iamafrog
1 month ago
Working full-time is cratering my reading time. Drop some great short stories below. I just read Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" and loved it. Let's have some variety in here.
anna
1 month ago
Waves by Sundara Ramaswamy, The Bells Are Ringing in Haridwar by M. Mukundan, and Jalasamadhi and Other Stories by Sethu. (These are all collections)
yarb
1 month ago
Individual stories, but the collections containing these are all worth reading: The Pedersen Kid - Gass The Forest Path to the Spring - Lowry The Jolly Corner - James Near Zennor - Elizabeth Hand The Swimmer - Cheever Procession of the Black Sloth - Laird Barron Early Light - Osamu Dazai Shades - Lucius Shepard The Hospice - Aickman Collections: The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Night Train: New and Selected Stories - Thom Jones Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France - Brian Hurt Saki, Kafka, Gogol...
yarb
1 month ago
Also Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor... consistent short story greatness
tokyodrifter
1 month ago
Really enjoyed Between Here and the Yellow Sea by Nic Pizzolatto - would link, but idk if it's online anywhere that isn't paywalled. Also, TC Boyle is a wonderful short story writer. My favorite collections are Tooth and Claw and If the River Was Whiskey. And of course you can't go wrong with Dubliners.
iamafrog
1 month ago
Great suggestions. I just rewatched S1 of True Detective and am curious to read Pizzolatto's fiction.
tokyodrifter
1 month ago
I'm a licensed Nic Pizzolatto Defender and love Season 2 to death, so take all my opinions with a grain of salt. His collection is 50/50 - some great stuff, some eh stuff. Galveston is great though, can't recommend enough. Nice balance of literary and pulpy with a gut punch payoff. (Movie sucks btw.)
yarb
1 month ago
I’ll respond lengthily to this tomorrow but for now, The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim. Not the rest of the eponymous collection — just that story. Fucking thrills.
mort_a_venise
1 month ago
Maybe an obvious choice, but if you don't know it Tolstoy - How much land does a man need? https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1886/how-much-land-does-a-man-need.html
mrfahrenheit
1 month ago
Schwartz - "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities": https://bergen.edu/wp-content/uploads/In-Dreams-Begin-Responsibilities-by-Delmore-Schwartz.pdf Garshin - "Red Flower": https://archive.org/details/redflowerstorytr00garsuoft/page/6/mode/2up
lowiqmarkfisher
1 month ago
Calvino's "Distance of the Moon": https://genius.com/Italo-calvino-the-distance-of-the-moon-annotated
amf
1 month ago
Seconding this -- an absolute all-time dime of a story. And afterwards, read The Dinosaurs: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_9_the_dinosaurs.html
iamafrog
1 month ago
"Bullet in the Brain": https://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Wolff,%20Bullet%20in%20the%20Brain.pdf