What's Your Favorite Short Story?

bnw: i have to agree with you: short stories do in fact kick my ass. raymond carver is indeed fine, "where i'm calling from" is my favorite. (tangential question: "raymond carver: the joy division of short fiction"?) his work is more like painting than writing; he has very few quotable lines, and his sentences are as spare and seemingly harmless as a solitary brushstroke. but when it's all assembled, when the piece is complete, the effect is devastating and almost always catches you off guard.

Collections of short stories just remind me of Paranoid Android: well, we couldn't write a full book, so let's just throw all these together and it'll work! Fair enough if you don't feel that way, it's your reading enjoyment, but to me it's frustrating.

Plus, there's the added "bonus" that an awful lot of short stories are so...it's like describing a place is as good as developing a character. Fuck that. I'm too much a psychology major to deal with that, I guess. I want loads of character info and twists and turns. I've never once read a short story that satisfied me in that way.

Okay, so you're talking to your friend, right? And they're telling you this big ass story about their friend and how for some reason they ended up standing on a street corner in Hoboken in the middle of the night, with a drug bust going on down the street, and then walked home thru Times Square after getting off the PATH train, and something bizarre happened to them. So you're all, "What a fucking moron, why did they put themselves in that position?" To me, that's a short story.

Now, imagine your friend tells you, well, I have this friend. They were out with some other friends and two of them were trying to hook up, so one girl agreed to drag the rest of the group off to go smoke a cigarette with her. The two trying to hook up were very awkward and shy and it took them a long time to get it going, but the girl kept saying to her girlfriend - one more cigarette! One more! Then they were all standing out on the street corner in the middle of the night, and then had to walk home because they had no ride, and something bizarre happened to them after that. And your friend explains these people's personalities and makes gestures and imitates them. You think, "That's a hilarious story" now. That's a novel to me.

The difference is basically the difference between a dumbass friend who can't remember the whole story and a really detailed, funny friend with a gift for imitation. That's it in a generalized nutshell for me.

To me, a good short story is one where a guy could be telling that hilarious story with all those great imitations, but since other people have been doing that all night, he goes into insane detail over something completely mundane, doesn't provide any character background, makes everyone in the story seem cartoonish, jumps from one thing to another randomly, and ties it all together in the end in a way that's completely inexplicable and meaningless but completely his own. A good short story is like Seinfeld. Except I've never read a short story half as good as Seinfeld.

Anyway, to Fred's question. I usually say Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" but it's been a while since I read it or lots of stories, really. I read lots of them when I was an English major, of course, especially when I was taking creative writing classes and more interested in writing them myself. Now I don't make as much time for them because I prefer to read whole books at once but doing so with one author's stories can get tedious sometimes. My reading habits have changed a lot in the past year or two, though, so I should try sneaking in some more stories.

But, some others: lots of other Hemingway. I especially like the one where whatsisname and whatisname sit around and get drunk and then decide to go hunting - don't remember the name. I realize that may not be uniquely identifying. The two books of Carver stories I've read were nice but I can't remember many details at the moment. It was pretty clear why (so I've heard) all the young writers wanted to be him or Barthelme in the 80s. "Cathedral" was really good - my creative writing teacher was a professional reader on the side, so he read us stories, including that one, and that made it even better. "You're really cooking with gas now!" I seem to remember "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" being good as well, but at the moment all I remember about it is some people eating dinner together and the narrator's friend Mel being a cardiologist. As for Barthelme, his stories are a joy - experimental fiction which is also fun and accessible. I once had a protracted argument with my friends over whether or not "Sentence" was a good thing or totally lame. The one about Colby and the plane (or are those separate?) is great too. Salinger - especially "For Esme with Love and Squalor," which my prof also read to us. Haruki Murakami's stories aren't his best writing (I like some of his novels better), but they're well worth reading. The one about the elephant factory is cool. DFW's stories are good but if you don't like his schtick you won't like the stories. I think I liked "Girl with Curious Hair" most of all. Will Self is gimmicky but I enjoyed most of The Quantity Theory of Insanity a fair deal, Grey Area,/I> less so. Wild ideas, when they work. I've read about half of Nabokov's collected stories, and they're, uh, very Nabokovian and thus beautiful to read but they don't always hit me. Just in the past year I've beeen taken with Borges, who's got all kind of short (very short) fiction and fiction-like stuff to offer, my favorite more-fiction-like thing probably being "Funes the Memorious". Vonnegut's got some good stories, too - "Harrison Bergeron" always makes me sad.

These are more or less what I think of by looking around my room at books I can see; in the past I've quite liked some other stories that I can't think of at the moment. Also, I unfortunately didn't get to keep the really great anthology I used for one creative writing class, which had a lot of good stories in it that I don't have elsewhere, which means I can't remember what they were exactly.

Least Favourite: JD Salinger. Utter dreck.

x0x0

Tracer: I said "something bizarre happened" because A) I really don't want to get into the specifics of that chapter of my life AGAIN, no matter how fucking hilarious the whole thing was B) it'd take too long to explain anyhow. You got the gist, leave me alone, hello! :)

And Josh isn't really getting away with stating "I guess you haven't read the right short stories" either, Fred, it's just not something worth my time to get into as to how that's the most worthless argument in the entire universe that assumes your opponent in a debate knows less than you do and that's the only possible reason they could agree. The other thing is that Josh has only said that to me once now, while you have said that to me 8 quadrillion times (approx.) so he's got a few more goes before he gets to your level. But rest assured, I've filed it away in my "Wow, that completely annoyed me" file.

I am someone who likes plots and stories and the more involved something gets, the better. It's very difficult to get that level of involvement and philosophy and psychology in a short story.

And Ally, that's not a "you don't like X cause you haven't heard every single last obscure reference..." type argument, it's more equivalent to saying "you are judging an artist by their crappy debut album and ignoring their more substantial later output".

With Salinger, it wasn't even the adolescent angst of _Catcher_ that bothers me. I just do not find his writing style engaging, I find it frustrating and infuriating the way he starts these fragments and never clarifies half the plot. The whole series of short stories about that huge family just PISS ME OFF because it's like he started to write a novel, but could never get around to sewing up all the pieces, so he just put out individual chapters he's written as short stories.

Maybe it pisses me off especially was because one of the writers I used to work with on E-Me! was a huge fan- her stories used to infuriate me, because she was working with a huge backplot in her head which she never actually explored in the written chapters. In some cases, that can be interesting- in Will Self's mental illness short stories, you can sew together back story, and figure out or invent bits of your own to make it all add up together and make sense. In both Salinger and this girl who idolised him, it just seemed like laziness, and arrogance on the author's part, and assuming that the reader had ESP or something.

(Well, he should have said that.)

(Well, he should have said that.)

The last anthology I can recall reading was John Cheever's collection, which was good, but I think reading it like a novel (straight through) ruined it for me. I also gave _Dubliners_ a shot, but (once again) tried reading it straight through, and got side- swiped.

(Short stories should be used as pallete cleansers during the reading of a novel, I think - referring back to Fred's original query, they (short stories) could be like the ambient noise / segue track on an album, bridging two sections, allowing the reader a chance to pause & reflect.) (Or they could serve as EPs - a sampling of an author's work that's substantial, but not too weighty. Someone mentioned this already, right?)

Oh, and I'm reading Phillip K. Dick at the moment...

Favourite short story though is "The Prize Of Peril" by Robert Sheckley. Indeed most of Sheckley's stuff is a good science fiction laugh riot. The short story after all is the home of the half assed Sci-fi idea.

Insert punchline here.

* crickets, tumbleweed, etc *

Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber' collection has been an old, old fave of mine. JG Ballard's 'The Garden of Time' is probably my favourite short story ever. Poetic and heartbreaking.

Mavis Gallant - in transit (book)
Sinclair Ross- lamp at noon
WG Valgardson- bloodflowers, god is not a fish inspector,celebration
Alice Munro - lives of girls and women (book)
Thomas King- borders
Margaret Atwood - birth

but hemingway's "the short happy life of francis macomber" is good too.

And yes, he wrote my favourite short story of which I typically forgot the title. It's about a boy and girl who at night watch angels descent on sacrificial blood (something like that). Anyway, something goes terribly wrong, so there's a beautiful passage about dimensional travelling. When we're back the boy (I think) walks around and starts noticing that people around him are changing into the girl, and I mean everybody! The story ends with him in a room looking into the mirror and seeing a girl asking "where are you?'.

Two other personal favourites are by JG Ballard (from War Fever).

1) The Greatest Theme Park in the World, about tourists on the Mediterranean who refuse to go back to their home countries/work, basically get obsessed with their bodies, begin a fascistic body/sun cult and end up invading the northern countries. All told at an amazing pace btw. not a word wasted.

2) the other one I forget the title of again ;) It's about some astronauts who discover a space-ship and start to walk around, every time the spaceship seems to grow, so every time they give an estimate how big it is supposed to be, at the end it's as big as the universe. Freaky tale.

Q: is it ok to use 'dig' in written conv. if you would not in spoken?

most of the good things in the world = nonsense that should be left behind with our high school days. it's all downhill from there, i've decided.

short stories in six words:
http://blog.wired.com/sixwords/

most seem to have a Twilight Zone quality:

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss...?
- Neil Gaiman

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/2214254&threshold=3)

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

another one i love who hasn't been mentioned: yu hua, who is kind of like modern china's answer to borges...but way more gruesome.

i think JCO has written exactly one good short story, "where are you going, where have you been?" i read that in highschool and thought it was so perfect that i started trying to track down everything she did (of COURSE i barely scratched the surface, but i read a ton of her short fiction anyways) and nothing even came close. lots of crap about boring academics having affairs with each other. also, her story in the new yorker a couple weeks ago was pointlessly depressing and horrible.

2. I love continually coming across the bits of 2001 ILX where people thought it was quite cool and mature to be bored with that "high-school" Salinger. If I were to do a top ten for short stories there's every chance "The Laughing Man" would show up in it.

3. I think we could probably count this is as an independently functional short story: "The Aquatic Uncle," from Calvino's Cosmicomics, would definitely make that top 10.

4. Also Capote's "A Christmas Memory."

http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/mayonnaise.html

I haven't read it yet, but apparently it's a thinly fictionalized retelling a real-life event from earlier this year. Too thinly, according to some people.

Roald Dahl's collection of war-related short stories 'Over To You' is quite simply incredible.

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

Gustave Flaubert - "A Simple Heart"
Anton Chekhov - "The Kiss"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - "Babylon Revisited"
John Cheever - "The World of Apples"
Katherine Anne Porter - "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"

My favorite living short story writer is Alice Munro, even if many of her later stories blur in the memory; she's really been writing a serialized novel about the lives of young women growing up in western Canada, surviving thanks to myth and memory.

Hemingway is not really my thing, but if every short story ever written by everyone else was crap, he would pretty much singlehandedly redeem the genre. damn him. wait, maybe that's how I can excuse my weird mental block about short stories, claiming that they're inherently macho somehow.

xpost: "Babylon Revisited"! Love! I had to teach that story recently and failed miserably, because all I wanted to do was revel in how much I love it. my students were pretty bored, I think.

There's a story I love that I cannot find, remembering neither author nor title (which is pathetic, seeing as I actually heard the author read it). A woman babysists for her sister and her sister's husband while they are staying at a resort. There's a teenage girl from the previous marriage also with them, and the building caretaker also does "deep tissue massage". Sounds daft, but it captures a mood very well.

My name here is a reference to his novel, "The Dead Father"

I just read Cheever's "World of Apples" over lunch -- turned out to have the collected stories in my bag -- and thanks, Alfred!

Great story.

from Come Back, Dr. Caligari

Margins
A Shower of Gold
Me and Miss Mandible
For I'm The Boy
Will You Tell Me?

from Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

The Balloon
The President
Game
Alice
Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning
Report
The Dolt
See The Moon?
The Indian Uprising

from City Life

Views Of My Father Weeping
Paraguay
On Angels
The Phantom Of The Opera's Friend
City Life
Kierkegaard Unfair To Schlegel
The Falling Dog
The Policemen's Ball
The Glass Mountain

from Sadness

Critique de la Vie Quotidienne
The Sandman
Träumerei
The Rise Of Capitalism
A City Of Churches
Daumier
The Party

from Guilty Pleasures

Eugénie Grandet
Nothing: A Preliminary Account

from The Dead Father

A Manual For Sons

from Amateurs

At The End Of The Mechanical Age
Rebecca
The Captured Woman
I Bought A Little City
The Sergeant
The School
The Great Hug
Our Work And Why We Do It

from Great Days

The Crisis
Cortés And Montezuma
The New Music
The Zombies
The King Of Jazz
Morning
The Death Of Edward Lear
The Abduction From The Seraglio
On The Steps Of The Conservatory
The Leap

Previously Uncollected

Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother's House

Borges
Bowles
Calvino
Chekhov
Déon
Fitzgerald
Maugham
Maupassant
William Maxwell
Nabokov
Sartre
Singer
Tatiana Tolstoya

her story in the new yorker a couple weeks ago was pointlessly depressing and horrible.

Loved the ending though.

1. Cortes and Montezuma
2. The School
3. At the End of the Mechanical Age
4. The Great Hug
5. The Policemen's Ball
6. Rebecca
7. See the Moon?
8. The Glass Mountain
9. The Balloon
10. A City Of Churches

100. Nor are eagles plausible, not at all, not for a moment.

Like: huh?

A thousand thanks, Mr. Que, that is indeed the story and the book is available used on Amazon for 50 cents. Double score.

Part of what I like about Calvino -- and part of what's especially on display in "The Aquatic Uncle" -- is that he manages to craft stories that contain both of two things: one on hand they're incredibly cerebral, they're symbolic or allegorical, they can toy with grand thinky things right up to and including semiotics; and on the other hand these same stories are remarkably observant in terms of basic, timeless human emotion and behavior. The stories at the end of Difficult Loves aren't as otherworldly and imaginative as some of his others, but they maintain that same amazing mix, I think. The photography one is really stunning; it spends all this time teasing out the implications of photography as an idea, but it's also really rigorously about how that idea might affect the way conventional people look at life, what impact this piece of technology actually has on our emotional world.

But look to "The Aquatic Uncle" for the best example of this I know. It's placed at a point in evolution where you get an amphibious creature pining for some lovely evolved land-creature, ashamed of his roots in a bog and ashamed of his old-fashioned aquatic uncle, and then once he swallows hard and introduces his leggy land-creature to his uncle, she falls in love with his old aquaticism: this dynamic absolutely amazes me, because it's this unchanging dynamic of aspirations in either direction -- it's absolutely the same as the way we treat a million things now, from class to race to whatever. These are the kinds of enduring root-level human desires and dynamics that Calvino seems to have way more understanding of -- even in the most fanciful and imaginary settings -- than 99% of writers.

Does anybody have any favorite short story collections?

Andre Dubus - either the big-ass collected stories or We Don't Live Here Anymore

Drat. If this were ILM I could edit my own posts to fix that.

-- Josh, Wednesday, June 13, 2001 7:00 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

?!?!

I wonder how Josh is doing. These days he just writes about people he meets on the bus.

Does anybody have any favorite short story collections?

You mean collected short stories of one author, or anthologies?

J: I assume that's because he had mod powers on ILM, but not ILE

You mean collected short stories of one author, or anthologies?

-- franny glass, Friday, December 21, 2007 12:07 AM

The former is what I had in mind.

But of course I won't turn down the latter.

I was going to mention "Fundamental Disch" but then I saw that I already did on this thread.

The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by Malcolm Bradbury.