What's everyone's favourite short stories?

[DrumsAndWires]

I'm needing some good short stories for this short story club I'm part of

One of my favs of all time is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Since reading that one, I've been searching for something as hard hitting, but so far I haven't found what I'm looking for...

Gimme what you got, CaB

[bgmnts]

If theyre alright with surreal horror, I'm about 320 pages into Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (cheers for rec @PlanktonSideburns )and I'd heartily recommend:

From SoaDD:
The Frolic
Dream of a Manikin
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story
The Nyctalops Trilogy
Dr Voke and Mr Veech

From Grimscribe:
The Last Feast of the Harlequin

It's full of gorgeous prose, genuinely fascinating and horrid imagery and some recurrent themes. It's almost philosophical in a way, Notes on is quite meta and experimental. The former lot - my interpretation - have narrators/characters searching for, or desiring, madness, and all that entails. It's influenced a lot by Lovecraft and Poe allegedly but I haven't read either so can only go by the blurb on that!

[PlanktonSideburns]

Delighted your getting into old miseryguts bgmnts. There's a pitch black kind hearted nhilism that only someone who's been to Newport could fully grasp

Have you read the My Work Is Not Yet Done stories by him? Basically The Office if it was set inside a black hole

[PlanktonSideburns]

Ooh I tell you what I read recently that was also fucking amazing

vanessa onwuemezi - dark neighbourhood

You'd love em bgmntz, drawing from similar Wells as ligotti, but its own totally amazing thing. Really weird, dark story telling but brutally beautiful and raw and emotional rather than arch and cowering like liggotti. The first story in the book in particular blew me away.

Got it in epub if anyone fancies

[madhair60]

sepsis by graham masterton

[bgmnts]

Delighted your getting into old miseryguts bgmnts. There's a pitch black kind hearted nhilism that only someone who's been to Newport could fully grasp

Ha! Yes. I assume he owes a lot to Lovecraft, but I did find that the appeal of madness is it is a contrast to the dull reality of this plane, and if becoming a hollowed out tentacle demon or whatever is the price, so be it.

I myself often have had these thoughts, why am I just mental and not delightfully mad in the lucid imaginative way these people are? Why do I not see into the otherness or dwell in the abyss, like a Faliol or a Dr Thoss? I agree coming from places of abjection like Cwmbran or Newport definitely contributes to this! That's the appeal of surreal horror I suppose.

I may check that out, as I did read that Kafka seeps into his stories, so I'd like to see how a mind like Ligotti could interpret that

Edit - your suggestions are one for one so far so I'll put that on the wishlist!

And yes @Deliciousbass I did notice there were a lot of sites dedicated to Ligotti analysis, which I was quite happy with as it did make me think a lot and it all runs a lot deeper in terms of symbolism and philosophy and interpretation. I liked reading what people think about these stories.

[Deliciousbass]

If theyre alright with surreal horror, I'm about 320 pages into Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

You can't go wrong with Ligotti. Vastarien is a quarterly journal dedicated to Ligotti analysis and short fiction that is often brilliant.

Also, definitely, definitely check out the early work of John Hawkes. He is a somewhat forgotten 60s postmodernist that had a huge influence on Ligotti and others. His writing is viscerally nightmarish and feverishly beautiful. I'd especially recommend The Cannibal, The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig and Second Skin (my favorite).

[dontpaintyourteeth]

JG Ballard - The Illuminated Man
Stephen King - The Jaunt
Izumi Suzuki - Terminal Boredom
Charlotte Perkins Gillman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Ursula Le Guin - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Flannery O'Connor - A Late Encounter with The Enemy
Tatyana Tolstaya - Aspic
any of the Ijon Tichy stories by Stanislaw Lem, if they count (I'm saying they do)
Àgua Viva by Clarice Lispector probably counts as a novella or something and not a short story, but it's one of the best things I've ever read, so I'm also counting it here.


I'm sure there's more

[PlanktonSideburns]

Also Bruno scultz

This one is like a mad dream logic version of the things your dad is doing thread

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I suppose Hemingway is out of fashion but Hills Like White Elephants is an obvious one for this. Or that one where the chap has gangrene. Snows of Kilimanjaro. What's the one where the hunter gets cucked? That's good as well

I dunno if anybody cares about Raymond Carver anymore either but he's got some good ones

[Deliciousbass]

Yes! Bruno Schulz is an extraordinary writer.

Here are some other short stories I'd recommend @DrumsAndWires

The Swimmer - John Cheever - a classic (but don't let that put you off!). A surreal story about a man who decides to swim through his neighbourhood via its gardens' pools.

The Pedersen Kid - William Gass - One day, maybe, soon, perhaps, the Cohen brothers will finally admit that a lot of their films are just attempts to recreate this story.

Raphael - Stephen Graham Jones -  I read a fair amount of horror but this is one of the few that really peeled back the outer layers and nestled in.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Oh fuck yes the swimmer is the bees tits

[Swift]

The Part-time Job by P.D. James - a man who was bullied as a child has waited decades to get his revenge.

Remembrance by Alistair MacLeod - About how the effects of WW2 have passed down through three generations of men.

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher is a good read this time of year.

I've always had a soft spot for Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado which I first read in one of those Illustrated Classics books as a kid and the images scared the shit out of me.

Also partial to Counterparts in Dubliners.

[Toki]

Couple of Mavis Gallant ones, Across the Bridge and also Luc and his Father. I really enjoyed these. There's also Maeve Brennan's Christmas Eve.

All three are pretty emotional, especially the last one, but well worth reading.

[flotemysost]

I'm basically an illiterate fucking moron these days so I've prob mentioned it on here at some point before because my reading capacity has been at gastropod pace for the last few years, but I enjoyed the collection Civil War Land in Bad Decline by George Saunders - it's very Vonnegut/Pynchon-like if you're into that sorta thing - satirical, somewhat dystopian imaginings of an America that don't feel all too far from reality, but despite the obvious comparisons it's got a charming freshness and humanity rather than seeming contrived and try-hard.

There used to be a short story book club at my work, which was great, until they decided to change it to a normal-length book club and the first book they went for was War and Peace, I mean fucking come on. Really sorting the wheat from the chaff there. Anyway cheers for the recs in this thread, short fiction is my bag so I might at some point in my life try and read some of these.

[non capisco]

The similarly themed twofer of 'Under The Garden' by Graham Greene and 'The Door In The Wall' by HG Wells. Inchoate dreamlike memories of inexplicable childhood experiences are a fascinating theme for me.

[kalowski]

Pretty much anything by Ring Lardner. I just can't remember the titles and my book is upstairs. The one about the Lackawanna Railway is fantastic.

[Vodkafone]

The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster is perhaps more of a tiny novella than a short story but manages to cram a huge amount of invention into its c. 100 pages

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges has some great short stories, such as The Garden of Forking Paths. Many are very short but because it borders on poetry, there is a super-density to them.

It's been a while since I read it but I have positive memories of The Doll's Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, another collection of short stories.

Then there's the short fiction of Gerald Murnane

[dontpaintyourteeth]

It's been a while since I read it but I have positive memories of The Doll's Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, another collection of short stories.

Seconding this one

[Small Man Big Horse]

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a thing of disturbing beauty, I know adaptations of fairy tales in their original, far darker form has been done to death since, but I still feel her versions are among the best.

On a lighter note, I'm also a big fan of Simon Rich, and "Animals" from Spoiled Brats is one of my favourites.

[Vodkafone]

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a thing of disturbing beauty, I know adaptations of fairy tales in their original, far darker form has been done to death since, but I still feel her versions are among the best.

On a lighter note, I'm also a big fan of Simon Rich, and "Animals" from Spoiled Brats is one of my favourites.

+1 for The Bloody Chamber. And Angela Carter in general really.

[buttgammon]

Lydia Davis is an incredible short story writer. Some of her stories are literally only a sentence or two, but she can create so much in these little miniature worlds, even though her main subject is simply everyday life. Her Collected Short Stories is just a perfect book.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass is probably the best short story collection I've read this year. It's quite intense and sometimes a bit bleak, but his attention to detail is incredible.

[Mr Vegetables]

I really like The Sound Machine by Roald Dahl; that one stayed with me for some reason

[surreal]

Couple that come to mind are:

The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C Clarke
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

both nice and nihilistic apocalypse stories.

Stephen King's "The Jaunt" as mentioned above, but both of his collections "Night Shift" and "Skeleton Crew" had a big impression on me at a young age.

[El Unicornio, mang]

A Haunted House and other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf is quite a good light read, collection of a bunch of her early stuff and not her greatest writings but some nice stream of consciousness stuff with good emotional payoffs in there. And all her stuff is public domain so easily accessible.

[flotemysost]

+1 for The Bloody Chamber. And Angela Carter in general really.

Same!

On stuff written from a childhood perspective, I remember finding the story Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit by Sylvia Plath subtly and inexplicably moving when I read it in my teens. Something about that first crushing lesson of the fallibility of the adults around you, with the threat of real conflict looming in the backdrop the whole time, oof.

[Kankurette]

Angela Carter's anthology of fairy tales is a thing of beauty.

I love short stories - I've got short story collections by Lucia Berlin, O Henry, Tobias Henry, JD Salinger, Michèle Roberts (do NOT read while hungry, her descriptions of food are immense), Joanne Harris, and a Jewish writer called Julie Orringer. (I mention her Jewishness because a fair few of her stories are about Jewish girls, as well as illness and water.) I also have a collection of American women's writing and some of it is essays and extracts from books, but there's a few short stories as well. In My Next Life by Pam Houston is one I really love - it's about a pair of women who bond over horses, and one of them is dying of cancer. There's also I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen, which really haunted me. It's about a working-class family and the oldest daughter is forced to grow up quickly, and she's bright and a talented actress but is held back by her circumstances.

[Joe Oakes]

The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster is perhaps more of a tiny novella than a short story but manages to cram a huge amount of invention into its c. 100 pages

This was the first thing that jumped to mind. Of the books I studied at school, it stuck with me more than 1984 or Brave New World. It painted a far more vivid and realistic future. Admittedly, it's entirely possible that I just preferred it because of the brevity.

I'm surprised that there doesn't appear to be any recent adaptions, as I assume it's public domain.

[The Crumb]

The Overcoat, The Carriage and The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol

Enemies, The Black Monk and Man in a Case by Anton Chekhov

Tamara the Bitch by Varlam Shalamov

The Watery Realmby Yuko Tsushima

The Haunted Boy by Carson McCullers

On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges (about as short as a story can get)

[samadriel]

I always bring up 'A Colder War' by Charles Stross, available online.  Spooky Cthulhu story set in the Reagan era.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230323071041/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm