Who doesn’t like short shorts? Well, lots of people. At the library, almost every week I hear people remark, “I don’t normally like reading short stories.” But we are missing out on some of our favorite authors’ best work if we skip over their short fiction. Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, Daphne du Maurier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Annie Proulx, among many other novelists, have all published powerful and engaging short stories.
What’s so impressive about short fiction is that an author has limited him- or herself to the number of words and scenes and moments he or she can use in order to tell a captivating story. Every word truly counts. Historically, a short story didn’t have a set length, but was a piece of fiction one could finish in one sitting. Interestingly, modernity may have caused a shift in that definition, since the length of time considered a “sitting” has shortened considerably—likely due to our hectic schedules and numerous life demands. Whether or not you are already a short story lover, and especially if you don’t have time for an entire novel but want to experience some fantastic storytelling, check out the list that follows.
The Best of Roald Dahl (1978) by Roald Dahl
••••••
For those familiar with Roald Dahl’s magically dark children’s stories, I beg you to try his stories meant for adults. This is one such collection and includes such tales as “The Man from the South,” about a man who bets a young American he can’t successfully light his cigarette lighter ten times in a row. If he’s successful, the American wins the old man’s car. If he loses, he loses a finger. This one’s been adapted to film several times over the years—my favorite was a segment of Four Rooms by Quentin Tarantino. Dahl was inspired to write because of the stories he made up for his children as he tucked them into bed. I’ve always wanted to visit Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Dahl lived for many years and which houses the magical Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.
Full Dark, No Stars (2010) by Stephen King
••••••
Okay, so the four stories in this collection aren’t exactly short stories—they’re novellas—but they are oh so good. As I experienced after reading his other novella collections, Different Seasons (1982) and Four Past Midnight (1990), these stories gave me the most pleasant nightmares, particularly the one entitled “Big Driver.” In this story, a female author is violently accosted and left for dead following a book-club engagement after the hosting librarian tells her to take a shortcut home. The twist at the end of the story is unbelievable. For me, there is nothing better than a new Stephen King book coming out just before an unplugged vacation at a cabin in the woods.
How to Breathe Underwater (2003) by Julie Orringer
“I am the canker of my brother Sage’s life. He has told me so in no uncertain terms.
Tonight as we eat hamburgers in the car on the way to our first scuba class, he can’t stop talking about the horrible fates that might befall me underwater.
This, even though he knows how scared I am after what happened last November.”
••••••
People say that your age is how you feel on the inside. If that’s true, I’ve been eighty-three years old since I was eleven. Anyone else who has grown up this way will feel for Orringer’s characters in these nine stories—young people who are flung too fast and too far into the messy corners of adulthood, to places where those around them are oblivious to their needs. Filled with memorable characters and tangible scenes, my favorite story of the collection is “The Isabel Fish,” about a teen girl who recently survived drowning in an accident that killed her older brother’s girlfriend, and her parents’ inexplicably clueless attempt to help her confront her fear of water by signing up the siblings for scuba lessons.
Interpreter of Maladies (1999) by Jhumpa Lahiri
••••••
Preceding her novel The Namesake, mentioned in the chapter “American’t Dream,” is this multi-prize-winning collection of nine short stories centering on the Indian-American experience. In the very first story, “A Temporary Matter,” a young couple reveals never-before-shared secrets to each other during the one hour of brownouts they must face for five consecutive evenings. Set against the backdrop of the moon landing, “The Third and Final Continent” is about a thirty-six-year-old man who moves to America to work at MIT and boards with the elderly Mrs. Croft while awaiting the arrival of his new wife from Calcutta. The narrator and Mrs. Croft have a strange and special bond, despite the many barriers that exist between them. Gillian Flynn, a former critic and author of Gone Girl, interviewed Lahiri for Entertainment Weekly just after she learned that she’d earned a Pulitzer for this book. During the interview, Lahiri admitted that “The Third and Final Continent” is about her own father, a university librarian. Lahiri said she was filled with anxiety over what he would think, but upon reading it, he said, “My whole life is in that story.” What is most special to me is Lahiri’s ability to blend the extraordinary with the ordinary and to help readers feel an intimate connection to the characters with few words.
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) by Emma Donoghue
“How was he to know what mattered to me? Perhaps we get, not what we deserve, but what we demand.”
••••••
As long as there have been fairy tales, there have been fairy tales with a twist. This collection of thirteen tales is the best of that sort. Using the same rhythm and patterns of age-old fairy tales, Donoghue reveals characters including Cinderella and Snow White as we’ve never seen them before—as three-dimensional, sensual, free women who choose themselves (or even the fairy godmother) over the prince. The way these seemingly disparate stories are woven together is perfectly done. Feminist fairy tales for the win!
Knockemstiff (2008) by Donald Ray Pollock
“My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at.”
••••••
The stories of complete and utter fuckeduptitude that haunt this book are gritty, dark, and, yes, even funny, albeit it’s a nervous sort of laughter that will escape your lips. Intersected by time and recurring characters, the stories can be consumed alone or as a string of bleak, grim little bits. From “Hair’s Fate,” in which a father gives his son an unorthodox hair cut as a punishment for having sexual relations with his sister’s doll, to “Bactine,” which centers on the most backwoods way I’ve ever heard of to get high, the stories are filled with drugs, mental disorders, subversive sexual acts, and myriad methods of dying. If anyone offers you an all-expenses-paid trip to Knockemstiff, Ohio (yes, it’s a real almost-ghost town near the author’s hometown), run the other way.
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges
••••••
From an Argentine author, librarian, dabbler in mathematics and physics, lecturer, and professor comes this collection of short fiction, essays, and parables. Perhaps the most famous of these is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a mock literary review of a fictional French author who seeks to recreate Cervantes’s famous work The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by rewriting it, line for line. My favorite story of the collection, however, is “The Garden of Forking Paths,” where readers encounter a never-ending book where at every twist and turn of the story, all possibilities are written and the branches of the story grow exponentially and into infinity. I was surprised to learn that this story isn’t in fact the inspiration for the second-person Choose Your Own Adventure children’s book series that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ladies and Gentlemen (2011) by Adam Ross
“He imagined it was something a hummingbird must feel: an awareness of moving with great rapidity while the surrounding world remains stuck in slow motion.”
••••••
And so it goes. Containing seven forty- to sixty-page stories written in matter-of-fact prose and filled with characters who could easily be your friends or neighbors, this book tugs you along for a ride through fidelity, mortality, isolation, and miscommunication between usually well-meaning folks. “When in Rome” is about a strained relationship between brothers with a violent twist, and “The Rest of It” centers on a college campus maintenance man who tells a loser professor his tales of wild adventures involving murder and drug smuggling. A theme throughout the collection is that of storytelling—or lying, as the case may be. Almost every story features a character who would make a fantastic author.
Lost in the City (1992) by Edward P. Jones
“On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.”
••••••
Lost in the City is a collection of midcentury African-American Washington, D.C. slice-of-life stories filled with a diverse range of characters, from a loving father who wakes before his daughter to check her pigeon coop for dead birds, to the young man who finally finds his place in the work force only to be offered “severin pay” when the owner of the store decides to sell. Rich but straightforward storytelling fills this collection of fourteen stories. As the Washington Post journalist Neely Tucker points out, there are fourteen stories in Lost in the City and fourteen stories in Jones’s book All Aunt Hagar’s Children. “The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on,” he writes. Isn’t that wonderfully interesting? Tucker’s rich interview with the author reveals Jones to be a most humble, down-to-earth, kind man, which makes me love his writing even more.
Orientation and Other Stories (2011) by Daniel Orozco
“We pace our work according to the eight-hour workday. If you have twelve hours of work in your in-box, for example, you must compress that work into the eight-hour day. If you have one hour of work in your in-box, you must expand that work to fill the eight-hour day.”
••••••
The brilliant title story of this collection begins with, well, an orientation at your new office job. (The entire story is told in the second-person, making “you” a specific, if universal, character.) In this office, like all offices, is a cast of colorful characters, from the woman who prophesies deaths, to the man who sometimes uses the ladies room for no perverse (or even good) reason, to the penguin-loving office-party planner who cries any chance she gets. The other stories in this collection are as equally appealing as “Orientation” because they underline the humor of something as mundane and ordinary as the workplace.
The Outlaw Album: Stories (2011) by Daniel Woodrell
••••••
Dropping readers right into Ozark Plateau country in the middle of America, Daniel Woodrell entrances and horrifies us with twelve short tales of off-handed murder, uncles who rape and maim, kidnapped children, arson, and other dark and gritty topics that reek of desperation and bleakness in the best way possible. Now, every time I drive through this part of the country, I think of this grim collection and wonder how many shallow graves I’m passing as I drive along the twisty roads. For more Ozark noir, also check out Woodrell’s novel Winter’s Bone (2006), featured in the chapter “My Family Is Weirder Than Yours.”
Runaway: Stories (2004) by Alice Munro
••••••
No list of short fiction would be complete without at least one collection from Munro, the master of the genre. Within Runaway are eight stories about tiny, but ultimately significant, moments in the lives of women. From the weepy Carla, who is involved with a mercurial, menacing man, to Juliet, who is used to “feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul,” to Robin, who discovers too late that a small misunderstanding has cost her a chance at romance, each character gains subtle insight into her thoughts, decisions, and actions. Munro’s prose leaves me entranced and thoughtful, and I see traces of myself and women I know in the characters of this book.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) by Philip Gourevitch
••••••
In just one hundred days in 1994, 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were massacred by the Hutu majority. Author Philip Gourevitch reached out to survivors in order to document their harrowing experiences, first in the New Yorker, and later within the pages of his book. The title, which came from a phrase written in a letter from Tutsi pastors to their Hutu church president, is certainly dismal, and genocide is hardly a subject one likes to recommend to another, but this book is an instructive and necessary look at how humans can treat one another. How a church leader could orchestrate and carry out the murders of his entire congregation. How an ordinary man can suddenly engage in the raping, maiming, and killing of his neighbors. How some governments sat idly by as this was going on, and how others would intervene, only to side with the killers. The author expresses it best in the opening pages: “[T]his is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another—a book about how we imagine our world.” It’s a sobering, eye-opening account that every human should experience and learn from.