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.

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.