Any Short Story recommendations?

[coeus]

I have recently started reading short stories again (first time since it was mandatory in high school), and have found them to be very enjoyable for a quick read. Most of what I have read has been in anthologies (so pretty much nothing from this century :) ), and I'm sure there are tons of great ones I haven't heard of. Here are some of my favorites:

To Build a Fire, Jack London
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
2br02b by Kurt Vonnegut
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

So, any suggestions for must-read short stories?

[Emil Miller]

Anythying by William Somerset Maugham but especially the following. Every one of them is a gem:

The Letter

The Outstation

The Lion's Skin

The Book Bag.

[TheFifthElement]

Less specific stories but more collections:
The Foxes Come at Night - Cees Nooteboom
The Bloody Chamber or Black Venus - Angela Carter
Cosmicomics or Numbers in the Dark - Italo Calvino
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka - also In the Penal Colony
Runaway - Alice Munro
The Awakening - Kate Chopin

[Scheherazade]

"A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by Salinger

"Button, Button" by Richard Matheson

"Pillar of Salt" by Shirley Jackson

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by McCullers

[peppersasen]

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (my all-time favorite)
"Another Life" by Paul La Farge (on The New Yorker)
"A Simple Case" by E. C. Osondu (on The Atlantic)
"A Tragic Actor" by Chekhov

[WyattGwyon]

The collected stories of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.

I'll second Emil's recommendation of Maugham.

[Lykren]

"A Clean Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway.

"Everything Stuck to Him" by Raymond Carver.

Haven't read any short stories by Chekhov, but his novella "Three Years" was superb and fairly short.

[ladderandbucket]

Signs and Symbols - Nabokov
The Library of Babel - Borges
A Hunger Artist - Kafka
A Distant Episode - Paul Bowles

[Snowqueen]

The Last Leaf by O’ Henry

After Twenty Years by O’Henry

The Hitchhiker by Roald Dahl

The Story of a Nobody by Anton Chekhov

The Open Window by Saki

The Wolves of Cernogratz by Saki

[Abanera]

For some reason, John Cheever's The Swimmer has always stuck out as one of my favorite 'realistic' short stories.

Joyce's The Dead from Dubliners is always a favorite.

The geek in me loves Asimov's Nightfall.

[astrum]

TheFifthElement,

I thought that Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was a novel.

[OrphanPip]

Well, Chopin's "Story of an Hour" is quite good, and you could add Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" to turn of the century stories written by women.

[astrum]

I read "Story of an Hour" in hs.

It was good.

[ennison]

Cheever's stories
Sheckley's stories
Para Handy Tales by Munro
Scotch Settlement by Paterson
A lot of Kipling but not all
LP Hartley's strange horror stories
James Shaw Grant's stories

[bookowskee]

First author that always comes to mind upon hearing short story/ies is Jorge Luis Borges. You can buy the complete compilations of all his short stories entitled Ficciones (Fictions). There, a masterful work of stories, collected in various time period unfolds before you in a labyrinthine way. A true master of short fictions. You can start with:

Tlon, Uqbar Orbis Tertius
The Secret Miracle
The Aleph
Shakespeare's Memory
The Three Version of Judas
Borges and I

And so on and so on.

[cafolini]

The problem with buying Borges I think is money. The last time I looked at it, it was very expensive.

[bookowskee]

^ Ok, understood. If that's an issue, there's always free ebooks in the internet. Not sure if you prefer ebooks over hard copies (I prefer hard copies, of course), but if you want one (ebook of ficciones) just say so. I know where to get it.

[Seasider]

Anything by James Thurber but especially The Night the Bed Fell and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

[ashulman]

You need collections by
Checkov
Kafka
Babel
Borges
O'Conner
Tolstoy

Tolstoy's stories in particular are a great intro to him rather than delving into the longer works.

[bookowskee]

Does anybody here read the short stories of Turgenev? It came highly recommended by Hemingway in his book, A Moveable Feast.

Anyway, here's more:

Bagombo Snuff Box - Vonnegut
Reheated Cabbage - Irvine Welsh
Tales of Ordinary Madness - Charles Bukowski
Collection of Dostoevsky's short fictions particularly The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Pixel Juice - Jeff Noon
Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk
Collected Stories - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Julio Cortazar's short stories
Insanity Defense - Woody Allen

And, yes, Kafka. Begin with Investigations of a Dog

[ralfyman]

Try anthologies like The World of the Short Story and Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

[hazelk]

I have a great collection of short stories, a few that I can recommend,
All by Annie Proulx

Jane Gardam " People of Privelage Hill"

Tracy Winn "Mrs Somebody Somebody",

Tim Gautrex "Same PLace, Same Things"

My latest that I am just adoring is by Mark Spragg "Where Rivers Change Direction" this one is a memoir.

[ennison]

Jane Gardam is excellent.

[Jassy Melson]

I recommend The Happy Demise of Hidy the Clown by yours truly. It's posted on this site. Some people don't like the story; most do.

[AuntShecky]

The problem with buying Borges I think is money. The last time I looked at it, it was very expensive.

Do you have a free library where you live? Do you have a library card? If so, you can check out books (real books, books on tape or CD, videos, music CDs, etc.) and keep them for a specified amount of time. If a library doesn't happen to have the book you're looking for, sometimes the staff can order it from another library branch in the system.

Also-- don't forget rummage sales and yard sales.

In all sincerity, though, I understand the frustration when you want a book and can't find it or afford it.

[mal4mac]

Death in Venice (and other stories...) by Thomas Mann
Maupassant - collected short stories.

[ralfyman]

Also,

http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/anthologies

[aaron stark]

I can strongly recommend Hemingway's short stories. They're not that long and tremendously well written. The ones I like best are "Cat in the Rain", "Indian Camp", "Up in Michigan" and "Hills Like White Elephants"

[Nazish]

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Why I live at the P.O - Eudora Welty
Birds - Daphne du Maurier

[maxphisher]

Brendan Behan's collection of short stories, After the Wake, is a great read.

[SilvanDitties]

The Winesburg, Ohio collection by Sherwood Anderson, obviously Chekhov, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, Signs and Symbols by Nabokov, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, and That Evening Sun by Faulkner, even though Faulkner has a lot of very nice ones.

[Bustrofedon]

Borges Borges Borges. I am in the cult. Flannery O'Connor? Raymond Carver is highly recommended by some though I don't see it. Bolano's stories perhaps although it's better to read 2666 and Savage Detectives, they're all in there. Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton: good, fun reads.