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I feel that, bookaholic though I am, I have not read nearly enough short stories. "The Lottery", "A Jury of Her Peers", "The Scarlet Ibis" and a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe stories are all I've read, mainly because I don't like reading whole books of short stories.
What are some good short stories that I should read? I am completely out of books to read and stories seem like a good thing to try reading...
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I think the best stuff Salinger ever wrote are his stories: "Nine stories." "Franny and Zooey." "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters." "Seymour. An introduction." -- To be read in this order. Posts: 1045 | Registered: Jul 2002
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First Love, by Samuel Beckett. Quite possibly one of the most perfect short stories ever written. I'll have more suggestions later, but I just had to get that out there.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I have to agree with jeni... Unaccompaned sonata, Is my Favorite short story. THough The best day, or The poceliean salamander all from Maps In A Mirror, By OSC, Is Great. Wish they were online, Or they would re-release Maps.. Karl
Posts: 33 | Registered: Jan 2003
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If you're into sci-fi, there's a GREAT list of short story authors floating around this board as a result of OSC's request for anthology suggestions. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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SciFi: "Portraits of His Children," George R.R. Martin "Press Enter," John Varley "Traitor," R.M. Meluch "Borders of Infinity," & "Labyrinth," Lois McMaster Bujold (These two are part of a series including novels and short stories.)
Mystery: All of the Sherlock Holmes stories, esp. "A Scandal in Bohemia," and "The Speckled Band" All of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Stories, esp. "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention"
The Biblical books of Ruth and Jonah are also great short stories.
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This is redundant, but I just finished reading all the stories in Maps in a Mirror, and my favorite was also "Unaccompanied Sonata"...just to add my recommendation Posts: 1635 | Registered: Aug 2002
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One of my favorite short stories ever is "Ralph the Duck" by Frederick Busch. He later expanded it into the novel Girls which I thoroughly enjoyed.
As far as SF, my perennial favorite is Heinlein’s "The Green Hills of Earth." I don’t know why. I just like it.
Another favorite is "How We Lost the Moon--A True Story by Frank W. Allen" by Paul J. McAuley.
For OSC, my vote would have to go to "The Originist."
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The Colour Out of Space, by HP Lovecraft. Ig nore the hype, this is better than the much-ballyhooed "Call of Cthulhu" (which isn't bad, in and of itself, mind you).
For a novellette (??), "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is also good by Lovecraft, though I am biased, since it mentions my hometown, and Innsmouth itself is in large part inspired by my hometown, circa 1930.
Did anyone ever read that one by Bradbury? I think it's called "All Summer in A Day"... Poe is great. Isacov is great... Um... "Death of Red Peril" was sad.
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Was "Mimsey Were the Borogroves" by Padgett? It's been too long since I've read that; it's a great story.
I would recommend just about any of Theodore Sturgeon's short stories. All of his short stuff has been compiled into a many volumed collection, and so is back in print for the first time in ages.
William Sanders is a contemporary SF author whose short fiction is, in my opinion, *vastly* superior to his longer stuff. In particular, I recommend his short story "The Undiscovered", but just about all of his short stuff is first rate.
Some of Ursula K Leguin's short work is incredibly good. In particular, I'd recommend "Mazes", "The Wife's Tale", and "Gwillian's Harp" (not completely sure of the name in that last title), all of which are anthologized in The Compass Rose.
Nancy Kress' short fiction is incredibly good, probably even better than her excellent longer work. She says that her favorite, and most natural form is the novella, and I agree with her that her novellas are incredible. Of the collections of her stuff that I've read, Beaker's Dozen has been my favorite.
Octavia Butler has an excellent collection of her short fiction called Blood Child; I highly recommend it.
If you're looking for good SF anthologies that will expose you to the SF authors currently shaping the genre, I recommend Gardner Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies (note that there are a number of yearly anthologies with similar titles, but with different editors). Someone here--Irami I think, but I could be wrong--said that he found the Dozois anthologies to be absolutely horrible, and dull to boot, but I really can't imagine why anyone who enjoyed short SF would think that; my guess has been that he unfortunately opened the book to a clunker, and was so disgusted that he gave up on the entire series of anthologies. There definitely are stories in each collection that don't work for me, but on the whole the work is excellent.
Well, that was probably more than you wanted to know.
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The Dead, by James Joyce Any and all by Flannery O'Connor -- she's a fascinationg read, especially if you're interested in different perspectives on religion A Rose for Emily, by Faulkner
Posts: 270 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Augh! How could I have forgotten one of my favorite short SF authors? Howard Waldrop's short stuff, especially his earlier work, is incredible. He seems to have gotten a bit bitter in recent years, but the stories collected in works such as Night of the Cooters are almost all brilliant. He's only published two novels, Them Bones and The Texas Israeli War. The former is as good as his short fiction, but I haven't been able to locate a copy of the latter.
Cordwainer Smith is another author whose short work isn't to be missed. I remember "The Game of Rat and Dragon" being particularly interesting, but all of his short work is quite good.
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I just realized something tonight: I've never read Unaccompanied Sonata .
The part about that which is shocking is that I have thought ever since I saw this thread that I had . It turns out that the short story I was thinking of was Sepulchre of Songs.
I realized this when seeing the top 100 list of short stories, which had Unaccompanied Sonata at number ten, and Sepulchre of Songs much further down on the list. I went to my bookshelf to find which story is which, but couldn't find the story. It turns out after an amazon.com trip, its in the Monkey Sonatas anthology, the one book in the Maps in a Mirror that I don't own .
Its mentioned as being one of the best short stories in existence, but how am I going to get my hands on it when the book is out of print? I suppose I will check out the libraries in my area...
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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Let me toss in another vote for OSC's "Unaccompanied Sonata" as an absolutely wonderful story. I actually cried when I read it; I think it should be mandatory reading for anyone considering a career in music.
Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy" is also very powerful. I also like his "The Feeling of Power" and "The Billiard Ball."
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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I'm glad someone mentioned Lovecraft. I just picked him up for the first time this past couple of weeks, and I've been reading the stories as fast as I can. I just thought his name comes up often enough that I should know something about him.
The Colour out of Space was not one of my favorites. Shadow over Innsmouth wasn't bad.
My favorites so far are At the Mountains of Madness, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Shadow out of Time and the Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
At times, he's really not the best writer. He is too in love with adjectives and adverbs, mostly wierd ones. But his stories often make up for it.
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It's all well and good to highly recommend Unaccompanied Sonata ...but there are those of us who have no clue how to get our hands on it, dangit!
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All your stories, UofU are novellas though, no shorter than 50 pages each. Not really a short story.
Lovecraft can't do dialogue, so, by and large, he doesn't. And he does have a conciously archaic bent, but I find that it lends something to the story, after reading the more modern style stories of others.
And I stand by Colour Out of Space. Good pacing, not too overwrought with "unspeakables", "unimaginables", etc... Plus, it has the "blasted heath", you have to love the blasted heath!
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Yeah, I realized I picked some of the longer ones. For some reason, I have enjoyed those a lot more. The shorter stories too often seem to follow the same lame formula (as summarized in Book-a-Minute). I find many of them unsatisfying.
I'll try and remember some that I did like, but really the longer ones have appealed to me more.
I have to admit that Colour out of Space wasn't one of the formulaic stories. It was actually pretty cinematic, meaning I can easily imagine it as a film. You could probably make a really creepy movie out of it.
Speaking of Lovecraft movies, I saw a particular horror movie one Saturday when I was a kid, and although I didn't understand a lot of it, I really liked it. I remembered certain scenes, and especially the theme song, for years afterward. But I didn't know the title, or anything else about the movie. I have tried to find out what it was, but didn't figure it out until last week. It was The Dunwitch Horror, made in the 70's and based on a Lovecraft story. I imagine that if I went back and watched it now, I would think it was cheesy, though.
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I should also say that my favorite short stories are written by Phillip K. Dick. I have read the entire Collected Stories (all six or seven volumes) and just loved them. I wish I could remember the titles of specific stories to recommend. I do remember that one of my favorites is The Variable Man, but I don't remember the volume in which it appears.
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Yeah, I have a book of his Dream Cycle stories, and they feel much better than most of his Cthulhu stories. The language works better as fantasy.
Although they tried to shoehorn Pickman's Model into the dream cycle, which seems silly.
I am really enjoying Dream Quest right now, and like Charles Dexter Ward, and really like Innsmouth (which is based on my hometown, so it feels very creepily authentic), but ATMoM seemed a bit stale to me, even with his attempts to connect various stories. The Dream Cycle book is great, it puts all the short stories referred to in Dream Quest before it, making it feel like a culmination.
I liked the Sarnath, Polaris is cool, The Shunned House is chilling, and I really like The Quest of Iranon, but The Nameless City left me a bit confused at the end.
**SPOILERS**
Am I to take it that the last chamber is an entrance to the dreamlands? And if so, what about all the Elder Ones that appear at the end, I can't tell if they are coming from their tombs to the dream world, or coming out of the dreamland?
-- I'm thinking that the difference between the Cthulhu stuff and the Dreamland stuff is that while both are filled with tragic stories, the dreamland stories are filled with sympathetically tragic protagonists, while the Cthulhu stories are a bit too straightforward neutral.
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Mountians of Madness was only the second story I read, after Call of Cthulhu (which I read first only because it sounded like the place to start, to figure out who the heck this Cthulhu person was I had heard about). Because I hadn't read any of the other, connected stories yet, Mountains of Madness was all new to me, and any side references to other stories didn't stand out or distract me.
What I liked about it was the complexity of the created world in the far past, althought the way it was presented was lame. How could they learn so many details about this alien civilization just by looking at the pictures on the walls?
I also read the Nameless City before the Dream stories, so I didn't catch the connection. I'll have to go back and look at it again.
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"Unaccompanied Sonata" remains one of my all time favorite short stories. On par with Graham Greene's "The Destructors" or Joyce's "The Dead".
For a good, wacky read, I suggest "Freeway Games" or "Closing the Timelid", two incredibly strange stories I read in Maps in a Mirror.
Posts: 1769 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I read Freeway Games aloud to a bunch of my friends last year because it wasn't very long, and they were curious about what I had been reading for the last week (I had checked out Maps in a Mirror from the library). After getting a little ways into it, I realized I should have read it myself before reading it to a group of people (many of which have never read anything by OSC). When we finished the story, they all thought I was a freak for reading something like that.
But yes, I would agree that it's a wacky read. Posts: 1635 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Oh, and to all of you waiting to get your hands on Unaccompanied Sonata, at least you won't have to wait forever with the reprint of Maps in a Mirror coming up sometime in the future! (December? January?) Don't worry, it's worth the wait.
(Are you sure your library doesn't have it? Even our small library here in town had one.)
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"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith. Very, very good, but his writing style is a little unusual. If you don't mind expanding your horizons it's truly wonderful. By all his short fiction in one volume here.
Best OSC short story: Sandmagic
Don't forget THE COLD EQUATIONS by Tom Godwin.
Posts: 49 | Registered: Nov 2001
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I love this short story and I was totally unaware that he had also written a novel length version until I saw it at the library the other day while looking for a Greg Keyes book. I haven't read the novel yet but it is next on my list.
Posts: 1336 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Solo, there was even a movie of Flowers! I still think of the story now and then. Especially when I was working for a placement agency for the developmentally disabled.
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. It turns out that the short story I was thinking of was Sepulchre of Songs. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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When we finished the story, they all thought I was a freak for reading something like that. ![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
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