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Thread: Any Short Story recommendations?

  1. #1
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    Any Short Story recommendations?

    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?

  2. #2
    Registered User Emil Miller's Avatar
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    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.
    "L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.

    "Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.

  3. #3
    Internal nebulae TheFifthElement's Avatar
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    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
    Want to know what I think about books? Check out https://biisbooks.wordpress.com/

  4. #4
    Pièce de Résistance Scheherazade's Avatar
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    "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
    ~
    "It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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  5. #5
    "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
    Last edited by peppersasen; 05-14-2013 at 06:42 AM.

  6. #6
    Registered User WyattGwyon's Avatar
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    The collected stories of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.

    I'll second Emil's recommendation of Maugham.

  7. #7
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    "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.

  8. #8
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    Signs and Symbols - Nabokov
    The Library of Babel - Borges
    A Hunger Artist - Kafka
    A Distant Episode - Paul Bowles

  9. #9
    Snowqueen Snowqueen's Avatar
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    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

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    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.

  11. #11
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    TheFifthElement,

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

  12. #12
    Dance Magic Dance OrphanPip's Avatar
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    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.
    "If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
    - Margaret Atwood

  13. #13
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    I read "Story of an Hour" in hs.

    It was good.

  14. #14
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    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
    Last edited by ennison; 05-20-2013 at 08:01 PM.

  15. #15
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    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.
    Last edited by bookowskee; 05-29-2013 at 09:30 PM.

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