Share some short stories you enjoy

Alice Munro, Boys and Girls.

The monkey's paw

Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

The best short story will always be The Lottery.

Jack London's "A Piece of Steak," about an aging boxer past his prime.

Everything in Joyce's "Dubliners," but especially "A Painful Case" and "The Dead" (the latter perhaps a novella).

Will a Cather's "Paul's Case."

Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"

"The Catbird Seat" by James Thurber

The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. A collection of short stories.

Salvatore Scibona, Tremendous Machine

Annie Proulx Man Crawling out of Trees!

Brokeback Mountain

Flanner O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Flannery, I meant.

Flannery O'Connor's stories are tremendous, hilariously funny, morally serious (the main character almost always gets killed), but her style as a writer is just amazing, the way the stories are narrated. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is maybe her most famous. It's a terrible shame that she died at just the age of 36.

FAULKNER wrote a lot of short stories, and many of them are very, very good. The collection THE UNVANQUISHED is about the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and seems to be based on things that his "Mammy", Caroline Barr told him about what happened then (she had lived through it as a child). It's pretty amazing.

Susan Sontag, The Way We Live Now

R17

TL;DR

Boule de suif by Guy de Maupassant.

Also, the title story from Hearts In Atlantis by Stephen King. (Not to be confused with the film which was adapted from an entirely different story.)

Anton Chekhob, Ward No. 6

Another Southern woman, Eudora Welty. Try "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" It's about the assassination of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, and it is told through the voice of the killer.

The Appointment in Samarra, by Somerset Maugham...

And r12, it’s a beautifully written short story, and amazing that such a fulsome movie could come from just a few pages...

R22, good one.

I read this story in a collection of lesbian short stories I bought at Giovanni's Room in Philly back in the day. It gave me chills then and it has ever since. Read it -- it will only take10-15 minutes. I don't know if it's exactly what you would call "enjoyable," but you'll form some mental pictures you'll never forget.

Another vote for O’Connor. Check out “Revelation “

The scary stories to tell in the dark series have always been one of my faves.

"Miles" by Michael Tyrell from the anthology "Cool Thing."

I love Alice Munro's work

The World's Most Dangerous Game

While I really didn't like In Cold Blood, Capotes' short stories are wonderful.

The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry

Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce

The Real Thing - Henry James (one of the few things I could ever stand reading by him)

The Lottery - Shirley Jackon

R8 - seconding your mention of Thurber's "The Cat Bird Seat"

And seconding the mention of Flannery O'Connor's work.

Katherine Anne Porter: The Old Order; and Old Mortality

I like Flannery O'Connor a lot too, my favorite is "The River".

"The Last Leaf" "Gift of the Magi" "Jimmy Valentine" by O Henry "where do you come from where will you go" anything by Saki

Years ago, I remember reading a short story about a little girl who inexplicably showed up at an older woman's house and wouldn't leave. I wish I could remember the name of it.

[35] That was a very popular story by Truman Capote. I can’t recall the title but it was a female’s name.

My Life With R.H. Macy by Shirley Jackson. It's included on this wonderful Maureen Stapleton recording.....

The Capote story is "Miriam". It's one of the "Trilogy" of short films adapted from his stories in 1969.

R35 here you go

oops

Ah - that’s it! What an oddly enduring story

Mary Flannery O'Connor, who dropped the Mary because she said Mary O'Connor sounded like an Irish washerwoman, died at 39. I spent a summer in Milledgeville and visited her farm at Andalusia.

R22: "fulsome"--that word does not mean what you think it means.

Hemingway's short stories (especially the Nick Adams ones--I went to his high school) are better than all of his novels except "The Dun Also RIses."

ANothern Southern woman: Kathrrine Anne Porter, especially "Pale Horde, Pale Rider" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."

Jane Hamilton's "Rehearsing 'The Firebird'" is a lovely, wry masterpiece of the adolescent girl as budding artist.

Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician".

"A Small Good Thing" by Raymond Carver

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."

R42, "The Dun Also Rises" was quite the masterpiece. Only succeeded by Dicken's "Greige Expectations" and Stendhal's "The Red and The Taupe".

You don't see short stories much anymore or discussions about them. I LOVE short stories. My favorites

[bold]Ballad of the Sad Café[/bold] by Carson McCullers - an awesome meditation on unrequited love and S Gothic, too. [bold]Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland[/bold], also by Carson McCullers - made me understand why mom lied so much [bold]A Good Man Is Hard to Find[/bold] by Flannery O'Connor - evil in everyday life.

Agree with everything else mentioned. Guy de Maupassant's [bold]The Necklace[/bold] and [bold]False Gems[/bold] are so wonderful critiques of high society, its aspirants and its victims. Both still relevant today.

I love short stories. My all-time favourite: Isak Dinesen's ghost story, "The Supper at Elsinore".

Percival Everett, The Fix

William Saroyan, The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse

Dineson - Babette's Feast, Deluge at Norderney

de Maupassant - The Necklace, La Maison Tellier, The Piece of String, A Tress of Hair (La Chevelure)

O. Henry - Gift of the Magi, The Last Leaf, The Ransom of Red Chief

Proulx - Brokeback Mountain

Poe - Tell-Tale Heart

Lawson - The Drover's Wife

Here's a delightfully creepy tale.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Stetson.

R44--Agree with "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver. I think of this story all the time.

Kurt Vonnegut: "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Harrison Bergeron."

JD Salinger: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "To Esmé, With Love and Squalor," "Teddy."

"The Lottery" is great. "The Monkey Paw" freaked me out as a kid, I never want to reread this story. Otherwise, I am drawing a blank on good short stories.

Here are 10 online short stories by the wonderful H.H. Munro whose pen name was Saki. "The Open Window" is a classic and features one of Saki's remarkable and quietly hilarious young women.

Anyone remember a short story about a kid who stayed in a house that had a stuffed dog? The dog comes back to life and kills the kid, if I remember correctly. It was in a young adult book of short stories in the mid 80s.

I might as well mention some more:

May Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathaniel West)

A Church Mouse (Mary Wilkins Freeman)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)

A Good Marriage (Stephen King)

r46 Damn that autocorrect! (But I like your other "suggestions"!)

Dorothy Parker's Horsie.

R44 - Seconding your Salinger mention "To Esmé, With Love and Squalor"

Bernice Bobs Her Hair - F. Scott Fitzgerald Shut a Final Door - Truman Capote Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx

Do you like the film version, r60?

R61 I've never seen it.

I'll also add: Repent Harlequin! said the TickTock Man by Harlan Ellison

Fulsome - of large size or quantity; generous or abundant. How does that not apply to a full length movie made from a short story of just a few pages, r42?

"Shut A Final Door" by Truman Capote

Thanks for all these tips -- I need to read, or re-read, some of these stories!

Of stories that haven't been named yet, one of my perennial favorites is "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell. Also, "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield.

One story that has stayed with me ever since I read it as a kid -- and I honestly don't know why -- is "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury.

Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" is truly harrowing. Surprisingly, much more so than a Stephen King story I can recommend: "Quitters, Inc."

Any and all Dorothy Parker stories are fun, bitter reads.

The New Yorker magazine has a wonderful fiction podcast where authors choose and read a story that has previously appeared in the magazine, and then they discuss the story with the New Yorker fiction editor. Lots of famous names like Cheever, Nabokov, Lorrie Moore etc. This podcast turned me on to Frank O'Connor- on one episode Julian Barnes reads "The Man of the World" which is quite wonderful.

“Demon Lover” (Elizabeth Bowen)

“The Potobello Road” (Muriel Spark)

pretty much anything by William Trevor

“Interpreter of Maladies” (Jhumpa Lahiri)

R65 reminds me to mention my favorite Bradbury short story, The Veldt. Here's a great recorded version by Leonard Nimoy.

R63 First definition is: "complimentary or flattering to an excessive degree." The second definition is the one you cite--doesn't mean you're wrong, I hasten to add, as meanings change. I did not know that the second definition was now considered acceptable, so I apologize....fulsomely.

"WHY I LIVE AT THE P.O." by Eudora Welty, it's very funny, creepy, gay, and kind of insane.

Imagine if you will that George Bernard Shaw wrote a Twilight Zone-style story about a bipolar Irishman investigating a mysterious moving cemetery.

I used to love short stories more than anything as a brooding teen, now I’ve hardly read any fiction in years. Bummer! Thanks y’all I hope to read some of these.

Have to second (3d? 4th?) the point, since it can’t be made too many times, that The Lottery is the pinnacle of short-story writing. Another Shirley Jackson gem: “The Beautiful Stranger.”

Also yes! to Flannery O’Connor - check out “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

And no one’s mentioned it yet? Recent NYer viral sensation (you don’t hear that very often) “Cat Person.”

Can’t find link to The Beautiful Stranger so I’ll just link to Jackson’s masterpiece The Lottery for anyone who hasn’t read it..../

The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Flannery O’Connor

50 Grand by Hemingway

John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums."

"Flight" by Steinbeck.

"Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor.

"It had to be murder" (1942), by Cornell Woolrich. Darker than its film adaptation REAR WINDOW, and if memory serves the protagonist, before its transformation so as to fit the "James Stewart" type, was gay.

Good one, r70! I thought of listing that one too, but figured I had already named enough stories.

Very funny, and with a decidedly DL sensibility.

“Sexy” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Rape Fantasies” by Margaret Atwood

“Pig Latin” by Clarice Lispector

All three should be available online!

When I was a kid I used to love jacking off to Penthouse Forum. That and the monkey paw story.

Miss Gentilbelle by Charles Beaumont.

"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"

Donald Barthelme, [italic] A City of Churches [/italic]

Any others?

I'll add one. Jack London -- To Build a Fire

The Possibility of Evil. I love this short story. It makes me think of what I will probably be like when I get older.

Lorrie Moore's volumes "Self-Help" and "Birds of America."

Raymond Carver ~ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Not to everyone's taste, but I love some of Isak Dinesen's stories (her fiction--not referring to Out of Africa, which is wonderful in its own way and so superior to the film).

bump. My dad is dying in hospice, he got his phd in American Lit, my mom got hers in English Lit, she is reading him Austen but I am loving your choices, obviously I am starting with Twain and Capote and then going back to this list later. Thank you.

For Sale. Baby shoes. Never used.

Miriam- Truman- Capote; Pale Horse,Pail Rider-Katherine Ann Porter, Noon Wine- KAP, Spirit Seizures-I forget her name.

Melissa Pritchard is her name. A terrific ghost story.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thank you, 78. Reading "Revelation" again made my day. What a story.

If You Were Ever A Horse by Ghassan Kanafani.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz.

Anything by Ann Beattie is good, butt The Cinderella Waltz is a modern masterpiece.

*but

R98, good one!

Since no one else has mentioned this one, I shall: "Where are you going, Where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates. I listened to it as a Selected Shorts audio offering, read by Christine Baranski.

R103, I've always enjoyed that one.

My favorite is "The Bottle Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Love “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Also love Deborah Eisenberg’s stories.

Rafe’s Coat by Deborah Eisenberg. Funny, sad but you can give her new collection a pass.

Has anyone here read anything by Oswell Blakeston (1907-1985) a film maker, film theorist, writer of both fiction and non-fiction and painter ? He wrote short stories in the horror genre. I consider myself knowledgeable in the area of early 20th century British gay culture but I hadn't heard of Blakeston.

Can someone explain to me the story OP posted, Symbols and Signs? WTF it is about and who is the little girl calling.

"The Bunner Sisters" by Edith Wharton.

Shooting an Elephant ~George Orwell (1936)

I read Capote's A Christmas Memory every Christmas.

Oh, dear. R22, "Appointment in Samarra" is by John O'Hara, not Somerset Maugham. And it is a novel and not a short story. You are welcome.

I like this one -- the "Hall of Small Mammals" by Thomas Pierce. It's about a guy who takes his new girlfriend's annoying son to the zoo.

I've always liked Kate Chopin, especially "Désirée’s Baby."

Franz Kafka, [italic]In the Penal Colony[/italic] -- a traveler visits a foreign prison's execution chamber. Extremely dark.

I was born in China

And raised in Jay-pan

If you don't like my peaches

Stay away from my can

R113, you are wrong.

The title of O'Hara's book "is a reference to W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an ancient Mesopotamian tale, which appears as an epigraph for the novel"

You idiot

Flannery O'Connor: "The Displaced Person."

Dennis Johnson: "Jesus' Son."

R119 and R120, good ones.

Fans of Keeping Up Appeances might note a (tragic) similarity in Dorothy Parker's story "The Wonderful Old Gentleman".

Another Flannery O'Connor fan. I always thought The Misfit sounded kind of hot by the description of him in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I realize that's so gay but ... One of my absolute favorite stories by O'Connor is "Good Country People." You know, the one about the mother and the daughter who has an artificial leg. The ending is so twisted but so darkly funny.

Alice Walker wrote a good essay about Flannery O'Connor where she noted that in O'Connor's world, she did not treat the African-Americans as what we'd now call "magical negroes." They were just as stubborn, mean, lazy and human as any of her white characters, not blessed with eternal patience.

Brilliant author.

Maugham's "The Lotus-Eaters" - disturbing and entertaining both.

[quote] One of my absolute favorite stories by O'Connor is "Good Country People." You know, the one about the mother and the daughter who has an artificial leg. The ending is so twisted but so darkly funny.

I love that story as well. I didn't think the ending was funny, though! Scary!

The Misfit (in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") didn't sound sexy to me.

What is the name of the short story where a woman kills her husband with a leg of lamb, roasts it and then feeds it to the cops who are investigating his death?

NVM, it's "Lamb To The Slaughter".

R127, I'll have to read that one!

I found it online. I'm surprised Roald Dahl wrote it.

GREAT THREAD! THANKS for posting THE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL - I read that back in high school and have never forgotten it.

Here are just a few off the top of my head:

THE DOLL'S HOUSE by Katherine Mansfield

A&P and IN FOOTBALL SEASON by John Updike

ARE WE NOT MEN? by the great T. C Boyle

THE SEMPLICA GIRL DIARIES and PASTORALIA by the great George Saunders

and one of the best short stories I have ever read in my life: PLAYLAND by Ron Hansen

Keep them COMING!!!

The "Lamb to Slaughter" story was on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

Im enjoying this thread. Let's hear from other cultures far from these shores. Tho I wonder if short stories get translated much.

I love most of The Maples stories by John Updike. 1960's and '70s Suburban ennui at its finest.

For you, R132

The Hidden Cause by Machado de Assis

Thanks r134

"His Beautiful Hands" by Oscar Cook

"Rain" by Somerset Maugham

Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss"

Robert Aickman, "Ringing the Changes"

Conrad Aiken, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"

Afterward by Edith Wharton

Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” from 1919, one of the first series to touch on homosexuality. Its story line still resonates today.

The Lady's Maid's Bell by Edith Wharton

bump

Every other year I buy one of these books -- Best American Short Stories. Each year has a different author as editor. There are some really good ones and some head-scratchers. YMMV.

R139, Aickman's "Ringing the Changes" was read, sometime ago, on BBC Radio. It's one of his best stories. It starts out in a quiet, cozy-horror sort of way (a couple goes on their honeymoon in October, and are surprised when the residents of a quaint village seem disturbed to see them) and builds to a supremely creepy conclusion.

The Office of Missing Persons.

"Eveline," James Joyce

THE BABYSITTER by Robert Coover.

I found a treasure of a collection of short stories at the thrift store -- T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Without a Hero." Excellent stuff. Sharp and satiric.

Those "Best American Short Stories" at R143 are available at libraries. I used to borrow them to read on long plane rides. There are also "Best American Essays" put out every year as well.

Ha Jin (Chinese) writes in English. (He's not a native speaker.) I enjoy his novels. He writes short stories as well. Very easy to read. "Waiting" is really good and probably his most popular piece.

Since the quarantine, I'm guessing a lot of people have more time to catch up on reading.

I just discovered Ron Hansen. Thank you, R130. I love his style. I checked out an e-copy of his "Nebraska" short story collection and my favorite is "Boogeyman." Chilling stuff.

I always go back to Peter Cameron's Jump or Dive and Fear of Math.

So, so, so, so good.

The title story and "Radiation" in David Leavitt's "Family Dancing"

Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose"

Mary Elizabeth Mann b 1846, Norwich, England - ran across this description of one of her stories - now I have to search for the rest of it and more of her writing which was very frank about conditions of the time. She was well known in her day. 'This story describes the visit of a well-meaning spinster to a philoprogenitive farm labourer’s wife (Mrs. Hodd) who has just given birth to a stillborn thirteenth child. After commiserating with the mother, her visitor asks if she can see the corpse. This turns out to have vanished from the cradle. Venturing downstairs, the woman finds Mrs Hodd’s brood of children playing with what, at first sight, looks like a rather battered doll. This in itself would probably be enough to send shivers down the average 21st century spine. But what gives the story an even sharper tug, perhaps, is the dreadful laconicism of the final paragraph. Mrs Hodd, mildly rebuked for allowing this desecration, is unmoved: “Other folkes’ child’en have a toy, now and then, to kape ’em out o’mischief. My little uns han’t,” she says. “He’ve kep’ ’em quite [quiet] for hours, the po’r baby have; and I’ll lay a crown they han’t done no harm to their little brother.”'

Great suggestions!

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Crazy Sunday" -- based on his friendship with Hollywood power couple Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer.

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Arguably the best American short story ever written.

Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

The Queen of Southern Gothic's greatest short story, and if it doesn't disturb you, nothing will.

I see many have recalled their school lessons!

Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" is a great character study of the Captain and his (gay?) interest in the fugitive Leggatt. Always finding something new to ponder.

Christie's short stories with Poirot, Miss Marple, Mr. Parker Pyne, and the Mysterious Mr. Harley Quin are almost all excellent.

Hawthorne can't be beat for a good moral turn. "The Minister's Black Veil" and "Young Goodman Brown," for examples.

Hemingway is the master of minimalism in Short Story dialogue and description, writ large in "A Clean, Well-lighted Place."

Crane is the man for the indifference of Nature, aka Naturalism. "The Open Boat" is the quintessential "Life isn't fair" story.

I need to read more modern stories besides those of David Sedaris. I bought "A Manual for Cleaning Women" (Lucia Berlin), but have yet to get past about ten pages. Ah, well; I prefer non-fiction.

True Romance by Ron Hansen -- a dark take on jealousy

I like short horror stories. Here's one of my favorites, [bold]Luella Miller[/bold] by Mary Wilkins Freeman.

Any others?

[italic]More,[/italic] you say?

Here's [bold]The Boarded Window[/bold] by Ambrose Bierce:

R163, thanks. I enjoyed that one.

[bold]The Drifting Snow[/bold] by August Derleth.

This one is hard to find online, and even harder to link on the DL, but I'll try. It's a Tinyurl link to a Google Books page. Just add the 'tinyurl' dot com to the following:

3mkgtoy

(crossing my fingers to see if this works)

[bold]Green Fingers[/bold] by R.C. Cook.

This one was adapted by Rod Serling for 'Night Gallery', and rather badly, too - IMO, his teleplay did great violence to the subtlety of Cook's story. If you've ever seen the episode, you can compare/contrast. I wouldn't mind hearing which you think was better.

There's also [bold]The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas[/bold] by Ursula K. Le Guin. This one has a foreword, which my link places at the end, though I prefer to read it before the main story.

The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoyevsky's [italic]Brothers Karamazov[/italic], and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how James puts it:

[quote]Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated. Dostoyevsky was a great artist, and a radical one, but his early social radicalism reversed itself, leaving him a violent reactionary. Whereas the American James, who seems so mild, so naively gentlemanly—look how he says "us," assuming all his readers are as decent as himself!—was, and remained, and remains, a genuinely radical thinker. Directly after the "lost soul" passage he goes on,

[quote]All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as "the probable causes of future experience"—that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!

Of course I didn't read James and sit down and say. Now I'll write a story about that "lost soul." It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word [italic]Omelas[/italic] in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas... Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas. Homme hélas. "Where [italic]do[/italic] you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?" From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

R165, R166, haven't had a chance to read these stories yet, but looking forward to it!

Thank you, R168. Take your time.

Meantime, here's [bold]The Pear-Shaped Man[/bold by George R.R. Martin:

Anything by Joy Williams. Trust me.

The Pear-Shaped Man? Someone wrote a story about Trump?

[bold]The Hound[/bold] by H.P. Lovecraft.

It's not that this story is one of the more outstanding of Lovecraft's, but that it has a relationship with the next one I'm going to post.

In Lovecraft's [italic]The Hound[/italic], one cant detect the whiff of a homosexual relationship between its narrator and "St John." What is merely implicit in the Lovecraft tale is made explicit in a modern take on [italic]The Hound[/italic], an openly gay horror story.

I give you [bold]His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood[/bold] by Poppy Z. Brite:

(I'll stop for awhile and let you catch up.)

Isaac Asimov, "Nightfall"., a classic and perfect short story.

Daphne du Mauier, "The Birds"

Any by the master of short stories, Edgar Allen Poe.

Roald Dahl, "In the Ruins" (only if you dare, this guy wrote some major twisted stories).

[quote] Roald Dahl, "In the Ruins" (only if you dare, this guy wrote some major twisted stories).

And here I associated Dahl only with such children's fare like 'Matilda' and 'James and the Giant Peach.'

James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In".

R176, link it!

[bold]The Girl Who Was Plugged In[/bold] by James Tiptree Jr.

An impressively unsettling story would be [bold]The Cocoon[/bold] by John B.L. Goodwin. I first encountered it back in the 1970s in a Helen Hoke anthology - [italic]Weirdies, Weirdies, Weirdies: A Horrifying Concatenation of the Super-Sur-Real or Almost or Not-Quite Real[/italic] (Franklin Watts, Inc., 1975). Everything that had it seems to be out of print, and I cannot find it anywhere online. I did find it on Youtube, being read aloud, and while it's certainly not my preferred way of taking in a story, perhaps you might be able to appreciate it.

I didn't enjoy the movie loosely based on it, but I love Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life.

I love Steven Millhauser's "The Knife Thrower and Other Stories" and Lorrie Moore's "Birds of America"

R173 how DARE you deadname our brave homosexual brother, the bearded Billy Martin?!??!

I recently listened to Cheever’s “The Swimmer” on the New Yorker Fiction podcast and was quite devastated by the ending. Has anyone seen the Burt Lancaster movie and how does it compare?

Thanks for all these! I love short stories. It’s hard to pick just one, but I the imagery in this one is just wonderful.

Here's something of the reverse - can anyone help me identify a short story I've lost track of? I was reading short story anthologies in high school, and I came across a truly disturbing one, describing a man hiding from a search party. By degrees, it's gradually disclosed that he's a clergyman, that he's the one the townspeople are hunting, that he's accused of murdering a young girl, and that he actually did it. Tiring, he slogs through a shallow creek, dogs barking in pursuit, and I think crawls into a drainpipe and drowns.

Does this story ring a bell with anyone?

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐞 by Robert Aickman:

An Encounter from DUBLINERS by James Joyce is a short story that sticks in my mind. It's like a cautionary tale you get told about if you bunk off school to go to the beach you're probably going to meet and gingerly sidle away from some potential child molester masturbating in a field. It all happens and more.

One of my favorites, The Family of the Vourdalak by Alexei Tolstoy

What’s the short story about a woman who is a vampire and sucks the energy from others? It’s very Lovecraftian but not sure if he wrote it.

Someone posted it on Datalounge years ago and I have been looking for it since then.

Luella Miller, R188. Someone posted the link a few posts above.

I don't have a link to the story, but Martin Palmer's "Anchorage Alaska" short story in "Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong" is excellent.

It concerns a college professor who has lived in Anchorage for twenty-two years. Every Thanksgiving, he and a group of gay male friends (with some rotating in and out of the group as the years pass) spend the weekend at a remote cabin.

They pass the short days playing with their dogs, snowshoeing, and ice skating on the frozen pond nearby. During the long frigid nights, they play cards, and boardgames by the fire, while reminiscing over various belly-warming beverages.

Each year, a theme for the Thanksgiving meal is agreed upon in advance. This particular year, they recreate the meal from "Babette's Feast". Everyone is assigned or volunteers to bring part of the meal. One man (a flight attendant) even smuggles ingredients from France. The meal is absolutely wonderful, even if it is consumed from cheap paper plates and cups printed with turkeys and autumn leaves.

Anyway, I've noted my love of culinary themes, and those involving "warmth in austere isolation" here before. These are only part of why I love this story as much as I do.

There are many other great stories from many other hometowns included in this book. I enjoy them all, but "Anchorage, Alaska" (a place I've never even been) is my favorite.

You can even get a paperback copy of this book on Amazon right now, for less than $3.00!

"Gal Young Un"- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”

Short story: book, online, audiobook, or podcast? Experience, preference?