favorite short stories
 

harrison burgeoron by kurt vonnegut and the first one out of tales of ordinary madness by charles b. are probably my top two.

I can't think of many right now, but I've read some good ones by Borges and Updike. Oh yeah, Dubliners by James Joyce. Oh and Flannery O'Connor.

Well I'm kind of drunk and can't post an accurate list without getting out a bunch of books so I'll just name a few of my favorite short story writers: Raymond Carver, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Conner (good call noumenal), Faulkner, John Cheever....a bunch more.

it's sad when you're in high school and you get wasted alone on school nights. i've spent the past hour or so drinking and really enjoying it so fuck it

Carmilla ,by Le Fanu.

Any of the short stories by Rolad Dahl. He's incredible. If you haven't read any of his short shorties its a definate must, stories like "Lamb To The Slaugther", or "The Hitchhiker". The closest writer I know that is very Dahl like is T.C. Boyle is is also one of my favorites when it comes to short stories. Read all of his stories too, you won't regret it. "Top of the Food Chain" is a bona fide classic.

My favoured short story authors:

HP Lovecraft
Nicola BArker
Evelyn Waugh
Giovanni Guareschi
Clark Ashton Smith
MIchael Bond
Arthur MAchen
Guy de MAupassant

Has anybody else read Toby Litt's New Puritans? I don't wanna be the only one who got scared reading that late at night...

yeah
Lovecraft short stories are very good
no one mentioned Kafka
"In der Strafkolonie" is my favourite short story ever

Love the Lovecraft!

In that vein, "Ubbo Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith is pretty amazing.

Nice to see people shouting out Flannery O'Conner. As a tour guide I take people by the house where she grew up, but I've stopped pointing it out to them because no one, save an English teacher from Tennessee, ever knows who she is. Dubliners by Joyce and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway stand out as my favorite collections of short stories. Also Baudelaire and De Maupassant as far as French writers go.

Ray Bradbury - Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellars!
Ray Bradbury - A Flight of Ravens

utilises the same atmosphere of parananoic tension and unease that is used in Fahrenheit 451. utterly thrilling

I know he's got his opponents, but J.D. Salinger writes a mean short story. Anything out of "Nine Stories" is good. And I rather dig Somerset Maugham too.

this is going to be the worst description on earth but about 18 months ago i read in a saturday guardian suplement the most horrifying but amazing short story.

it was called guts but i cant remember the authors name! basically to cut a long and tedious story short, it involves a swimming pool, a horny pubescent male and biting through your own intenstines to stop yourself from drowning.

thats distinctly gross but it was a very good read.

Guts by Chuck Palahniuk.

thanks, that was kinda bugging me.

In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
A collection of early short stories in Hemingway's own remarkable sparse style. Makes every word count. Very atmospheric and calming about men returning from war. Sublime.

Some short stories I've enjoyed recently.
Lit:
Reflections-Angela Carter
The School-Donald Barthelme
Sc-Fi:
The Elvis National Theater of Okinawa-Johnathan Lethem and Lucas Jaeger
The Ant King-Benjamin Rosenbaum

For collections "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson was a good read (Need to lay my hands on a couple of his novels). I read the title story out of Carver's "Cathedral" for a class and should probably pick up the whole thing at some point. I read a collection of Vonnegut's short stories when I was in high school but the only thing I remember about it now is a nasty contraceptive that made people piss blue.

Mark Twain. Don't forget him.

Yeah Twain has some good ones too......nice Shining pic noumenal.

as much as he's been dismissed as a "dead white male" etc etc---

i think hemingway's short stories are awesome

sure, once you read them all they get a little repetitive (wounded penises everywhere), but some are such masterpieces! among my favorite

-a clean, well lighted place
-the killers
-the snows of kilimanjaro
-cat in the rain
-the nun & the radio... something like that, damn i cnat remember

so many. really great.

Hemingway is pretty much the best short story writer of the 20th Century. His "minimal" approach to story writing has influenced just about every writer that came after him.......I read a ton of short stories in college and his influence can really be seen.

Chuck Palahniuk is fucking spectacular. obviously fight club and choke are both incredible novels. for salinger the one where the veteran is on a vacation with his wife and he ends up killing himself after the lady is staring at his feet (or he thinks she is) in the elevator is incredible. i don't remember the name though

I plan on checking out Hemingway's Complete Short Stories from my school library. I like the novels of his that I've read.


Can't believe no one mentioned Edgar Allen Poe!

Young Goodman Brown is my favorite of all time

Yeah man do it! They are great to read maybe one or two a night because they are so short.

"Emergency" by Denis Johnson, and his whole Jesus' Son collection (all of the stories involve the same character, so it is somewhat cohesive). A big influence on Chuck Palahniuk.

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (novella) my favortie short work

The Gold-Bug - Edgar Allan Poe (tale)...of course he has so many other classic tales, but this one, The Murders of Rue Morgue, & The Purloined Letter featuring his C. Auguste Dupin character are my favorites. The Black Cat is a masterpiece & The Imp Of the Perverse is also very noteworthy.

The Cossacks, The Devil, Master & Man, & Alyosha The Pot from my Tolstoy Short Stories book impressed me greatly.

The Double, The Christmas Tree & a Wedding, Notes From Underground (novella), White Nights, The Crocodile are probably my picks by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Lazarus - Leonid Andreyev

Misery, A Dead Body, The Duel - Anton Chekhov

The Queen of Spades - Alexandr Pushkin

The Cloak - Nikolai Gogol

An Anarchist - Joseph Conrad

Yeah, Ernest Hemingway is masterful at crafting short stories:
The Killers, The Big Two-Hearted River, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber are probably my favorites. I had read too much about A Clean Well-Lighted Place before I read it, I think. I wonder if Hemingway ever read Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches. His writing definitely owes something to Anton Chekov & Honore de Balzac.

Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game, Siddhartha (novella) - Herman Hesse

From high school & college I especially remember Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County & of course, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.

William S. Burroughs' autobographical Junky is a short novel, about the same length as a short story.

blots, I liked the movie Jesus' Son; I should probably check out some Denis Johnson. That sounded weird. Penis Johnson? I should probably read some D. Johnson.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce

Always been a favorite.