Your favourite short stories?

Which short story or stories are you most fond of? And why is that?

Here is a list of my five favourite short stories:

5. The outsider, HP Lovecraft

The outsider is the story of a person who is trying to discover what he is. However already in the first paragraph we are being told that he has made a gruesome discovery and he now wants to move as far away from it as possible. Complete with a memorable climax, and also another climactic moment half way through the story, it is regarded by me as one of the best works by this author

4. In the penal colony, Franz Kafka

Around 40 pages long, this is the account of a visit to an penal colony, which appears to have very unussual customs, or at least its old customs were peculiar, and someone still wants to enforce them. Arguably the most graphically violent of all of Kafka's work, it is, perhaps (consciously or not to its author) a striking allegory of the bipolism a son can have in regards to his emotions for his father: the officer on the one hand is set to maintain the old order, that of the father-figure in the story, and the traveller seeks to, hesitantly, dismiss it.

3. The dream of a ridiculous man, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Although Dostoevsky is mostly known for his novels, he has written a few great shorter stories. The dream of the ridiculous man is the narrative of a dream, and also the notes of a resolution to change oneself. Born out of despair, the dream provides a solution to the inner conflict of the narrator between dismissal of the world, and love for it, presenting an utopia of kindness.

2. The sleeping machine, Guy De Maupassant

This is also the account of a dream, but of an entirely different kind. The statistics of suicides, read in the morning paper, make the narrator imagine a world where society would have solved the problem of suicidal depression, by means of an organisation that offered quick and painless death. The entire story is formed masterfully, and its ending is very memorable as a juxtaposition to the dream

1. The recluse of Bayswater, Arthur Machen

I placed this at the first spot, after some thought. Surely there exist a number of other stories i could have picked, but this one means something special to me, perhaps not entirely without any connection to the fact that i once lead a reclusive life in Bayswater, which is a part of central London. The story follows the life of a student of Law, who becomes increasingly isolated, and finally gets sick. He is prescribed medication, but someone has made a mistake, and he is now taking something he should have never come to contact with. The result is arguably one of the most persisting in memory episodes, where only the struggle to break down the door of the main characters room keeps us from learning what his plight was all this time

Ok, that was my list. In your own you can include a different number of stories, even just one. It would be great if you had something interesting to share about them as well, so as to inform others who might be interested in reading them :)

Probably:

Faulkner - The Bear

Joyce - The Dead

Borges - The Library of Babel

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz - Scott Fitzgerald
The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Hemingway
The Killers - Hemingway
Sadie Thompson - Somerset Maugham
Ashendon Stories - Somerset Maugham
A Perfect Day for Banana Fish -J. D. Salinger

"Other People" by Neil Gaiman. I don't care that it's modern.

Hm, of all of the ones mentioned by others i only have read The library of Babel...

It would really be great if you could also say a few words about the stories you propose we read, as an introduction, and so that one can form a view on whether he/she would like to read them ;)

Katherine Mansfield is my favourite short story writer. Shame she died so young and left us so little work.

I included Wikipedia links but beware as they contain spoilers in their respective plot summary sections.

Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathanial Hawthorne

I always loved this story not only for its lush garden setting, but also for the variety of narrative tropes going on all at once. You have the central romance, a revenge plot in the background, and even a bit of horror and tragedy thrown in. Just all-around entertaining.


Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

This.... THIS is an amazing story. It's technically a novella but I read it all in one sitting because it was so good. The outstanding aspect of it was the atmosphere; that is it began in almost a surreal way(from the narrator's perspective) and gradually you would notice certain things were amiss which just helped build the tension until the revelation. It also challenges the reader to think about their perception of right and wrong given the situation of the antagonist.

Hm.... hard to pick just one favorite short story. I think one of my favorite books of short stories would be The Things they Carried by TIm Obrien. Brilliant, moving stories about a group of soldiers both in Vietnam and back in the States.

'Some Nice Stories, And One Not' by Natasha Soobramanien

It's about a group of four people that vistit Isreal and Palestine, spend some time there, and travel back to England.

I finished The Stories of Paul Bowles today, and, although a lot of the short-stories left me bored or indifferent, I read some fine pearls: "At Paso Rojo", "Doña Faustina", "The Hyena", "Here to Learn", "Madame and Ahmed", "Kitty", "Hugh Harper", "New York 1965","In Absentia".

A reader should find in the variety of Bowles' stories something to his liking: straightforward stories, experimental stories, humorous stories about the human condition, unexplainable fantasy stories, fables with talking animals, stories about the cultural differences between Westerners and Easterners.

It's A Good Life.

I loved the Twilight Zone episode. I had ordered this Sci-Fi anthology and I didn't even know it was in there because I didn't know what the name of the story was, but I was on the train one day and I was looking through the table of contents and I saw the title and I had a feeling it was probably the one where the Twilight Zone got its inspiration from.

It's as good as the episode.