies if you identify in any way with the main character.
- “The Scarlatti Tilt” by Richard Brautigan
- “Bend Down and Lick My Feet” by Amy Yamada
- “Wine Not” by Chris Miller
- “The Utterly Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs” by Ted Mann
- “Pure Drivel” by Steve Martin
My favorite is Nightfall by Isaac Asimov. In fact, I can’t believe that it hasn’t made anyone’s list yet on this thread.
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving.
- “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
- “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka.
- “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.
- “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” by Mark Twain.
Positions six through one hundred would probably be filled by Ray Bradbury stories. I love that guy.
“Gladys’s Gregory” by Shirley Jackson (like “The Lottery” only sicker.)
“The Champion of the World” by Roald Dahl
“Saint Ursela and Her Maidens” by Mary O’Connell
“Everything’s Eventual” by Stephen King
“Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson
A short story thread with only one mention of Flannery O’Connor and no mentions of Sherwood Anderson? Depressing.
The Displaced Person - Flannery O’Connor
Hands - Sherwood Anderson
Paper Pills - Sherwood Anderson
Indian Camp - Ernest Hemingway
The Man Who Would Be King - Kipling
Y’know, I have a real love/hate relationship with threads like this. I have an extremely difficult time narrowing down my list of favorites to five, or fifty, or five hundred. And yet I am compelled to participate. May God have mercy on my soul.
I’m going to mention the five I thought of when I read the thread title, but upon reading some of the posts I note several stories that I would include if I thought about this at a different time. Such is life, I guess.
Anyway, in no particular order:
The Howling Man by Charles Beaumont
Gramma by Stephen King
Tuf Voyaging by James R. R. Martin
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Upon re-reading my list, I feel compelled to add a sixth (cheating, I know) - “No Flies on Frank” by John Lennon. IN HIS OWN WRITE is hilarious.
It just blew me back in my chair, Peyote. It has one of those twist type of endings (different from another great mention in this thread - Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, but just as impactful to me). Upon another read, I found the writing technically sound, the characters perfectly sketched out for a short story, and the basic layering of situation, character development and sudden twist to be jolting.
A story like Steinbeck’s The White Quail is similar - we learn about these two characters and their situation, feel the story heading in a specific direction, and then the rug just gets jerked out from under me. And yet, immediately when it happens, the emotional truth of the twist seems so powerful.
I’ve read a few of London’s stories and really, really like them - I don’t find they have that same emotional jolt, but instead capture moments in time in the life of the characters, and the layers of emotion with which they experience those moments.
Soup_du_jour, The Overcoat was written by Nikolai Gogol, along with The Nose, and the Coach - some of the best, most poignant commentaries on class structure - they are hilarious, too.
And the Metamorphosis is pretty much it, isn’t it?
With as many SF fans as we have on this board, I’m surprised that nobody else has mentioned Larry Niven’s “Inconstant Moon”. It’s as hard as hard SF gets, but the story is about the people, and how they react to the science, and he pulls it off excellently.
Let me think a bit for four more…
“City Life” by Mary Gordon
“Natica Jackson” by John O’Hara
“The Laughing Man” by J.D. Salinger
“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff
“The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambera,
off the top of my head.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Sauron *
**Y’know, I have a real love/hate relationship with threads like this. I have an extremely difficult time narrowing down my list of favorites to five, or fifty, or five hundred. And yet I am compelled to participate. May God have mercy on my soul.
My sentiments exactly. And participate I must!
These are what come quickly to mind and are not in any particular order after “The Lottery” which is without question the best:
The Lottery Shirley Jackson
The Open Boat Stephen Crane
The Enormous Radio John Cheever
Little Herr Friedman Thomas Mann
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty James Thurber
In no particular order;
“Best Man at a Buddhist Wedding” C. Bukowski
“Hills like White Elephants” E. Hemingway
“The Big Blonde” D. Parker
“An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” A. Bierce
“Nightfall” I. Asimov
I would like to apologize to Kipling, Thurber, O’Conner, Wolff, Bradbury, Fitzgerald, Jackson, Joyce, LeGuin, Vance, Farmer, et al, and their fans for not including them
I’m not much of a short story reader, so I could only come up with 3 off the top of my head. If someone else has more than 5, they can use up my credits.
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We Love Glenda So Much, Julio Cortazar (The last line still gets me. Every time.)
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*Porcupines at the University{/i], Donald Barthalme
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The Lottery, Shirley Jackson <— This seems to be the most mentioned ss on this thread. To bring the story more to life, my 7th grade English teacher decided to make us all draw papers from a bag and stand with our backs to the wall. We all revealed out papers at the same time and yup - I got the paper w/ the big black mark. Fortunately no one threw anything at me. In retrospect, I’m not sure why she did this.