hello. i am looking to read some modern short stories 1900's to present. Any recommendation to authors, collection etc will be much appreciated
hello. i am looking to read some modern short stories 1900's to present. Any recommendation to authors, collection etc will be much appreciated
you can't go wrong with a bit of JG Ballard or Roald Dahl in my opinion
for early 1900s - anything by Kafka and some of HG Wells's short stories that were penned at the turn of the century too
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
Ernest Hemingway.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY!
Complete Stories is best, but if it's got more than you want I'll say my favorite (if I HAD to choose one) would be Men Without Women. It also has the best title ever, because is there anything else worth reading about?
....(ernest hemingway)......
Also I read a 60s scfi-fi anthology called Dangerous Visions last year and it was really fantastic. Besides the great, aforementioned J. G. Ballard it includes other 'famous' people like Roger Zelazny, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison (who edited it as well), Phillip K. Dick, Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Damon Knight, and Samuel Delany. The stories were all written specifically for the book, and they're all short and weird; a lot of them are really cool too, and some of them are actually mind-blowing. If it's your thing, check it out.
Well, they say variety is the spice of life, but here are my 4 favourite short story collections:
'Collected Stories' by Katherine Mansfield
'Collected Stories' by Vladimir Nabokov
'For Esme-with Love & Squalor' by J.D Salinger
Plus the short stories of Kafka and Borges.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.-Vladimir Nabokov
human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars-Flaubert
I'd recommend Dahl tooOriginally Posted by Hank Stamper
Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes.
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
If you like SF, Gene Wolfe's 'The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories and Other Stories' is probably the best single author short story collection I've ever read. I'd also echo the recommendation for J G Ballard - my favourite collection of his is 'Vermilion Sands'.
There are a lot of good short ghost story anthologies - most stories by M R James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce and the like will usually be well worth reading.
'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravish'd me.
Angela Carter's Black Venus or The Bloody Chamber are both excellent short story collections providing a slightly different take on the fairy tale.
Ian McEwan - First Love, Last Rites
Haruki Murakami - The Elephant Vanishes
Margaret Atwood - Bluebeard's Egg
A S Byatt - The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
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Witold Gombrowicz - Bakakai
Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines
Apollinaire, Le chantre
The Happy Prince and Other Tales - Oscar Wilde, beautiful.
I'd like to give Borges another shout-out. Besides his own work (any volume of which is bound to be well near perfect), he co-edited a large anthology of short fantastic literature, all philosophical and thought-provoking, called "The Book of Fantasy". In it are 80-some small pieces by luminaries such as Ambrose Beirce, Ray Bradbury, Jean Cocteau, G. K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kafka, Kipling, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Yeats, J. G. Ballard (!), and a bunch of Eastern folktales. Plus it has Borges' best story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".
For contemporary, Alice Munro is superb. And as already mentioned, Katherine Mansfield, whose collected stories brought me into the reading of short stories as an art outside of other narrative prose. In truth, almost any canonical short story writer seems to be good, because bad short story writers seem to be silenced quickly.
Another great name in the short story is Italo Calvino, who seems the supreme magical realist short-story writer. Cosmicos is a good collection by him, as is t zero, and even Invisible Cities (though I confess, Invisible Cities loses tons in translation).
Faulkner is another superb story writer, whose work is quite constantly sublime.
Of those not already mentioned, D.H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
My two favorite short story writers are Donald Barthelme and Eudora Welty.
When the tupelo
Goes poop-a-lo
I'll come back to youp-a-lo
- Kilgore Trout
I'd suggest olaf olaffson, the icelandic author, and clive barker, and echo james joyce and jg ballard.
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