On Short Stories

[miyako73]

Whose short story collections you would buy if you had money to spare?

[chrisvia]

Gogol, Chekov, Pushkin, Poe, Borges, Carver, Paley, Barthelme, Gass, Moore, de Maupassant, Voltaire, Balzac. Would you like just one pick?

[dfloyd]

the collected short stories of Somerset Maugham, possibly the best short story writer of the 20th century; although the Americans Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald are hard to beat.

[DocHeart]

Whose short story collections you would buy if you had money to spare?

I've already spent all my money. Here's what I got me:


The Granta Book of the American Short Story

Playboy Stories: The Best Forty Years of Short Fiction

Somerset Maugham: Collected Short Stories - Volume I (Penguin)

Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels

The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty

Selected Short Stories by William Faulkner




And a pair of trousers that don't fit me anymore.

[tonywalt]

the collected short stories of Somerset Maugham, possibly the best short story writer of the 20th century; although the Americans Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald are hard to beat.

I agree on Maugham. . I love Rain, Red, Honolulu and for sentimental reasons (about colony life) the Outstation.

Ann Beattie's The Burning House and Confidence Decoy.

Also John Raymond's brilliant book of short stories(Livability) has "Benny" "The suckling Pig" "Wendy and Lucy" and "Old Joy"(the latter two stories became Excellent movies - minimalist though, only for a very few. Old Joy is the best Art film of the 2000's easy, you would have to go back to "Five Easy Pieces" to find that sort of deliberate meaningful film.

[Anymodal]

In this order: Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Giovanni Papini, Edgar Allan Poe

[Desolation]

JL Borges, Donald Barthelme, and Anton Chekhov are the ones that I'm most curious about.

[tonywalt]

They are all good. It's taken be a year to learn just how much classic older authors are the rule on litnet. I rarely see current authors.

[OrphanPip]

They are all good. It's taken be a year to learn just how much classic older authors are the rule on litnet. I rarely see current authors.

I think the tendency is to recommend the established, safe, names when people ask these things. I think in the previous short story thread we had my recommendations included Alice Munro, Bronwen Wallace, and Rohinton Mistry, all of whom wrote in the previous 40 years, and two of them are still alive.

I sometimes pick up the annual sci-fi/fantasy story anthologies that get published.

[tonywalt]

The annually published "Best American Short Stories" (which includes Canadian authors) is excellent. I just think, as opposed to novels, short short stories have improved in quality in the modern era - and there is interesting experimental writing styles in many of them.

[Bastable]

the short stories of Borges, Fitzgerald, Richard Yates and Paul Bowles all knock my socks off. i'd say kafka as well but he goes over my head too often.

[JCamilo]

I would say Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, mostly because if found it a bit expesive last time i looked so i didnt bought (and because it is very good)

[Kyriakos]

I love short stories.
Don't really have anything on my to-buy list though since i re-read stuff i already have read in the past, by Kafka, Poe, Lovecraft, De Maupassant, Chekhov and others.

[wordeater]

I'm an avid reader of short stories. Some of my all-time favourites are Poe, Hardy, A. C. Doyle, H. G. Wells, Roald Dahl, A. Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Hemingway, Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham, Borges, Maupassant, Gogol and Chekhov. Currently I'm reading Evelyn Waugh.

[Pierre Menard]

Highly recommend the short fiction of:

- Borges
- Akutagawa
- Joyce
- Nabokov
- Melville
- Kafka
- Calvino
- Bashevis Singer

[Emil Miller]

I'm an avid reader of short stories. Some of my all-time favourites are Poe, Hardy, A. C. Doyle, H. G. Wells, Roald Dahl, A. Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Hemingway, Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham, Borges, Maupassant, Gogol and Chekhov. Currently I'm reading Evelyn Waugh.

I'm also reading the complete Waugh short stories. I'm about two-thirds the way through. I found 'An Englishman's Home' to be the best so far, the plot is ingenious. Throughout the book there are some moments that are laugh out loud in Waugh's caustic manner.

[namenlose]

I judge some of Turgenev’s short stories to be masterpieces, and in my opinion they are even superior than Fathers and Sons and his other longer works. His plot structures usually don't please me, so I'm not a great admirer of his novels, but I believe shorter forms are more adequate to the employment of his poetic style and power of description. A Sportsman's Sketches would be my first recommendation among his works in the genre, as I thought it to be his most perfect collection and a great achievement in atmospheric construction.