You're right, O'Conner is true original. I enjoyed her story "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (as much for the great title as for the tale itself.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Riesa
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You're right, O'Conner is true original. I enjoyed her story "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (as much for the great title as for the tale itself.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Riesa
These short stories are good
A Ramble in Aphasia by O Henry
The Small Miracle by Paul Gallico
Bertie's Christmas Eve by Saki
A thread just started by Reichenbach should remind us how good a story writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was.
There is One story of Hemingway i learn in school .. i don't remember the name..
it was something with a watch or a clock... in a dinner.. hmmmm.. well don't remember but it was really good...
"A Clean Well-Lighted Place"?Quote:
Originally Posted by Weeping Willow
-- That's one of my favorites. Others:Quote:
Originally Posted by starrwriter
"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Powder" - Tobias Wolfe
"A Mother in Manville - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
"A Complicated Nature" - William Trevor
"Revelation" - Flannery O'Connor
"Errand" and "Cathedral" - Raymond Carver
There's a great little anthology called First Fiction, edited by Kathy Kiernan and Michael Moore, that features the first published short stories of writers like Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood (and many more). It's interesting to read the variety of styles and types of subjects these writers started out with - and can be a good starting point if you want to trace how these writers developed their craft across time.
I forgot to mention "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" by Conrad Aiken. Great short story.
nop.. i lloked.. i think it was about a guy waiting for some people to come and kill him.. and all the time all the characters are looking at the clock above the bar..Quote:
Originally Posted by starrwriter
ring a bell???
I can't believe how i can't find this story... :mad:
It must be "The Killers," a story about some gangsters who come to kill a guy nicknamed the Swede.Quote:
Originally Posted by Weeping Willow
I just thought of another -- "The Other Two" by Edith Wharton. It's an interesting character study told from an interesting point of view.
"A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert is a great one.
Also, "Eliduc" by Marie de France if your interested in a twelfth century take on the short story. I kind of like looking at the progression of different literary styles over time. Both are originally written in French, although I only read translations.
I'm so surprised that no one has yet mentioned "The Dubliners", Joyce's anthology of short stories. It is brillient as a book in itself as well as its story's efficiant structures and human truths ect.. Every story in the Dubliners takes place in one small city (Dublin obvously) and moves upward in the maturity of the main characters from one story to the next chronologically. The incredible complexity of emotion in each small to large egos and situations could be considered existential. And yet, each story stands on its own so beautifully. (You'll have to excuse this ramble, I'm a fanatic when it comes to Irish lit.)
The following stories are also good:
The Corsican Bandit by Guy de Maupassant
The Babes in the Jungle by O Henry
"The village that voted the Earth was flat" by Kipling
"The Rock that changed things" by Ursula Le Guin
just to pick two at random (almost) from those masters of the form
I just popped in to add "Dubliners" and Guy de Maupassant (just about anything by him) to the list. And I was beaten to it on both counts. What are the chances of that...?
Irish & pras, I commend your taste.
I'm taking a course in which the first half is a pile of short stories ... so i thought i would save this post till we finished this unit .... but I'v been going through too much good stuff to hold back.
My favorites so far
The Fall of the House of Usher -Poe
Young Goodman Brown -Hawthorne
The Yellow Wallpaper -Gilman
The Birthmark -Hawthorne
and I'm currently taking a quick break from Kafka's Metamorphosis at the moment .. .and I don't know if i like it or not. But I stringly recommend the other ones!
I think it is William Faulkner........I think O.Henry is an excellent short story teller. Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov are also great.........Quote:
Originally Posted by Shea
Hermit and Sixfinger by Pelevin
Oh, and we also like Bradbury's short stories.
Jorges Luis Borges, for me, is the quintessential short story writer of the 20th century. Stories of his ingrained in my memory are "Man on Pink Corner" and "The Library of Babel".
I posted once, but I was using my laptop, and it didn't post. I agree with most people here, adding in the short fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. With O. Henry, along with those mentioned, I recomend "Roads of Destiny", "The Last Leaf", and "After Twenty Years." For Stevenson, along with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", there's "The Bodysnatchers" and the terrifying "Thrawn Janet" as wild as any Poe story. For Twain, "Cannibalism in the Cars", "The Invalid's Story", and "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" are a must! :D :nod:
Is Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" considered a short story?
Because if it is --it definitely belongs on this list.
-AFTER THE BALL (or AFTER THE DANCE) by Tolstoy
-Anything in the collection titled INTERPRETER OF MALADIES by Jhumpa Lahiri
A TEMPORARY MATTER, the first short story in this collection has been known to
be available on the web.
-I know there must be more but I can't think of them now. I tend to like a good short story better than a novel. But I HATE a bad short story.
I think that short stories must be more difficult to write than novels. Even if you don't have a hard limit on length, you still don't have the freedom to take a lot of time to develop characters. You must be able to "draw" the character with a minimal number of "brush strokes". Can be very tough I would think, I've never tried to write one myself. Good luck.
"Origin and Castrophe" and "Lamb to the Slaughter" both by Roald Dahl are great short stories.
Bradbury is the master of the short story in my opinion. Another one worth mentioning is "Moonface" by Jack London.
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce is a good story. The subtle way the point of view shifts really enhances the tale. And I found myself wondering if whoever produced Gladiator back in 2000 was maybe influenced by the last paragraphs in the story -- Farquhar and Maximus seemed to view their last human moments similarly.
Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth
It's completely different. It's a series of short stories that form a novel, but in a way no one had before. Go read it.
Two awesome short stories:
"Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor
as a matter of fact, O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a collection of short stories that is amazing from start to finish. Believe it!
If you love the jazz age...Fitzgerald cannot be topped. For a surreal experience, check out "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
My favorite short story writer is D.H. Lawrence. Must reads: "The Prussian Officer," "Odour of the Chrysanthemums," "The Blind Man," "Wintry Peacock," "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," "The Princess," "The Woman Who Rode Away." Lots of others too.
I'd say
"A Story" by Dylan Thomas or basically any of his stories
I notice someone mentioned a story called 'The Lottery'. I'm not sure if it's the same one I have read, but it was a rather creepy little story, and I read it in Year Nine for English. I can't remember who wrote it though.
Roald Dahl is great, so is F. Scott Fitzgerald. I recently read an interesting story by Anais Nin, called "The Child Born Out of the Fog", which might be worth a look. Good luck to you anyway.
I haven't read many short stories but my favorite author of short stories so far is Jorge Borges ,and I've only read about 140 pages of his so far. My favorite short stories (so far) are The Aleph, Death and the Compass, The Other Death, The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths. I also liked The Silent Men by Albert Camus.
Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Short Happy Life of Francois Macombner
Leaf By Niggle ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Taras Bulba ~ Nikolai Gogol
The Kreutzer Sonata ~ Leo Tolstoy
The Gambler ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Leutnant Gustl" - Arthur Schnitzler
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Aleen Poe.
Great read. You can read into his mind and his insanity by all of his works.
My vote for Gift of the Magi by O. Henry or The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton.
I would have to agree that "Harrison Bergeron" is an excellent story; it's by Kurt Vonnegut.Quote:
Originally Posted by gatsbysghost
It's hard for me to pick out a favorite, but some excellent stories are "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis MacComber" by Hemingway (already mentioned by several others), "The Scarlet Ibis" by James Hurst, and "The Swimmer" by John Cheever. Oh, and also "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates. There are too many excellent short stories to name them all...
Kafka - The Metamorphoses
Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground
Camus - The Stranger
Edgar Allan Poe - "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Arthur Conan Doyle - "A Scandal in Bohemia"
J.D. Salinger - "For Esme - With Love and Squalor"
Robert Coover - "The Square-Shooter and the Saint"
Jack Kerouac - "Good Blonde"
Willa Cather - "Coming, Aphrodite!"
"The Open Window" by Saki
"Uncle Fred Flits By" by P.G. Wodehouse
"The Monkey's Paw" by (I think) Munroe
"In the Penal Colony" Kafka