Nov 27, 2024
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.
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...
Also Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor... consistent short story greatness
tokyodrifter1 year 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.
Great suggestions. I just rewatched S1 of True Detective and am curious to read Pizzolatto's fiction.
tokyodrifter1 year 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.)
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.
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
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
Calvino's "Distance of the Moon": https://genius.com/Italo-calvino-the-distance-of-the-moon-annotated
amf1 year 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
"Bullet in the Brain": https://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Wolff,%20Bullet%20in%20the%20Brain.pdf
Waves by Sundara Ramaswamy, The Bells Are Ringing in Haridwar by M. Mukundan, and Jalasamadhi and Other Stories by Sethu. (These are all collections)