My Favorite/Recommended Short Stories - Please tell me yours!

[kennyc]

Any New/recent recommendations in the short story world?

[Catlady]

Having just read through the whole thread, a few comments first:

Shirley Jackson did indeed write a classic short story called "Charles"; this was one of her family stories about her son Laurie's first days in kindergarten and his gleeful reports of the various misbehaviors of his classmate Charles.

John Collier's "Evening Primrose" was turned into a musical for an episode of a short-lived TV anthology series called Stage 67 in 1966; Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics, and Anthony Perkins starred. Sondheim fans had long passed around multi-generational VHS tapes of this episode, but just last fall the episode was finally beautifully restored and released on DVD.

Thanks to the poster who mentioned "Pigeons from Hell" being available here at MR. I did not even know it was a short story; I only knew of the classic Thriller episode (Boris Karloff's Thriller TV series recently got a DVD release as well).

Ditto "The Jar"--again, I only knew of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, and now must go and look for the story.

(It would be an interesting project to compile a list of all the short stories that were dramatized on those old anthology shows from the sixties.)

As to my favorite short stories, I love "The Lottery" and anything else by Shirley Jackson. I don't believe anyone has mentioned "The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank Stockton. I also really enjoy the stories in the Kurt Vonnegut collection Welcome to the Monkey House, especially "More Stately Mansions."

[stonetools]

Nightfall, Isaac Asimov
The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
And He built a Crooked House, Robert Heinlien
Its a Good Life, Jerome Bixby
I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
The Man Who Counts, Poul Anderson
With Folded Hands, Jack Williamson
The Warriors, Larry Niven

There are many more but I just can't recalll them right now.
I'd round out the list with

Sandkings
and They Who Walk Away from Omelas

but they've already been mentioned. And those are just the SF stories....

[stonetools]

Oh yeah, PG Wodehouse has written a ton of humorous stories. Start with his golf collection "The Clicking of Cuthbert" but you pretty much can't go wrong, if that kind of humor is your "cup of tea".

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Nightfall, Isaac Asimov
The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
And He built a Crooked House, Robert Heinlien
Its a Good Life, Jerome Bixby
I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison
The Man Who Counts, Poul Anderson
With Folded Hands, Jack Williamson
The Warriors, Larry Niven

There are many more but I just can't recalll them right now.
I'd round out the list with

Sandkings
and They Who Walk Away from Omelas

but they've already been mentioned. And those are just the SF stories....

Excellent list/suggestions!

[Catlady]

Two sites that may be of interest: Classic Short Stories and HorrorMasters.

[carpetmojo]

"Jesus Out to Sea. - James Lee Burke.
11 short stories.

As ever, brilliant.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Two sites that may be of interest: Classic Short Stories and HorrorMasters.

I'm not too much into horror, but can definitely vouch for the first one.

[stonetools]

Excellent list/suggestions!

Gee, thanks.

Let me recommend some short story anthologies:

Blackwater and Blackwater 2, edited by Alberto Mangual. Two great anthologies of fastastic fiction , by authors from all over the world. The books are only available in print, but well worth seeking out.

A Hammock among the Mangoes Short fiction from South America, often with a magic realist flavor

Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. Two groundbreaking anthologies of speculative fiction , edited by Harlan Ellison,

THe Hugo WinnersEdited by Isaac Asimov.

And if all of this doesn't slake your thirst for short fiction, there are the best of SF and Fantasy anthologies that come out every year. Happy short story reading!

[BenG]

Story of the Week
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/

I like this one, Mrs Spring Fragrance:
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/0...fragrance.html

[spellbanisher]

Narrative magazine is probably the best place for modern short stories, and they have some decent poetry as well.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

The best short story for daydreamers imho is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber.
http://www.monte.k12.co.us/delta/ola...er%20Mitty.htm

Anything by Raymond Carver is great. His most famous short story is Cathedral.

Other favorites:
The Dead by James Joyce
A Painful Case by James Joyce
Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Class by Sherman Alexie
Assimilation by Sherman Alxie
The White Heron Sarah Orne Jewett
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan
The Fly by Katherine Mansfield
Gimpel the Fool, the Gentleman From Cracow, The Little Shoemakers, The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka...In fact, anything by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Bontsche the Silent by I.L. Peretz
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor
Summer Night by Elizabeth Bowen

[Mario1up]

You guys should check out Machine of Death. (http://machineofdeath.net/) It's a collection of short stories based on the premise that there's a machine that can take a sample of blood and tell someone how they would die. Here's a quick excerpt from the beginning of the book:

"The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does."

I've read the whole thing, all of the 30 or so short stories, and I must say they are excellent. They're interesting, well-written, and because each is by a different author, they all offer interesting pictures of how society would be and how people's lives would be changed by the presence of such a machine.

The best part? You can get it digitally for free! In fact, they encourage you to share the book however you like, copy it, distribute it, put it up in torrents, whatever.

Here is the free PDF download of the book. It actually looks great on a Kindle 3, as long as you turn the PDF setting to "darkest".

They also are recording podcasts of the short stories. They have only done eleven as of now, but they will be putting more up. http://machineofdeath.net/about/podcast

If you like, you can buy it in Kindle format at Amazon for $5.99, or in paper, or for Nook or iDevices.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

Narrative magazine is probably the best place for modern short stories, and they have some decent poetry as well.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

The best short story for daydreamers imho is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber.
http://www.monte.k12.co.us/delta/ola...er%20Mitty.htm

Anything by Raymond Carver is great. His most famous short story is Cathedral.

Other favorites:
The Dead by James Joyce
A Painful Case by James Joyce
Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Class by Sherman Alexie
Assimilation by Sherman Alxie
The White Heron Sarah Orne Jewett
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan
The Fly by Katherine Mansfield
Gimpel the Fool, the Gentleman From Cracow, The Little Shoemakers, The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka...In fact, anything by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Bontsche the Silent by I.L. Peretz
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor
Summer Night by Elizabeth Bowen

I agree completely about Narrative Magazine! I think I mentioned it either earlier in this thread or maybe in other threads. Excellent stuff!

[TaureanBull]

Following, alll written by Jeffery Archer:-

A Quiver Full of Arrows (1980)
A Twist in the Tale (1989)
Twelve Red Herrings (1994)
The Collected Short Stories (1997)
To Cut a Long Story Short (2000)
Cat O'Nine Tales (2006)
And Thereby Hangs a Tale (2010)

[januaryman]

Thanks for all the great suggestions - and remionders of stiories I have read and loved and will now re-visit.

Some of my favorites - in no particular order:

The Enormous Radio - John Cheever (almost anything By Cheever is excellent)

The Temptation of St. Ivo - John Gardner

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

The Lady with the Dog - Anton Chekhov

Will You Please Be Quiet Please - Raymond Carver (Lots of great stuff by him)

Hands - Sherwood Anderson

The Dead - James Joyce (ALL of Dubliners could be listed)

Big Blonde - Dorothy Parker

Just Like Little Dogs - Dylan Thomas

Death of a Traveling Salesman - Eudora Welty

The Pedestrian - Ray Bradbury

A Double-Barreled Detective Story - Mark Twain

Novellas that I like and are listed above as well - Bartleby the Scrivener, A Christmas Carol, Heart of Darkness, The Mysterious Stranger - not technically short stories, but very good indeed!