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I wanted to make a thread where we can share, discover, and discuss some of our favorite short stories. What are yours?

 

Some of mine:

 

The Night Face Up

The Lottery

All Summer in a Day

Flowers for Algernon

The Little Match Girl

 

I might come back to this with a few more later, but my favorite I've stumbled upon by far is "Bullet in the Brain."

EDIT: Some others that I liked (from a tragically limited selection of authors are):

The Red Room (H.G. Wells)

The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham (hilarious and also Wells)

Usher II (Ray Bradbury)

EDIT 2 The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham is good, but actually not funny at all. I was thinking about "The Truth about Pyecraft"

A Sound of Thunder (also Bradbury)

As a kid, I also loved "A Million Fish... more or less"

https://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html

I can't believe someone actually clicked a link and read a thing! If that's where you saw it anyway. I originally got that link from Corgi. But yeah that's one of my favorites too, and I'll have to come back to this thread with more too.

I admire short stories a lot for the difficulty and deliberateness they need in structure and all the impact they can pack into such a small space. It's not an easy thing to do, you really have to have a solid grasp on the underlying mechanics of what makes a story work and how to use language effectively. Whenever I see someone dismiss shorter stories as "easy" because they have a small word count I see a big clumsy doofus who bashes keyboards with their face and doesn't have any idea what they're talking about basically.

It really feels like they've become a bit of a lost art too, since magazines aren't really a thing anymore, that used to be how so many of the greats got their start.

Lol, don't worry. Ain't nobody clicking links. I had read that one long before I found CYS

I might come back to this with a few more later, but my favorite I've stumbled upon by far is "Bullet in the Brain."

 

That was pretty good. The best (and only) cynicism-themed short story I've ever read.

Is that the two paragraph short story where the guy shoots himself to get out of his repetitive life only to wind up with an even shorter repetition?

If so I saw that in a story collection and was similarly impressed by it.

Nope. That ain't it

Now I'm wondering what the title of that story is, because I'd like to read it.

That's like five pages.  That would be a typical essay assignment length for my freshman/sophomore classes.  Granted, that is a low effort assignment prompt if the assignment was indeed to write "on its symbols."

I think it's like when you start to lift weights, and the notion of a fifteen-pound triceps curl seems outrageous, and then eventually, it becomes trivial.  That's a five-page essay.

Even if there wasn't much content in the short story itself, a lot of in depth analysis can come from how the symbols are commonly used in literature and the way in which the author applies this to the theme. Research tends to be helpful here. Once in pre-university, I wrote a 1500 words essay on one symbol from the Bloody Chamber. It was only mentioned a few times in the story. Some of the content involved: the symbol's significance in the author's time period, how she used it in her other written works, and how the symbol contributed to the novella's theme. My first draft was over the word limit lol, I had to revise it. Not to humblebrag, but I ended up getting the highest grade in my class, so it wasn't as irrelevant as I initially worried about.

In fact, you could use the structure of: define symbols, state their common use, note when it's used---whether it's a recurring motif or mentioned once---and analyse how it serves the theme. Then add a bit of discussion about how the symbols relate to one another (e.g. choice of diction, whether they are part of an extended metaphor, whether they prove different themes/ subthemes or the same theme in different ways, which is most effective, etc).

Tldr: I agree with Gower and the trick is not to limit yourself to the surface level story.

As long as I'm digging up links, here's a pdf I found of Shiloh if anyone wants to try and speculate whether they could write 1300 words on it.

Never read it before but this is a Southern collection of names, damn. Bobbie Ann Mason, Norma Jean, Mabel, and Leroy? Seriously? This is a country western song.

But besides the battle in the title itself, there's a few "symbols" that jump out. It helps that everything here ties back to the failing marriage and the protagonist seeing things for the first time, so it at least doesn't lend you guessing at their meaning.

I usually read them in short story collections.

The black cat

Arthur Jermyn

The beast in the cave

The Red-Headed League

A grain of truth

Technically novella collections. Different Seasons and Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King are both incredible reads, the former of which includes everyone's favorite prison tale: Shawshank Redemption (yes, there's raep). And Full Dark, No Stars is some of the most intense, appalling, thrilling writing you'll ever read (yes, there's raep).

I haven't read a lot of short stories; these four might actually be the only ones that I have read. 

 

All Summer in a Day: I remember reading this one wayyy back in elementary school and this is the one that I remember most vividly. 

There Will Come Soft Rains: We had a Ray Bradbury reading day or something in highschool and I remember reading this and rereading All Summer.

The Monkey's Paw: I don't remember when I read this, but this is my favorite out of the four. 

The Box-Social: I couldn't remember the name of this one so I had to look up "Pretty box + Dead fetus + short story" lol. I believe I read it in middle school.

Ray Bradbury's stuff can be like, weirdly poetic and surreal given that it's ostensibly sci fi, and he has so many short stories. I've got nice hardbacks of the Martian Chronicles and the Illustrated Man.

One of the reason I think short stories appeal to me is because the attention to phrasing and detail means there's almost always a few lines that stick in your mind and are just a pleasure to read, in the level with poetry, and his stories have that in spades.

I've brought it up before how much I like Kipling (and we all had SUCH a long and involved discussion on Kim, truly astounding, the book club threads are always so successful and no one is lazy at all!)

And the nice thing about his stuff if that all of it is free by now, including the short story collections. I dunno if anyone still reads his stuff in schools anymore since "colonialism" is a bad word now, but The Man Who Would Be King is one of his more famous short stories, and then there's The Story of Muhammad Din which proves you can make people sad even when clocking in at barely over a thousand words.

Since everyone has got on fairy tales on the brain this month though, I'll link The Children of the Zodiac. It's so different from the stuff he's known for, always enjoyed it.

Oh, and just gotta say it, no discussion of short stories is complete without I Have No Mouth and I Must Svream. (link goes to a pdf)

One on the greatest and most fucked up sci fi horrors of all time, and it's got a point and click adventure game based on it that's a classic too.

One of my favorites for sure.  And thanks to my wife, I've actually even played the game.  It's hard and a little unsettling, although not as back as the source if I recall.

There are IF games based on Frederik Pohl's Gateway that aren't bad either, but more set in the same universe than really having much to do with the plot. They're free by now, but you need DosBox to run them.

Tolkien's "Leaf By Niggle" is stellar.  It can be read and enjoyed as a pure story, but opens up with some thought about how it works as an allegory.  It has the flavor of The Pilgrim's Progress and some of C.S. Lewis's works; it meditates on work and death and how individual art is possible if you believe in a creator God.  It's primo Tolkien, and it fits perfectly into the Lord of the Rings--not in terms of the story, but in terms of its big ideas about what it means to find meaning as a small person in a big world.

This one is stellar too, I read it back when you recommended it to ghost Found it for anyone curious. Another PDF

Just finished this one. A masterful work that has raised my opinion of Tolkien's writing, though my relatively low opinion of his work had been in no small part due to my first experience with it being The Silmarillion when I was of middle school age.

This is, to be frank, a rather bizarre take. I'm sure any writer looks pretty amateurish when your only experience with them are fragmented rough drafts and posthumously-published notes that were printed more or less to satisfy the interests of fans and academics of completely other works

That's ... what I said?

Without actually being a broken record, no short story thread can be complete without the last question by Asimov.

https://astronomy.org/moravian/C00-Last%20Question.pdf

We should revive the Thunderdome.

I agree.

Full support

Can't remember the name of the story, but for some reason this one keeps popping into my mind for this thread.

Starts off with a guy taking his shoes out of the refrigerator (or putting them in, don't remember right now) and then he turns around and sees a horrible monster grinning at him. He freaks out and then looks again and the monster is still there but it's changed form.

The man starts to say how he thought this was over and then calms down and goes about his breakfast in the kitchen. The monster keeps changing forms and the man is now just getting annoyed claiming that this is all in his head and not real, even mocking the monster's form a couple times.

The man then gets angry saying he isn't scared of it and he's dealt with worse things. Then the thing speaks which now surprises the hell out of him because apparently it's never spoke before. The creature assures the man that he's real but the man regains his composure stating that he's still not real and that his own mind has just gotten worse.

The man and creature going back and forth over its existence for a moment until the man issues a challenge that if he's really real he should be able to pick something up. The man then puts both of his hands in a jar, stating that if his hands are in the jar then he can't pick up anything so the creature wont be able to either.

The creature suggests that he could turn off the lights instead then they could be in the dark. The man tells him to do whatever and to stop stalling. The creature goes to pick up a toaster but before it does so it states if the man is so sure that the creature is a figment of his imagination then perhaps the best way to prove he's real is to get rid of the man.

The creature then lunges at the man and rips his heart out.

The stands over the man's body laughing and then suddenly the creature begins to disappear causing it to scream out the big "Noooooo!"

Story ends with the man laying dead in his kitchen with his hands still in the jar.