What's Your Favorite Short Story?

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"