your favorite short story writers

oh, and i'd like to give a shout-out to brian aldiss. during my summer sci-fi spree, i enjoyed some of his stories very much.

Andre Dubus, definitely. Collections like The Last Worthless Evening and Adultery changed my whole perspective on the validity of the form. I recently read "My Christina and Other Stories" by Merce Rodoreda, a Catalan writer, and found the distinct voice of her different characters pretty amazing. It was first published in the 60s but reads as fresh as anything today. Steve Stern's "The Wedding Jester" is one of my top reads for this year: entertaining, complex, humorous, painful, imaginative -- I don't understand why his books aren't more popular.

i really dig kevin moffett. he won the iowa short fiction award last year i believe and his collection is called "permanent visitors"

Gene Wolfe, Poe, Ray Bradbury, H. G. Wells, Pasha Malla, Frank Herbert, W. W. Jacobs, Jerome K. Jerome

The Rocking Horse Winner by DH Lawrence was one I studied at school and it has stuck with me for the last (counts...) well, for over half my life.

Maupassant's a master, of course. My favourite is La Parure (The Necklace?) The opening line is something like "She was one of those pretty and charming girls, born as if by an error of destiny into a family of employees" and it kind of sums up the whole story.

More recently I have really loved some of Tim Gautreaux's short stories. There's one I particularly liked about a grandfather taking care of his grandaughters which was touching without being soppy (a difficult line to tread).

Welding With Children was the title of the story (and the collection).

Katherine Mansfield is THE master of short fiction as far as I'm concerned. Tobias Wolff is a close second.

There's also Borges, of course, and I remember loving Witi Ihimaera's Pounamu collection.

googling around has revealed my dude kevin moffett studied under Barry Hannah which makes a good deal of sense.

also, just on current stuff, i did actually like the Miranda July collection quite a bit, but i think it was somewhat addressed on another thread and got an (understandable) amount of flak.

Borges
Maugham
Tolstoya
Maupassant
Delmore Schwartz
Hemingway
Fitzgerald
Kafka
Sartre

all immediately come to mind

i don't know if i've ever read any short stories by sartre! novels and plays, but not short stories.

i love katherine mansfield too. she was the bomb.

i loved tobias wolff's *in the garden of the north american martyrs* collection.

scott bradfield! i used to dig his short stories. though he's probably best known for his novel *the history of luminous motion*.

who is "Tolstoya"

anyway, George Saunders, Ann Beattie, and Gary Lutz.

so far:
raymond carver
tobias wolfe
fitzgerald
katherine mansfield
grace paley
alice munro
miranda july (i know a lot of ppl who hated it but i loved it)
salinger
denis johnson's "jesus' son"
maggie dubris' "weep not, my wanton"
richard ford

i think there are more that i can't remember.

i loved the miranda july. the denis johnson collection is the only book of his i actually thought was good.

yeah i didn't like much of his other stuff, except "the name of the world" but "jesus' son" is just amazing.

Not mentioned yet:
Haruki Murakami
H.P. Lovecraft

it makes me kinda sad that july gets bagged so much: i don't think she's pretentious at all, and i think her short story collection has this really great insight into the private world we each have, the one that no one else ever accesses.

Anton Chekhov
William Trevor
Alice Munro
Katherine Mansfield
Stefan Zweig
DH Lawrence (much better at short stories than novels, in my opinion)
W Somerset Maugham (ditto)
Guy du Maupassant
Grace Paley
Tobias Wolfe
F Scott Fitzgerald (the Pat Hobby stories especially are fantastic, but almost all great)
Jorge Luis Borges
Franz Kafka
Joseph Roth
Deborah Eisenberg
David Gates
HG Wells
Richard Yates
MR James (supernatural stuff)
Phil K Dick

Updike has some terrific short stories too, fwiw. i mean, he has some terrific novels also.

Also: Jack London

i keep meaning to find some richard yates, but haven't gotten round to it. i also need to read some jack london - 'call of the wild' was like my favourite book when i was 10.

Elizabeth Bowen, Julio Cortazar (esp in weird sketches like in Cronopios y Famas), James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, James Thurber, Flannery O'Connor, S.J. Perelman (well I say they're short stories dammit), James Tiptree Jr., R.A. Lafferty, Bernard Malamud.

also: john yau

my son's sixth grade class is reading 'call of the wild' now!

oh damn, right right Donald Barthelme

I've never read any of London's novels - I'd like to read Call of the Wild at some point. His stories are great though.

Damn, yes, Donal Barthelme too.
Also...
Lorrie Moore
Jancy Willett (only 1 book of stories, 20 years ago, but it's awesome)
Edith Wharton
John Cheever

lots of canadians:
sharon butala
eden robinson
alice munro
margaret atwood
caroline adderson
zsuzsi gartner
bill gaston

the sci-fi short story is one of my favourite forms of fiction, but i don't have any particular favourites, aside from the classics (ray bradbury, arthur c clarke, john wyndham)

(the once lionized, now neglected) Denton Welch
Evan S. Connell
Kafka
Borges (although I think my enthusiasm for him has weakened)

I also really like this one story, "Night of the Gryla," by William Heinesen. And these things I do always mention.

I recently read "My Christina and Other Stories" by Merce Rodoreda, a Catalan writer

This sounds like the kind of thing I might like.

Couple of contemporary writers: Steven Millhauser and Kelly Link. Both operate in a very loosely defined "dark fantasy" ballpark, though Link is more tied to genre conventions, Millhauser to New Yorker realism. Similar as well in that their work tends to be very still, hypnotic, even depersonalized. Compare in some ways to the early stories of Ray Bradbury and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Oh yeah, and Angela Carter. The Bloody Tower is one of my favorite collections of short stories - this Side of The October Country, anyway.

Stanislaw Lem's sci-fi parables (esp the Cyberiad) are a lot of fun. Similar to Calvino's Invisible Cities, another favorite. Do novels composed of interlinked stories count?

Saki doesn't get mentioned much these days. He's awfully stodgy, but I still like the elegance and nastiness of his stories. And Kipling. Everybody should read the Jungle Book(s) and the Just-So Stories.

I love some of Stephen Dixon's stories (especially the ones collected in Friends, Movies, and Long Made Short). Peter Taylor's "The Old Forest". Jesus' Son. Faulkner and Hemingway. R.K. Narayan.

waht abt this guy
http://www.brooklynrail.org/article_image/image/2056/BK-Griffin.jpg

love him. still need to buy the collected stories.

that leonard michaels book is probably the best book i read last year. sooooo good.

MR James seconded - the only traditional ghost stories worth reading I reckon, but boy are they worth it. Make sure you only read in the dark on your own though...

No mention of Ballard? He's highly variable - all the Vermillion Sands stuff is appalling I think - but his shorter, psychological scifi stories are classic. Track 12 probably my favourite of all time, ultra short but perfectly formed.

borges, jean rhys, saki, poul anderson

goat song by poul anderson is good to read

Roald Dahl.

Also Stephen King for The Long Walk.

Since I got a book of his for Christmas R.A. Lafferty is my new favourite answer for this. The guy was brilliant and there's something uplifting about an SF writer who doesn't do much in the way of dystopias.

I did Katherine Mansfield short stories for Eng Lit A Level with an old bag of a teacher who put me right off. Maybe it's time I tried again.

I think I might still want to bludgeon the protagonists in Something Childish But Very Natural though.

Amy Hempel, and I think I love Raymond Carver now.

salinger, wodehouse, harlan ellison, ray bradbury, lovecraft

I've tried so much to get into Harlan Ellison, but no success. And every time I read something really good by Bradbury, I then come across something awfully folksy and sugary that makes me very cross. But Wodehouse, he's ace. And much of Lovecraft is too, in a mental, purple-prose way.

H E had to get his teeth into you when you were an adolescent, I think.
I doubt "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or "I Go To Sleep Angry Every Night And Wake Up Angrier Every Morning" would hit an adult quite so hard.

jorge luis borges
john ohara
john cheever
lorrie moore

honestly I've never liked short stories all that much, other than a few touchstones I read and re-read.

I can't believe I didn't put Salinger. He was so obvious I overlooked him. Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut must be my favourite short story, like ever.

Not a great one for short stories, but want to second Chekhov. Went through a phase last autumn of reading him (mostly out of that Richard Ford selection from his stories) and thinking "But this is LIFE ITSELF!". Then I dropped off a bit. Still, the slightly longer stuff like "An Anonymous Story", "Ward Number 6" particularly good.
Really only popped up to also give another shout for Kipling. "The Bridge Builders", "The Gardener", "Wireless", "The Finest Story in the World" "The Wish House" - terrific borderline fantasy stuff with odd mystical-emotional intensity. He's not someone I think of for quiet realism (though "Mary Postgate" maybe, sort of), but for everything else (SF, Medieval Science speculation in the "Eye of Allah", revenge obsession), he's very worth a try if you haven't. Two good one volume selections - an Everyman Hardback and one from the Fantasy Masterworks (which shows his range more than the imprint might lead you to expect.)
Also like Ballard, Trevor, Wodehouse, Waugh.

Kipling also did some great early science-fiction - 'With the Night Mail' and 'As Easy as ABC' I think are the titles.

stephen dixon

and no one's mentioned david foster wallace but oblivion is great

David Foster Wallace. I am brimming with venom. For him, and for his ilk, the David Eggers, the Jonathan Safran Foers, the Mark Z. Danielewskis.

Sorry for being negative. Oblivion had moments of intelligence and humanity, and is the best I've read from DFW.

He's not really a great short story writer--his real talent is the novel.

Also he and Eggers and Foer have very different styles.

those three writers you mentioned i have no taste for but i love dfw's work since and incl. infinite jest

he has nothing to do w/ those people

I learned the phrase "filthy lucre" from "The Rocking Horse Winner"; we read it in Junior Great Books in jr high sometime. It made very little sense to me at the time.

"Junior Great Books": what is this thing of which you speak? Sounds like the name you'd give something to stop kids who might be interested from being interested.

It was an after-school thing where you got to read short stories and excerpts from more advanced (adult) fiction while in like 6th-8th grades, when your regular level Reading/English classes were stupid. Then you'd discuss the stories in yr group. It was all right. Only like 8 people in my group so that's already several miles better than normal school.

i was in great books! from 4th grade to 8th, i think. we did it during school though and I got to get out of class. I remember reading The Rocking Horse Winner too. And To Build A Fire.

maybe that's where my love for the short story comes from. i associate them with getting out of jail.

Ah--sounds better than I thought, then. I assume this is a US thing?

A surprising number of the short stories were from the fantasy-ish genre, considering they were supposed to be LIDERACHUR. The one about the men who go back in time to hunt dinosaurs and one of them steps on a butterfly and when they get back the bad guy has been elected president...also the one where the Future Children are neglected by their Future Parents and so they turn their Virtual Reality room into a sere desert and lock their parents in it and the Virtual Lions somehow come and eat them. I learned the world "veldt" from that one.

http://www.greatbooks.org/

it did feel kind of exclusionary though. i mean, not everyone got to do it! and once i was in the program i just stayed in it year after year. and they were small groups, like laurel said. all brainy kids. every school is different probably. my school system was big on rewarding the brains. they'd let you do all kinds of stuff on your own if they thought you were a fancypants.

What an interesting take on the situation. I mean I dunno where you grew up but my school had almost nothing for students who were done early/bored by normal work. Just fill out the worksheets like everyone else so I can give you a grade, and stop bringing extra-curricular reading to class or I'm confiscating it.

yates yates yates. vollmann. yates yates. dubus, sometimes. crane, sometimes. yates.

Anybody read the Vice (I know) fiction issue? I know I did. Miserable, kill-them-now, drug-addled BULLSHIT from Vollman, Jim Shepard and Nick Tosches, as well as a super-gr8 Mary Gaitskill story and and entertaining WTF by someone I've never heard of about Aztec gods and killing machine duck babies. Also two nice, spooky sort-of-folktales set in China, one by a visitor, the other a local.

Want to read more Gaitskill now, as I've never read any. Recommendations?

*Bad Behavior* and *Because They Wanted To* are both good Gaitskill short story collections. Um, they are also her ONLY short story collections, so that makes it easy to narrow it down. I was not a fan of her first novel, Two Girls, Fat & Thin, but it's been years since I read it. I didn't read her last novel, Veronica.

Veronica was great!

yates yates yates

^^^^

David Foster Wallace. I am brimming with venom. For him, and for his ilk, the David Eggers, the Jonathan Safran Foers, the Mark Z. Danielewskis.

-- Chelvis, Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:46 AM

There's something that ties these guys together (outside of publishing relationships), but I can't put my finger on what it is. Ideas?

Reading a cheapie second-hand huge colection of Frank O'Hara short stories, which I am much enjoying, and have enjoyed stuff by him in the past too, but never thought of him for this thread. He was hugely successful in his time, but seems to have pretty much faded from view these days. Not that all his novels were that great, but when they were good they could be very good.

Balls! John O'Hara!

There's something that ties these guys together (outside of publishing relationships), but I can't put my finger on what it is. Ideas?

Nothing?

David Foster Wallace. I am brimming with venom. For him, and for his ilk, the David Eggers, the Jonathan Safran Foers, the Mark Z. Danielewskis.

-- Chelvis, Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:46 AM

There's something that ties these guys together (outside of publishing relationships), but I can't put my finger on what it is. Ideas?

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver

Nothing?

-- Mr. Que

Well, with Danielewski in the list, the "nothing" answer wins. But cut him out, and it's a semi-reasonable question.

Dave Eggers and JS Foer seem very similar to one another in certain respects: ironic/postmodern/metafictional sort of by defalt, as a generational thing without "experimental" baggage; seemingly similar age/class/education/place-in-the-world; explicitly concerned with issues, subjects and "others" (i.e., conspicuously liberal).

It's tempting to lump David Foster Wallace in that group, too, but he doesn't belong. Surface similarities, but he's much more cynical, hermetic, and aggressively intellectual. I get a weird sense of disassociative outsider-ness from his work, something uncomfortable, even disturbing in the sensibility, whereas Eggers and Foer, no matter how self-obsessed they get, always come across as emotionally healthy and reassuring.

explicitly concerned with issues, subjects and "others" (i.e., conspicuously liberal).

this is every book ever. every book ever written is concerned with a subject.

Eggers fiction isn't metafictional at all! it was A Heartbreaking Work that fits into that category of "ironic/postmodern/metafictional" best, and it was non-fiction, oddly enough.

ironic/postmodern/metafictional

I'd consider AHWoSG all of those things, and some of his short fiction too. Plus that sensibility is a big part of the McSweeny's identity, both as a magazine and as an imprint.

As for the "subjects" thing: sure, all writing has a subject. By putting "issued, subjects and others" in a group, and by putting scare-quotes on issues, I hoped to suggest certain types of subjects and approaches. A humanist streak, perhaps with some entitlement baggage.

how can non-fiction be metafictional????????

Meta-nonfiction if that makes more sense. Exactly the same premise. It's a non-fiction novel, after all. And it's writing that addresses the writer, the writer's consciousness of "the writer", and the act of writing for an audience. Again, in an off-the-cuff, style-based manner that makes it seem more like an ingrained way of thinking than an experiment.

Hell, the title of the book is a metafictional conceit.

Rebecca Brown is one of my favorite short-story writers when she's in a hyperreal mode. The Gifts of the Body, especially, and The End of Youth.

Charles Baxter's A Relative Stranger, that's a good collection.

re: Danielewski, wtf is the d00dz deal anyway? any payoff for the headgames or should I just go and try to get through The Tunnel again?