famous short stories 20th century

Bite-sized: 50 great short stories, chosen by Hilary Mantel, George Saunders and more

Quick and easily shared, is the short story the form for our times? Leading authors pick their favourites

“The Tribute” by Jane Gardam (1980)

John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardam’s 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters . Reading this gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of “diplomatic wives”, trailing inebriate husbands through the ruins of empire. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which a small kindness – though not by a diplomatic wife – pays off 40 years later. I must have read it a dozen times, to see how its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung; every time it makes me smile with delight. Hilary Mantel

“The Stone Boy” by Gina Berriault (1957)

This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on good and evil and especially about the way that people’s expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down and eventually force us into compliance with their view. But it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like any great work of art, resists reduction. Berriault, who died in 1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. A wonderful sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories . George Saunders

“The Love of a Good Woman” by Alice Munro (1998)

Among the handful of short stories closest to my heart, I’ve chosen “The Love of a Good Woman” by Canadian writer Munro, from her 1998 collection of that name. It’s about a murder – probably it’s a murder, because nothing is certain – and a love match that depends on keeping that murder secret. Like so many of Munro’s stories, this one has the scope of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. The sociology of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the loose weave of her narration; the story takes in whole lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us deep inside particular moments. A woman moves among the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. Tessa Hadley

“The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961)

Born in Palermo in 1896, Lampedusa was a learned prince who died before his work was published. In addition to his celebrated novel The Leopard , he left behind some short stories, including “The Siren”, a mysterious masterpiece that jolts and haunts me every time I read it. It contains two narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two tonal registers and two points of view. There are even two titles; though published as “La Sirena”, it was originally called “Lighea”, the name of the siren, portrayed as a 16-year-old girl. Lampedusa’s description renders this fatefully seductive creature specific, vulnerable and real. Jhumpa Lahiri The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March.

“A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877)

Flaubert wrote this story for his old friend and “fellow troubadour” George Sand. It’s the story of Félicité, an old servant-woman, and the diminishing loves in her life, the final one being a (live – at first) parrot. It has a sombre novelistic density, and is touching and tender, comic and grotesque. Control of tone is central to its effect. It also exemplifies the Flaubertian principle that irony and sympathy are not incompatible. Sand died before she was able to read it. “So it is with all our dreams,” noted Flaubert. Julian Barnes

“Friends” by Grace Paley (1985)

This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is dying. The women then go home on the train. It ends with a brief conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-year-old son. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold spaces within it. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of the world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions, our children’s colonisation of our hearts and our powerlessness ultimately to protect them. Its understated tone is perfectly pitched: the narrative moves gently, then soars, into either sadness, or joyful contentment – again and again. I am in this story, and so is the world. Ahdaf Soueif

“My Life” by Anton Chekhov (1896)

This is Chekhov’s longest short story and one of the very few he wrote in the first-person singular. It’s the autobiography of a young man in provincial Russia struggling to live up to his lofty ideals and being brought down by life’s random contingencies. I actually adapted “My Life” for a play and know it intimately. If you could only read a single Chekhov story then this is the one: all his gifts and genius – the wry, dark comedy of his voice, his unique angle on the human condition, his refusal to judge – are contained in it. William Boyd

“In the Night” by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)

Part poetic incantation, part eccentric kaleidoscopic vision, this is a story which contorts each time you read it. Born in Antigua, Kincaid invents aesthetics which are wholly unique, transfiguring human form and surroundings, in particular, the Caribbean landscapes. Here, she conveys the multiple textures of smaller islands, creating a literary geography which remains experimental, new and indefinable. Irenosen Okojie

“Music at Annahullion” by Eugene McCabe (2004)

McCabe’s story is set on the border between Monaghan and Fermanagh sometime in the 1950s or 60s. Two brothers and a sister are uneasily sharing a smallholding. The landscape itself and the states of sour feeling are described with sharpness and precision. When the sister announces that she would like a piano that is advertised for sale locally, one of the brothers buys it for her. But it won’t fit into the house and is left to rot outside. The failure to get the piano into the house has an extraordinary power and pathos. Its purchase has stood for all hope, and now there is no hope. The hard-won sense of despair and darkness in the final pages of this small masterpiece is memorable and chilling. Colm Tóibín

“Werner” by Jo Ann Beard (2007)

Only afterwards did I discover that this was in fact a piece of densely textured reportage, but it taught me so much about how to write a short story that I will always see it as one. A young man, Werner Hoeflich, trapped by a fire, escapes by leaping from the window of his New York apartment, across the intervening gap and in through the window of the adjacent building. It has the richness of a novel, the raw and dirty grip of life and was, for me, a revelation. Fine language and a deftly conjured mood are all well and good, but fiction – of whatever length – should thrill. Mark Haddon

“The Window Theatre” by Ilse Aichinger (1953)

Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee – this translation of one of Aichinger’s most famous stories provides windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark, precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)

Poe’s obsessive theme was the terror of losing sanity – never more dramatically evoked than in this masterpiece. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, one of Poe’s shortest “tales of the grotesque and arabesque”, and the one that seems most contemporary in the hallucinatory intensity of its narration, an unnamed individual commits a brutal, seemingly unprovoked murder of an old man with whom he lives, disposes of the body by dismembering and burying it beneath the floorboards of the residence they share, and succumbs to madness and self-destruction in the aftermath of guilt. Throughout, the narrator insists on his sanity: “True – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.” That the murder is entirely irrational is acknowledged by the murderer: “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.”

Poe is a master of the “unreliable narrator” – a voice that speaks with devastating spontaneity and is utterly convincing – that has come to be a staple of much suspense and horror fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unhampered by the literary pretensions of certain of Poe’s other, longer stories, totally committed to its unrepentant pathology, and its visceral celebration of this pathology, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the very essence of Poe, as Poe is himself the very essence of the American gothic tradition. Joyce Carol Oates

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce (1890)

Many readers might come to this from the short film, made rather confusingly in French. But it’s a tale set during the American civil war. Peyton Farquhar is being hanged by Union soldiers on a small bridge in Alabama. To say more might ruin the experience of reading it. When I happened on the story a few years ago, I thought I might be one of only a few intrepid readers. Of course, it is considered to be one of the best stories in American literature. Sebastian Barry

“After Rain” by William Trevor (1996)

William Trevor has influenced me more than any other writer, and it’s impossible for me to name one story by him that is an absolute favourite. I can, however, name 20 to 30 stories that I return to often. One of these is “After Rain”. A woman travels alone to recover from a love that has ended too abruptly, but the wish that solitude could exorcise loneliness is as faulty as the wish that love could exorcise disappointment brought by love. The story to me is like an eye drop for the mind. It doesn’t offer a resolution to life’s muddiness, but it offers a moment of clarity. Yiyun Li

“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William H Gass (1968)

The thing that is most striking about this story, aside from its restrained, grave beauty, is that it should manage to be so moving. On one level it is a dryly detailed and topographically exact portrait of a small town in the American midwest, but on another it is a devastating threnody for lost love. Gass was one of the great prose stylists, and the writing here is typically smooth and pellucid, conjuring its effects by stealth and unflagging control. Simply, and by simple means, a masterpiece. John Banville

“American Express” by James Salter (1988)

The temporal shifts in James Salter’s short fiction are its distinguishing glory. Decades unfold inside the beat of a sentence; a single moment might linger unspoken for many pages. Time seems to concertina, expanding and contracting to open out pockets of aromatic description. In “American Express”, a pair of venal New York lawyers make a shabby killing and embark with their riches on a playboy jaunt through Italy, where one of them takes up with a schoolgirl. The story deals in oxymorons – bitter desire, weak power – and jolts to a conclusion that is harsh, cool, indelible. Kevin Barry

“Paradise” by Edna O’Brien (2014)

Key to a great short story is the tension and torsion created within each sentence. “Paradise” combines remarkable disquiet, poetry and narrative drive. O’Brien is a phenomenal architect of landscape, both physical and human, imbuing her setting with exact detail, lush discomfort, intrigue and counterintuitive fate. The main character, a nurse, has been taken to the overseas villa of her rich lover. Not only must she learn to swim and entertain his companions, she’s interviewing – without any real prospect – for the position of wife. The story is lit with sexual chemistry, but travels a horribly misaligned path. Its true test lies in finding an exit from the female dream. Sarah Hall

“Hands” by Sherwood Anderson (1916)

This is a strange, dark little story. Its charm comes from the eccentricities of its subject, former schoolteacher Wing Biddlebaum, since “the story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands”. Anderson evokes the Ohio town of Winesburg by focusing on the hands of its inhabitants. Wing’s hands are “slender, and forever trying to conceal themselves” and he notices how the hands of those around him are “quieter, inexpressive”. And it’s the wandering hands of Wing Biddlebaum, who has changed his name from Adolph Myers, that leads to the story’s disturbing conclusion. Guy Gunaratne

“Let It Snow” by David Sedaris (2003)

Sedaris is in the fifth grade when heavy snow closes the schools. After a few days, his mother breaks down: “Get the hell out of my house,” she says, “and stay out!”. The little Sedarises go off sledding and return to find the door locked against them. They peer through the window to see their mother watching TV and glugging wine. ‘Open the door,’ they yell, ‘it’s us!’. She closes the drapes on them. “That bitch!” shouts a Sedaris sister. Fun turns to fear, mild sibling savagery follows and then, suddenly, it’s OK again.

A story – more memoir than fiction – that starts with the recognition that the very sight of you drives your mother to drink is attractive to me. But when it ends with that mother wading barelegged through five inches of snow to reach you, it’s everything a story should be. It’s The Sound of Music / Lord of the Flies / Owl Babies in a few short pages. He is a genius. Nina Stibbe . Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe will be published by Viking on 28 March .

“The Distance of the Moon” by Italo Calvino (1963)

This is a gloriously sensual story, narrated by a man who wants another’s wife – but the true star of the show is the moon. Calvino imagines it so close it risks dipping its scales in the sea. Fishermen gather lunar milk as the protagonist writhes in unrequited love. It is a great example of magic realism – full of texture and motion and mischief and longing. Leone Ross Come Let Us Sing Anyway , by Leone Ross, is published by Peepal Tree.

Contemporary and classic tales picked by Chris Power

“civil peace” by chinua achebe (1971).

Achebe didn’t write many short stories (in the preface to his 1972 collection, Girls at War , he notes that “a dozen pieces in twenty years must be accounted a pretty lean harvest by any reckoning”), but his best are deeply memorable. “Civil Peace” takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Biafran war, and gives vivid life to the luck and misfortune experienced by Jonathan Iwegbu – an incorrigible optimist in a devastated society – and the surviving members of his family.

“In a Bamboo Grove” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1921)

Akutagawa’s ingenious riddle of a story takes the form of seven testimonies given to a magistrate in the course of a murder investigation. A samurai has been found dead in a bamboo grove, but the narrative doesn’t end with the confession of the notorious bandit Tajōmaru. Instead, two subsequent testimonies, that of the samurai’s wife and of the samurai himself, via a spirit medium, contradict each other and the bandit’s story, and ask the reader to turn investigator and puzzle out the truth.

“Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood (1983)

Alice Munro once said: “I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it’s still happening … I don’t want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that’s what happened.” Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isn’t death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isn’t what happens, but how and why.

“Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin (1965)

A southern white deputy sheriff tries and fails to have sex with his wife. As she goes to sleep he talks about the vicious beating he gave a black protestor earlier that day, and returns to a deeper and even darker memory from his childhood: the ritual killing of a black man. After the killing, there was a picnic. Baldwin doesn’t deny his character humanity, but as the story’s shocking climax shows, neither does he forgive him.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

When described in summary, there is a danger of reducing Borges to a collection of tropes: labyrinths, mirrors, invented books (he avoided “the madness of composing vast books” by pretending they exist and writing commentaries on them). But with these elements he explored some of the most thrilling ideas in fiction. Labyrinths and strange books are both present here, as is a theory of existence that anticipates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Extraordinarily, all these elements are enfolded within an account of a wartime espionage mission.

“This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski (1946)

From spring 1943 to summer 1944 the young Polish poet Borowski was a political prisoner in Auschwitz. His stories are some of the darkest documents in world literature. This one describes the narrator’s first shift as a kapo unloading trains packed with Jewish men, women and children. Borowski’s prose alternates between a blunt numbness and image making of extraordinary power.

“The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter (1979)

In The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter rewrote some of the best known fairytales – “Beauty and the Beast”, “Snow White”, “Bluebeard” – challenging their assumptions about gender, sexual cruelty and morality. In “The Company of Wolves” Red Riding Hood is no longer the meek victim of the wolf, but a woman of agency and courage who uses her sexuality to tame him.

“Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver (1981)

The best Carver stories don’t require the conventional techniques of exposition or backstory but create an extraordinary immediacy. Here we witness a man who has taken his furnishings and arranged them on his lawn: bed, couch, desk, turntable, lamp. It’s all for sale, and as the man gets drunk with a young couple looking to furnish their apartment, we can guess how he has got here. But a hangnail of the unknowable remains, and stays long in the memory.

“The Country Husband” by John Cheever (1954)

Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife ), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote.

“An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad (1897)

Kayerts and Carlier, agents for the Great Trading Company, are “two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals” left in charge of a remote trading station. Conrad mines a deep vein of irony as he describes their work “serving the cause of progress”. As the story unfolds, and the men are shown to be idiotic cogs in the engine of colonialism, Conrad exposes the gap between the high-flown language of such projects (“progress”, “civilisation”, “virtue”) and their brutal reality.

“Twilight of the Superheroes” by Deborah Eisenberg (2006)

Eisenberg’s story is high on the list of great literature about 9/11. Since the 1990s she has examined the effects of American power on the world and asked the question one of her characters asks here: “How far away does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it?” The attack on New York, that “terrible day”, although it seemed to come from nowhere, “had been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtain”.

“In the Tunnel” by Mavis Gallant (1971)

Sarah’s father sends her from Canada to Grenoble as a way of ending her relationship with a married professor, but she ends up on the French Riviera. There she meets Roy, an ex-prison inspector, and rashly moves in with him. The story’s charge arises from a combination of wit, the awfulness of the relationship’s collapse, and Gallant’s profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. She talks about her characters in a way that makes you feel your own perceptiveness is being worked like a muscle.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

During her lifetime Gilman was best known for her nonfiction, and she was forgotten after her suicide. Her fiction, in particular “The Yellow Wallpaper”, was rediscovered in the 1970s by feminist academics. This chilling story takes the “madwoman” figure of gothic fiction, memorably used by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre , and describes her experience from the inside looking out. Having been told to avoid mental stimulation by her doctor following an episode of depression, Gilman wrote the story to “convince him of the error of his ways”.

“The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol (1842)

It is uncertain whether it was Turgenev or Dostoevsky who said, “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”, but his influence on those writers – as well as on Tolstoy, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and many more – is profound. The main character of this bleakly hilarious story, the downtrodden government clerk Akaky Akakievich, is arguably the first antihero in modern literature, and his doomed pursuit of a new overcoat one of the most memorably absurd quests in fiction.

“Six Feet of the Country” by Nadine Gordimer (1953)

The reality of apartheid, and later the effects of its aftermath, dominates Gordimer’s fiction. Here her narrator, who has escaped the tension of Johannesburg to play at farming in a rural suburb, becomes enraged when, following the death and autopsy of one of his workers’ brothers, the authorities return the wrong body for burial. Despite his efforts to achieve justice, the story’s final, bitterly ironic lines reveal that he is blind to his own racism.

“Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway (1925)

Hemingway’s distinctive style – which John Updike described as “gleaming economy and aggressive minimalism” – is stunningly showcased here. Nick Adams’s journey into the Michigan backwoods is also a journey into his own war-damaged psyche, and his unwillingness to fish the deep water of the swamp a resonant evocation of trauma.

“A Village After Dark” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2001)

The tension in this uncanny piece is stoked by Ishiguro’s refusal to provide more than tantalising fragments of backstory. At nightfall an old man, Fletcher, arrives at a village where he once held great influence, but is now resented (“I was mistaken about a lot of things,” he admits). This might be an alternative Britain, or a future one. The dilapidated buildings and Fletcher’s tramp-like appearance give the story a Beckettian feel, while its allegorical quality carries over to Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant .

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948)

Asked to describe her writing, Jackson once noted its fascination with “the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour”. “The Lottery”, in which a crowd gathers for a ceremony in the main square of a New England village on a sunny June morning, ends with one of the nastiest surprises in fiction. When the New Yorker printed the story it became the “ Cat Person ” of its era as letters flooded in expressing admiration, disgust, and – unbelievably – concern that the gruesome story was true.

“Emergency” by Denis Johnson (1991)

Johnson’s story begins in a hospital emergency room. It’s the night shift, and Fuckhead (his nickname is the only name for him we get) and Georgie are taking care of hospital business while swallowing every pharmaceutical they can get their hands on. When their shift finishes, they drive into the countryside and reality unravels completely. Johnson rides a line between the sacred and the profane, between hilarity and sadness., and writes prose that will take your breath away

“Araby” by James Joyce (1914)

The stories in Dubliners divide into the four stages of life, and “Araby” encapsulates the turbulence and humiliation of adolescence in a boy’s lonely night-time journey across Dublin to buy a gift for the girl he loves.

“A Bright Green Field” by Anna Kavan (1958)

If you love JG Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan. Few novelists, Ballard said, “could match the intensity of her vision”, and that same intensity fuels her stories. The narrator of “A Bright Green Field” claims to encounter the same, unnaturally vivid field of grass wherever she goes. It’s an unlikely candidate for a bete noire, but Kavan’s descriptions of a mountain town in the gathering gloom, loomed over by “the sheer emerald wall that was the meadow”, create an atmosphere of powerful unease.

“Extra” by Yiyun Li (2003)

Granny Lin is 51, and doesn’t know when everyone started calling her granny. Working as a maid at a boarding school in the Beijing suburbs she develops feelings for six-year-old Kang, a rich man’s illegitimate son, an unwanted “extra” who “has to be got rid of”. Granny Lin’s love is complicated; is it maternal, or is it perhaps the great romance she missed out on in her youth? Li has a Chekhovian ability to disappear from the text, allowing a remarkable intensity to develop between reader and story.

“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (2014)

Machado takes a grisly campfire tale (“The Green Ribbon”), combines it with the purported medical practice of suturing a woman’s perineum with an extra stitch or two after childbirth to increase her husband’s pleasure, and creates a powerful modern fable about misogyny and motherhood. Before her wedding day, as Machado expertly builds the atmosphere of foreboding, the narrator notes that, “Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle”.

“Madame Tellier’s House” by Guy de Maupassant (1881)

Maupassant, probably the only short-story writer as influential as Chekhov, wrote in two modes: short, impressively constructed but one-dimensional stories with trick endings (“The Necklace” is the most famous of these), and longer, more interesting work. He wrote “Madame Tellier’s House” after a friend reported passing a brothel in Rouen with a sign on its door saying, “Closed because of First Communion”. His expansion on this irresistible detail resulted in one of his greatest stories.

“A Horse and Two Goats” by RK Narayan (1970)

Narayan, who wrote more than 200 short stories, called them “concentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulence”. The opulence of the clay horse at the centre of this story has faded beneath the Indian sun, but the conversation it triggers between an American tourist who speaks no Tamil and Muni, a poor peasant who speaks no English, is not only very funny, but also telling about the degree to which misunderstanding is an unavoidable part of human interaction.

“Minutes of Glory” by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1976)

This story by Kenya’s most prominent writer follows the struggles of barmaid Beatrice as she works in a succession of increasingly seedy establishments. Men prey on her, buying her body as if it were “a bag of potatoes or a sack of cabbages”, and her hopes of living the high life in Nairobi become more unlikely by the day. “She fought life with dreams,” Ngũgĩ writes, and through a reckless action Beatrice’s fantasies briefly become reality before the story reaches its sorrowful conclusion.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor (1953)

This story is a vicious and darkly funny account of a family’s encounter with a criminal gang led by the psychotic Misfit. Its closing lines, and the apparent act of grace they describe, are as memorable as they are ambiguous.

“We Didn’t Like Him” by Akhil Sharma (2013)

Two boys grow up together on a lane in Delhi. One, the narrator, becomes a lawyer. The other, Manshu, becomes pandit of the local temple. The narrator’s burgeoning dislike for Manshu, the way the events of life bring them back into contact with one another, the Hindu burial process and the mechanics of “putting someone in the Ganges”: these elements are so absorbingly animated that the story’s emotional impact, when it arrives, feels like an ambush.

“Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (2015)

Police shoot two black men outside a comic-book convention in LA, while halfway across the country an artist buys his daughter a cupcake at a vegan bakery. Thompson-Spires’s self-reflexive story is “angry, like a big black fist”, but it’s also breathtaking in the way it loops back and forth in time and constantly second-guesses the reader’s assumptions.

“Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)” by Eley Williams (2015)

“To kiss you,” this story begins, “should not involve such fear of precision.” Williams’s story is less a stream of consciousness than a barrelling wave, as a woman debates whether or not to kiss her girlfriend in an art gallery, and all the doubt, thrill, uncertainty, hilarity and panic of love is compressed into a few seconds of indecision.

• Short stories
• Anton Chekhov

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20 Great American Short Stories

We hope you enjoy reading these stories (there are actually thirty). They represent the first collection published at American Literature. You may also enjoy Favorite Short Story Collections or search The Short Story Library

You may also be interested in The Short Story of the Day and 25 Great American Novels

• The Gift of the Magi (1905) by O. Henry This tender story -- one of the most famous titles in the short story genre -- is a must-read. The story is about a young couple and how they meet the challenge of buying each other a Christmas gifts when they don't have enough money. This sentimental tale has a moral lesson and is widely enjoyed during Christmastime and the holiday season. Study Guide
• The Little Match Girl (1845) by Hans Christian Andersen This is a special seasonal selection for The Holiday Season. It's a story to read for perspective, and is also featured in our Christmas Stories collection. Study Guide
• To Build a Fire (1908) by Jack London A classic Man versus Nature story set in the Yukon Territory in Northwestern Canada. "The dog did not know anything about thermometers" but it had the sense to know "that it was no time for travelling." A brilliant story to read in the depth of winter when a freezing spell is in the forecast or gripping your region.
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890, 1891) by Ambrose Bierce A short story masterpiece: This a suspenseful story about a Civil War soldier, Petyon Farquhar, who has been captured by enemy troops. The story opens in a dangerous predicament, with the soldier about to be hanged, "A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama ... A rope closely encircled his neck." Will Farquhar succeed in his effort to make a daring escape? Study Guide

• A Dark Brown Dog (written 1893, published 1901) by Stephen Crane This a powerful and well written tale of sorrow. The story -- depending on the reader -- can operate on at least two levels; as a simple story about a dog, a child and crushing cruelty. It may also be interpreted as an allegorical social criticism after the American Civil War. Either way, it's a powerful, sad story.
• The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W.W. Jacobs Three wishes and a Monkey's paw. What could go wrong? A horror story in the short story form. And I quote: "The first man had his three wishes. Yes," was the reply, "I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw."
• The Cask of Amontillado (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe A classic revenge story in the horror genre. The story is set in an unspecified Italian city, the protagonist, Motressor believes he has suffered a thousand slights and injuries at the hand of his friend. Montressor invites -- rather tricks --his friend, Fortunato , into tasting some wine stored back at his pallazo in the wine cellar.
• Eve's Diary (1906) by Mark Twain Mark Twain's take on the battle of the sexes is funny and witty and brilliant as he writes once from Eve's perspective and then follows-up from Adam's. A sample observation from Eve, "He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright..." I recommend starting with Eve first, then move over to the companion piece, Extracts from Adam's Diary .

• The Story of an Hour (1894, 1895) by Kate Chopin This dramatic short story -- an early entrant in feminist literature -- was very controversial when published in 1894. It suggests a possibility that people of that era were more comfortable rejecting rather than considering. The story still has the power to make modern readers uncomfortable. But please note that it is possible and sometimes even desirable to criticize an aspect of something to point out a nuanced feature; a quick mind can illuminate part of an arrangement without condemning the entire arrangement. I believe that is what Chopin did here. This suspenseful and climactic story will take you on an emotional journey. Study Guide
• The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) by Bret Harte The hard-luck life of hard-hearted miners changes with the birth of Thomas Luck who draws on the heart strings of the rough and tumble miners of Roaring Camp. Featured in our Civil War Stories
• Regret (1897) by Kate Chopin A beautiful story hinting at the depths of a woman's emotional complexity. A great short story, one that could easily be misunderstood by modern feminists.
• The Skylight Room (1906) by O. Henry This one was selected for its simple poignancy.
• A Horseman in the Sky (1889) by Ambrose Bierce Another interesting story from Ambrose Bierce. This one is also set during the American Civil War. I classify this one under man versus himself. Study Guide
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) by Washington Irving One of the early American classics, and don't forget its famous companion Rip Van Winkle .
• My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832), Young Goodman Brown (1835), and The Minister's Black Veil (1832) by Nathaniel Hawthorne All three of these stories are important examples of Hawthorne's contribution to the genre of Dark Romanticism, and should be read. The first one is my favorite of the three. If you are having trouble understanding the stories, it might be helpful to visit Hawthorne's Home Page for some background, and The Minister's Black Veil Study Guide
• The Cactus (1882) by O. Henry A classic dose of O. Henry coming straight at you. Short and direct. Communication is important.
• The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe "Me crazy? Not at all. Let me prove my sanity by describing how carefully and ingeniously I murdered my victim!"

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865) by Mark Twain The famous story of Dan'l Webster the frog, and his anticipated performance in the jumping contest.
• Scarlet Stockings (~1869) by Louisa May Alcott "[ Belle Morgan ] does and says what she likes, is very blunt and honest, has ideas and principles of her own, goes to parties in high dresses, won't dance round dances, and wears red stockings, though Mrs. Plantagenet says it's fast." Independent, assertive, and clad in scarlet stockings. Lennox is helpless to resist.
• An Angel in Disguise (1851) by T.S. Arthur A sentimental story about love and kindness: "A bond had already corded itself around them both, and love was springing into life."
• Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856) by Herman Melville A widely read story, one of Melville's finest examples of Dark Romanticism, whose interpretation has been widely debated. If you figure out what it means, please let us know!
• The Purloined Letter (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe Poe again, this time with an early entry into the genre of detective stories. Also consider The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget
• A Jury of Her Peers (1917) by Susan Glaspell This short story is based on a murder story that Glaspell covered as a young reporter. It's adapted from her play Trifles which is a selection on the High School list. Read the story and please share it if you like it, Glaspell deserves to be more widely known.

• On the Gull's Road (1908) by Willa Cather A love story complicated by circumstance and protocol.
• The Lottery (1948) by Shirley Jackson A comprehensive summary of The Lottery , Jackson's dramatic and suspenseful short story. This story was probably intended as an allegorical lesson but it sparked controversy and even outrage across the United States, particularly in rural communities like the one where the story takes place.
• Thank You, M'am (1958) by Langston Hughes A comprehensive summary of Thank You, M'am . A compassionate story about what happens when a young boy tries to rob the wrong woman! Forgiving, yet firm: we should all be like Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.

• The Split Cherry Tree (1939) by Jesse Stuart A comprehensive summary of The Split Cherry Tree . TIn this widely read story, set in the rural hills of Kentucky in the 1930s, young Dave Sexton finds himself trapped between the modern world that demands an education and his father's past where hard work may have held more value than "book learning." A conflict arises when he is punished by his teacher, and Dave's father Luster has to make a determination about the value of education.
• The Cat (1901) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Freeman's cunning in crafting this tale is well matched to the cat's marvelous waiting powers, hunting for its prey and anticipating the return of its master.
• The Lady, or the Tiger? (1882) by Frank Stockton The princess has a difficult choice to make. This iconic story has become a catchphrase to describe a problem that has no solution.
• The Night Came Slowly (1895) by Kate Chopin "The night came slowly, softly, as I lay out there under the maple tree."

Ready for more? You may enjoy our Favorite Short Stories Collection . Only have five minutes to spare? Try one of these Short Short Stories , sorted to suit your mood.

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Blog – Posted on Sunday, Jun 17

Best short stories and collections everyone should read.

If you are on the lookout for great storytelling but don’t want to commit to a full-length novel, then short story collections are the answer. Whether it’s just before bed, during your commute, or waiting to see your doctor, small chunks of time are perfect for reading short stories.

Here we have gathered thirty-one of the best short stories and collections , from all sorts of backgrounds and sources, to help you grow your “To Be Read” pile.

For your convenience, we've divided this post into two parts: 1. the ten best free short stories to read right now , and 2. best short story collections. Feel free to jump to the section that you prefer!

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great short stories out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized short story recommendation 😉

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Free Short Stories to Read Right Now

These individual short stories are the best of the best — and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse. From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories for you to read.

1. “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl

While not exactly a philosophical or political tale like our first two examples, this twisty short story from Dahl does delve into some shady moral territory. We are introduced to Mary Maloney: a loving wife and dedicated homemaker. In just a few short paragraphs describing how she welcomes her husband home, Dahl makes us sympathize with Mary — before a rash act turns her life upside down and takes the reader with her on a dark journey.

For those who haven’t read it, we won’t spoil the rest. However, it’s safe to say that Dahl serves up a fiendish twist on a platter.

2. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

A perennial feature in many a high school syllabus, Shirley Jackson’s best-known short story clinically details an unusual ritual that takes place in a small town. There’s not exactly a lot of plot to spoil in The Lottery — but within a few short pages, Jackson manages to represent the mob mentality that can drive reasonable people to commit heinous acts.

3. “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore

Told in the second person point of view , this story from Moore’s debut anthology Self-Help takes an honest look at the inner life of a struggling artist. Through the use of an unusual POV, the author manages to turn her reader into a confidante — making it abundantly clear that the ‘you’ the narrator is speaking about is actually herself.

This story is a standout, but the entire collection is well worth a read for its insight, humor, and disregard for literary norms.

4. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

In the Social Media Age, no short story has gone viral the way this New Yorker contribution from Roupenian has. Arriving at the height of #MeToo, it begins with 20-year-old Margot embarking on the early stages of flirtation with an older man, Robert. As she gets to know more about this man (as well as filling in the gaps with her imagination), the power dynamic in their relationship starts to fluctuate.

Lauded for its portrayal of Margot’s inner life and the fears many modern women face when it comes to dating, it also has its fair share of detractors — many are critical of the central character, some are downright outraged by the story’s success. Still, this story undeniably struck a chord with the reading public, and will likely remain relevant for some time.

5. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, “Cathedral” is today known as one of Raymond Carver’s finest works. When it opens, we meet a narrator whose wife is expecting a visit from an old friend, a blind man. Dissatisfied and distrusting of people not like him, our narrator struggles to connect until the blind man asks him to describe a cathedral to him. 

 “Cathedral” is one of Carver’s own personal favorites, and deservedly so. His characteristic minimalist style is devastating as the story builds up to a shattering moment of emotional truth — an ultimate reminder that no-one else can capture the quiet sadness of working-class people like him. 

6. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

Innocuously titled, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is nevertheless Flannery O’Connor’s bleakest — and most famous — work. It begins unassumingly with a Southern family who’s planning to go on a road trip. Yet the journey is rudely interrupted when their car overturns on an abandoned dirt road — and they are met by an enigmatic group of three men, coming up over the far hill. 

This short story inspired some strong reactions from the public upon publication — and the conversation continues today as to its frank depiction of the nature of good and evil. Again, we won’t spoil anything for you, except to say that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is well worth your time. 

7. “Symbols and Signs” by Vladimir Nabokov

The famous author of Lolita wrote “Signs and Symbols” in 1948. Its premise is seemingly simple: an elderly couple visits their mentally ill son in the sanatorium in America. Yet their background and trials come into sharp focus as the story develops, until an explosive ending disrupts everyone’s peace of mind. 

As you might expect, the somber “Symbols and Signs” diverges sharply from Lolita in terms of both tone and subject — but its ending will keep you awake at night thinking about its implications.  

8. “Sticks” by George Saunders

Not so much a short story as it is flash fiction, “Sticks” is written from the perspective of a young man whose father has an unusual habit: dressing up a crucifix that’s built of out a metal pole in the yard. One of America’s greatest living short story writers, George Saunders explained: "For two years I'd been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story." 

The result is a masterful piece of fiction that builds something out of seemingly nothing — all in the space of only two paragraphs. 

9. “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

If there’s anyone who you can trust to deliver thought-provoking, terrifying science fiction on the regular, it’s Ray Bradbury. In “The Veldt,” George and Lydia Hadley have bought an automated house that comes with a “nursey,” or a virtual reality room. Worried about the nursery’s effect on the kids, George and Lydia think about turning off the nursey — but the problem is that their children are obsessed with it. 

As an ominously prescient prediction of the downside of technology, “The Veldt” is a short and shining example of how Ray Bradbury was an author before his time. 

10. “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes

In this classic short story, we are privy to the journals of Charlie Gordon, a cleaner with an IQ of 68. ("I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me. All my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb.”) Charlie’s luck changes when he is selected for an experiment that purports to turn him into a genius — but everything that goes up must come down in the end. 

“Flowers for Algernon” won the Hugo Award in 1960 for its groundbreaking presentation. Heartbreaking and rich with subtle poignance, it is likely to remain a staple for centuries to come.  

Best Short Story Collections to Devour

If you'd like many short stories at your fingertips all at once, short story collections are where you should look. Here, we've collected 21 of the best short story collections — along with the standout story in each volume.

11. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Standout Story: “A Manual for Cleaning Women”

12. Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar

Standout Story: “House Taken Over”

13. Drifting House by Krys Lee

Standout Story: “Drifting House”

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14. Dubliners by James Joyce

Standout Story: “The Dead”

15. Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

Standout Story: “Riding the Bullet”

16. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Standout Story: “The Garden of Forking Paths”

17. Florida by Lauren Groff

Standout Story: “Above and Below”

18. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman

Standout Story: “The Flints of Memory Lane”

19. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Standout Story: “The Pig”

20. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Standout Story: “Samsa in Love”

21. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Standout Story: “For Esme - With Love and Squalor”

22. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Standout Story: “In a Bamboo Grove”

23. Runaway by Alice Munro

Standout Story: “Runaway”

24. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez

Standout Story: “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”

25. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

Standout Story: “A Man Told Me the Story of His Life”

26. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

Standout Story: “Hills Like White Elephants”

27. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Standout Story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

28. The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

Standout Story: “The Lady with the Dog”

29. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Standout Story: “I’d Love You to Want Me”

30. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Standout Story: “The Thing Around Your Neck”

31. The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

Standout Story: “When Women Love Men”

Ready to write your own short story? Check out these short story ideas for all your inspiration needs.

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20 Most Influential Science Fiction Short Stories of the 20th Century

By Jason Boyd

Updated July 7, 2020

Science Fiction is influential to the world around us, and in turn, short stories are influential to Science Fiction.

Real people invent and make real things straight from the fortune-telling yarns of Science Fiction. The genre can even influence itself. But what’s been the biggest influence on Science Fiction as a whole, one could wonder. To start, what medium has been the most influential on its growth?

Short stories. On average. Over a wide body of work in the 20th century. Part of the challenge in making a superlative listicle thing-a-roo is finding a constraint. So, fancy sounding wins out. We’re going with the good ol’ century modifier.

Saying that, short stories were by far the incubator for Science Fiction of the 20th Century. Of course, you could rebut me by pointing out how Mary Shelley kicked off Science Fiction in the 19th Century with a novel. But from an economic point of view, it’s how Science Fiction survived and thrived.

At the time, short fiction was one of the only paying markets for science fiction. Understandably, that’s where the writers went. But the market found its audience and the rest is history. So, the debt that Science Fiction has to the 20th Century is a debt that Science Fiction has to short fiction.

For the list, We limited ourselves to short stories under 7,500 words. We ensured proper Science Fiction genre classification. Every mention includes a publication date.

Our ranking? Biased. This list is 100 percent displayed in a particular order, yet with no scientific yard stick. You’re bound to disagree, because this list wasn’t easy. So, keep an eye out for your favorites, and if we left any (or all) off, give us a good pitch for why they deserve top 20 ranking.

Honorable Mention #1) A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (1972)

This one was tricky. The novel is what we know. But it started as three linked short stories. Of course, we could have picked one of them out and chosen it on a technicality, but we ultimately decided that the novel adaptation shows them to be intrinsically non-standalone.

Honorable Mention #2) Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (1998)

We would have loved to have put this on the list to really bookend the later part of the 20th century. But it’s a novella. It’s length just didn’t fit the requirements, even though it’s a lightning fast read.

20.) Chronopolis by J.G. Ballard (1960)

Telling time, and time telling devices, have been outlawed for years. But one youngster just can’t help himself from counting the seconds. It turns violent quick, and its ending is an example of how Science Fiction on the page can be strange and mean. Ballard himself is a huge influence on Science Fiction as a whole, with ties to New Wave, and this story in particular helps demonstrate the shift away from squeaky clean narratives in Science Fiction of which Ballard played a part.

19.) Burning Chrome by William Gibson (1982)

The first coining of the term “cyberspace,” and this story already features hackers. If that’s not evidence enough for how ahead of its time Burning Chrome was, ushering in cyberpunk along with the Sprawl trilogy, than maybe you can just appreciate that it’s a cool heist story.

18.) It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby (1953)

Twilight Zone and The Simpsons ’ “Treehouse of Horror II” cemented this story in everyone’s memories, even if they never read it. Anthony is three years old with the powers of a god. Everyone has had to placate him since his birth, when he plucked his town out of existence and accidentally held them hostage. He is not malicious. It’s simply that his whims are commands, and his commands are all powerful.

17.) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

We’re the first to admit this story has an ambiguous genre . It’s got all the feeling of Fantasy at first. But when you get to the reveal in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, it definitely has the feeling one most often associates with Science Fiction. Regardless, it deals full on with psychological and philosophical questions. Since the origin of this land and the mechanism of its system is never explicitly stated, we’re granting it a conditional spot on the 20. Plus, it was first printed in New Dimensions 3, ostensibly a Science Fiction anthology.

16.) The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein (1947)

Both a song and the title of the first story to include the song, telling of its origin, The Green Hills of Earth lives on as a poetry ahead of its time, written before a single picture of the Earth was every broadcast. Astronauts on Apollo 15 themselves remarked how visionary it was for Heinlein to put himself not only into space but into the mind of a poet in space.

15.) The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956)

“THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” Isaac Asimov himself considered The Last Question his finest short story , and it’s easy to see why. The question, posed to an evolving supercomputer over the course of eons, is about thermodynamics and entropy. Yet, its answer still manages to make you shed a tear. Imagine.

14.) “Repent Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison (1965)

The concept is similar to that of Justin Timberlake’s In Time , though Ellison dropped his lawsuit after seeing a screening. Except, Repent Harlequin ’s concept is that time is taken as a penalty for breaking rules, making the story more a criticism of rigidity and structure than of income gaps. Oh, and it may be a movie of its own soon.

13.) The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (1950)

A mother and father try to get to the bottom of why their kids keep turning the “nursery” (think: holodeck) from a fairy tale land into a hot African veldt teeming with lions in Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt. A chilling portrait of spoiled children, it raises questions about the true cost of automatization and creature comforts.

12.) The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (1951)

The precursor to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Sentinel concerns humans happening upon an alien object left behind on the moon. Was the short story a huge seismic shift for Science Fiction? No. But there are not many Science Fiction properties as influential as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Without this story there’s no Stanley Kubrick movie.

11.) Speech Sounds by Octavia Butler (1983)

Octavia Butler has written several literary works of science fiction and fantasy. In fact, her work seems to cross genre bounds more than most. Speech Sounds is as much about a woman making her way in a dystopian wasteland as it is about race and gender inequality.

10.) To Serve Man by Damon Knight (1950)

To Serve Man is probably most widely known as the inspiration for the Twilight Zone episode of the same name and for “Hungry are the Damned,” the second segment from the original The Simpsons Halloween Special (later Treehouse of Horror). In today’s cynical world, where we wait for the twist, it might not be so modern now, but it was shocking for its time.

9.) I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (1967)

By far, at least to the person making the list, the most disturbing science fiction on this list. Set in the distant future, an AI spends eternity torturing a group of humans it keeps perpetually alive for that sole purpose. Ellison was part of a movement of his own making. It included these weird, off-putting themes. If golden-age Science Fiction inspired The Twilight Zone, then you could say Ellison’s brand of Science Fiction inspired The Outer Limits.

8.) A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury (1952)

Ever heard of the Butterfly Effect and wondered why everyone decided butterflies were the theory’s key insect? It’s because, in the 50s. Ray Bradbury decided it would be so in A Sound of Thunder . A butterfly plays a key role in changing history in this time travel tale about a T-rex safari.

7.) Robbie by Isaac Asimov (1940)

Said to be the first robot story the legend ever penned, Robbie by Isaac Asimov is about a robot that befriends a little girl. What it’s really about is the science fiction community having what Asimov considered an irrational fear of robots. Asimov did a lot to change that, even though we’re trending toward fear nowadays, and this story is the beginning of his brightside approach.

6.) “All You Zombies–” by Robert A. Heinlein (1959)

Paradoxes and more paradoxes. “All You Zombies–” is hard not to spoil. Let’s just say it involves unexpected parentage and time travel. Sure, you might think this one was influential because of, well… zombies. That being the title is what we call an added bonus. No, this one’s real influencing power is in the mind-bending paradox love of the modern time travel story.

5.) There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury (1950)

Probably one of the earliest examples of that creepy melancholy feeling one gets from a humanless world left to run on autopilot, such as in Wall-E or the Fallout games. There is something utterly heartbreaking about the house’s sweet stewardship over its missing family in There Will Come Soft Rains , reminding us that nuclear war doesn’t end with a bang.

4.) The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Often considered the best science fiction short story of the 20th century, including by this Locus Magazine poll , The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke combines science and spirituality. Of course, what would science fiction writers be if not ardent questioners of life’s biggest questions.

3.) Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (1981)

No, not the horrible (I still can’t shake liking it) movie. The original short story, which introduced things like heroin-addicted dolphins and prosthetic thumbs with monomolecular wire.” Johnny Mnemonic serves as the precursor to the Sprawl trilogy.

2.) Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)

Harrison Bergeron is terrifying, which is why it’s easy to see why such limitations are put on him. The story raises serious questions about social equality, challenging beliefs but providing no easy answers. It’s widely considered one of the finest Science Fiction short stories of all time.

1.) The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948)

The chilling tale of a lottery you definitely do not want to win rattled a lot of people’s sensitivities for the time. In a style similar to that of a Twilight Zone episode, where the time is indeterminate but it can be assumed to be near future, the story is one of the few science fiction stories that inspire widespread literary study and interpretation to this day.

Okay, we know we missed something. Let us know what we left off, because the reading list doesn’t have to stop here. There’s an entire century of short science fiction to read and recommend. What’s first?

Jason Boyd is a science fiction author, geek enthusiast, and former cubicle owner. When not working on his MA in Creative Writing, he's trying to figure out how magnets work.

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Clifford Simak, City.

So many that can be added, but I’ll keep my Should Have Been Contenders down to five: “The Little Black Bag”-C. M. Kornbluth “A Martian Odyssey”-Stanley G. Weinbaum “The People Trap”-Robert Sheckley “The Helping Hand”-Poul Anderson “Sail On! Sail On!”-Philip Jose Farmer

Nightfall – Isaac Asimov

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Modernist Short Stories

Modernist Short Stories

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on September 25, 2022

The term modernism is used to define a loose literary movement of the early 20th century; its dates are subject to question, but some critics situate it between about 1890 and the outbreak of World War II. It can also be used to denote a style of literature rather than a particular cohesive movement. As a term describing both a movement and a mode it has several defining characteristics, including experimentation with narrative technique, structure, style, the use of time and space, and individual subjectivity and consciousness. In addition, it has come to be associated with the exploration of certain themes, such as alienation and isolation, gender and sexuality, and the darker side of human psychology. These elements may all be seen in the short fiction of the period; indeed, many critics claim that the modernist period was a time that saw a great fl ourishing of the genre.

The 19th century was a high point for the British novel, yet the short story remained, for much of the century, undefined and amorphous. Editors, readers, and critics did not reach a consensus on what constituted the short story, also referred to as a sketch, tale, or miscellany. Authors famed for their novels, such as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, expressed ambivalence about the short story as a form. There existed no real audience for the short story; fiction writers relied primarily on readers of novels for their income and audience, so they devoted their time to writing triple-decker novels. Rather than expend their energy on short fiction, they would serialize their novels, guaranteeing an audience for themselves and profits for their editors and publishers. The Victorian period witnessed a dramatic rise in literacy as well as in the publishing of periodicals, contributing to the growth of an audience for fiction. Serials such as Bentley’s Miscellany, London Magazine, and Athenaeum specialized in and encouraged the publication of fiction (see Magazines ). At the same time, however, short stories were often relegated to the status of filler material, and it was conventional wisdom in the publishing world that collecting an author’s short fiction in book form for sale was bad business: There was simply no market for it.

Several intersecting factors in the 1880s and 1890s contributed to the solidification and flourishing of the short story as a genre. First, there emerged a large number of new periodicals devoted to fiction: The Strand Magazine  and Blackwood’s, as well as shorterlived but nonetheless important serials like The Yellow Book and the Savoy . At the same time, the triple-decker novel and its serialization fell in popularity. Later there would be a number of crucial “little magazines,” such as the Egoist, the Little Review , and the New Age, dedicated to the publishing of serious modernist fiction. Second, practitioners of the genre found the short story conducive to the kinds of aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological explorations they wished to make. Whereas earlier the amorphous quality of the short story made it difficult to define, publish, and market, writers in the late 19th and early 20th century discovered that such a flexible genre lent itself to technical, stylistic, and thematic experiments. The movement toward psychological realism, as well as symbolism and the  Aestheticism of the fin-de-siècle could be accommodated in the short story as practiced by precursors of modernism, such as Oscar Wilde , Thomas Hardy , and Joseph Conrad ; by true modernist short story writers, such as Katherine Mansfield ; and by novelists who wrote and published short stories, such as James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , and D. H. Lawrence. Collections such as Hardy’s Life’s Little Ironies (1894), Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Mansfield’s Bliss (1920), Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday  (1921), and Lawrence’s England, My England (1922) showed the growing interest in short story collections as valid and valuable contributions to the literary marketplace and exemplified the transformation of narrative through modernist concerns, both technical and thematic. Often, these concerns intersect, particularly in the interest in and representation of individual subjectivity.

Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, in the 1890s. Houghton Library, Harvard University

Important precursors to the modernist short story include the works of Wilde, Hardy, and Conrad. These authors exemplify a number of crucial developments in the genre at the turn of the century. Wilde was a key figure in fin-de-siècle England, parlaying aestheticism into fiction that seems on the surface merely witty and sophisticated but that, on closer examination, has something significant to say about the relationship between reality and art and about the artifice of human psychology and behavior. Wilde’s story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (1891) is the tale of a wealthy and delicate young man on the eve of his wedding who learns through a palm reader that he will murder someone. Horrified, he postpones his wedding and decides to preempt the inevitable by killing one of his relatives. What seems at first to be a grim tale of murder and corruption becomes instead a witty reflection on performance, on blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction, as Wilde satirizes the attitude that anything can be rendered into an aesthetic experience, including duty and murder.

The relationship between truth and fiction is a primary concern in modernist literature. A grimmer reflection on the relationship between truth and fiction and on the ways art can function as a trap is Hardy’s story “On the Western Circuit” (1891). Here, an illiterate servant girl becomes pregnant by a young law clerk moving from London through the countryside on one of his periodic rounds to hear cases. They begin a correspondence, but unbeknownst to him the girl’s sensitive and beautiful letters are composed and written by her employer, who herself falls desperately in love with the man. When the deception is revealed on the day he marries the servant girl, he realizes that through the letters he has fallen in love with the mistress and trapped himself in a marriage that can only ruin him. The story is an excellent example of Hardy’s preoccupation with inexorable forces like lust and fate that trap individuals. In its frank treatment of sexuality, as well as its interest in the nature of texts and interpretation and the seductive quality of language, Hardy’s story shows much affinity with later modernist stories.

Conrad shares Wilde’s and Hardy’s concentration on psychology; his texts also exemplify a 20th-century concern with the consequences of empire and postcolonial modes of inquiry. His novella Heart of Darkness works through this concentration on psychology and subjectivity by employing a variety of experimental narrative techniques, namely, an unreliable narrator and an impressionistic representation of events. Conrad rejects a stable perspective and a linear narrative to tell the story of Marlow and his trip into the Congo to find Kurtz, an ivory trader rumored to have gone insane in the jungle. The story, told from Marlow’s point of view, is always unstable; one is never sure where one is or what one knows, just as Marlow is unsure. The reader is forced to piece information together from impressions, from clues, mirroring Marlow’s knowledge gathering as he travels into the unknown.

The emphasis on the processes of subjectivity and the narrative techniques that arise from this preoccupation in modernist short fiction are exemplified in the work of Joyce, Mansfield, and Woolf. Joyce’s stories in Dubliners are famous for their use of the epiphany, a moment of being or feeling in which the character comes to a realization. These stories are also notable for their lack of resolution, for the seeming failure of the plot to resolve itself. For instance, “Araby” and “Eveline” both focus on a moment of realization on the part of the main character, only to show that such a realization does ends not in clarity or resolution but in further paralysis. Joyce’s use of stylistic experimentation is notable as well, as stories are told not only from the point of view of the boy or of Eveline but also in the individual voice, a striking use of free indirect discourse. Mansfield, too, in such stories as “Je ne parle pas français” and “Bliss,” refuses to offer resolution to the inner conflicts of the characters. Furthermore, she focalizes her narratives through the perspectives of her characters only to show how little they know and understand not only others but also themselves. For Mansfield’s characters, their own subjectivity remains a mystery.

Mansfield’s stories also share with those of other modernist writers, like Lawrence, a concern with the representation of sexuality and desire and their relationship to alienation and isolation. For these authors, and for many modernist writers, desire does not bring two people together but rather provides a moment to show how there can be no true connection. Mansfield’s story “Bliss” and Lawrence’s story “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” illustrate the modernist impulse to address sexuality, gender, and desire while also showing how it contributes to isolation and how it forms a most unknowable part of the human psyche.

Further exploration into the processes of subjectivity and their relationship to time and space can be seen in Woolf’s fiction. Her story “Kew Gardens” begins with an image of the flowers in the gardens, their shifting colors serving as a symbol for the shifting perspectives of the people walking along the paths. The story is told from several points of view, different people thinking their own thoughts or having their own conversations as they walk. The moments are meant to be seen as occurring simultaneously, a moment in time when an experience is focalized through many subjectivities. The story ends with a return to the symbol of the flower, a moment of movement and of stasis. The short fiction of the period relies heavily on symbols such as this one; in “Bliss” Mansfield uses a pear tree to signify the female protagonist’s burgeoning sexuality, and Lawrence uses animal symbolism extensively to similar purpose in his work, including stories such as “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.“

This intersection between symbolism and psychological realism, the importance of narrative experimentation, and the shared themes discussed are key characteristics of modernist short fiction. The modernist period, by all accounts, was a moment of great artistry in the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Childs, Peter. Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Flora, Joseph, ed. The English Short Story, 1880–1945: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Morrisson, Mark. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Categories: British Literature , Literature , Short Story

Tags: 20th century short stories , Famous short stories in the 20th century , Modern Fiction , Modern Short Fiction , Modernism and Short Story , Modernism and Short Story Writing , Modernist Short Stories

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50 Great Classic Novels Under 200 Pages

Getting you through february.

We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. Last year, I wrote about the best contemporary novels under 200 pages , so now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”

A few notes: Because the “contemporary” list surveyed novels published since 1970 (inclusive), this list will define “classic” as being originally published before 1970. Yes, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, but one has to draw the line somewhere (though I let myself fudge on translation dates). I did not differentiate between novels and novellas (as Steven Millhauser would tell you , the novella is not a form at all, but merely a length), but let’s be honest with ourselves: “The Dead” is a short story, and so is “The Metamorphosis.” Sorry! I limited myself to one book by each author, valiantly, I should say, because I was tempted to cheat (looking at you Jean Rhys).

Most importantly for our purposes here: lengths vary with editions, sometimes wildly. I did not include a book below unless I could find that it had been published at least once in fewer than 200 pages—which means that some excellent novels, despite coming tantalizingly close to the magic number, had to be left off for want of proof (see Mrs. Dalloway ,  Black No More , Slaughterhouse-Five , etc. etc. etc.). However, your personal edition might not exactly match the number I have listed here. Don’t worry: it’ll still be short.

Finally, as always: “best” lists are subjective, no ranking is definitive, and I’ve certainly forgotten, or never read, or run out of space for plenty of books and writers here. And admittedly, the annoying constraints of this list make it more heavily populated by white and male writers than I would have liked. Therefore, please add on at will in the comments. After all, these days, I’m always looking for something old to read .

Adolfo Bioy Casares, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms, The Invention of Morel (1940) : 103 pages

Both Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz described this novel as perfect, and I admit I can’t find much fault with it either. It is technically about a fugitive whose stay on a mysterious island is disturbed by a gang of tourists, but actually it’s about the nature of reality and our relationship to it, told in the most hypnotizing, surrealist style. A good anti-beach read, if you plan that far ahead.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) : 107 pages

Everybody’s gateway Steinbeck is surprisingly moving, even when you revisit it as an adult. Plus, if nothing else, it has given my household the extremely useful verb “to Lenny.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945) : 112 pages

If we didn’t keep putting it on lists, how would future little children of America learn what an allegory is? This is a public service, you see.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) : 112 pages

A people-pleaser, in more ways than one: Sherlock Holmes, after all, had been dead for years when his creator finally bent to public demand (and more importantly, the demand of his wallet) and brought him back, in this satisfying and much-beloved tale of curses and hellbeasts and, of course, deductions.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1933) : 112 pages

A 20th century classic, and still one of the best, most important, and most interesting crime novels in the canon. Fun fact: Cain had originally wanted to call it Bar-B-Q .

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) : 122 pages

One of the landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, about not only race but also gender and class—not to mention self-invention, perception, capitalism, motherhood and friendship—made indelible by what Darryl Pinckney called “a deep fatalism at the core.”

Albert Camus, tr. Matthew Ward, The Stranger (1942) : 123 pages

I had a small obsession with this book as a moody teen, and I still think of it with extreme fondness. Is it the thinking person’s Catcher in the Rye ? Who can say. But Camus himself put it this way, writing in 1955: “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

Juan Rulfo, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden, Pedro Páramo (1955) : 128 pages

The strange, fragmented ghost story that famously paved the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude (according to Gabriel García Márquez himself), but is an enigmatic masterpiece in its own right.

Italo Calvino, tr. Archibald Colquhoun, The Cloven Viscount (1959) : 128 pages 

This isn’t my favorite Calvino, but you know what they say: all Calvino is good Calvino (also, I forgot him on the contemporary list, so I’m making up for it slightly here). The companion volume to The Nonexistent Knight and The Baron in the Trees concerns a Viscount who is clocked by a cannonball and split into two halves: his good side and his bad side. They end up in a duel over their wife, of course—just like in that episode of Buffy . But turns out that double the Viscounts doesn’t translate to double the pages.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) : 128 pages

I know, I know, but honestly, this book, which is frequently taught in American schools as an example of early feminist literature, is still kind of edgy—more than 120 years later, and it’s still taboo for a woman to put herself and her own desires above her children. Whom among us has not wanted to smash a symbolic glass vase into the hearth?

Leo Tolstoy, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) : 128 pages

Another classic—Tolstoy can do it all, long and short—particularly beloved by the famously difficult-to-impress Nabokov, who described it as “Tolstoy’s most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement,” and explained the thrust of it this way: “The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life—Life with a capital L.”

Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968) : 138 pages

Brautigan’s wacky post-apocalyptic novel concerns a bunch of people living in a commune called iDEATH. (Which, um, relatable.) The landscape is groovy and the tigers do math, and the titular watermelon sugar seems to be the raw material for everything from homes to clothes. “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.” It’s all nonsense, of course, but it feels so good.

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) : 140 pages

Another early novel on the subject of passing—originally published in 1912, then again under Johnson’s name in 1927—this one presented as an “autobiography” written by a Black man living as white, but uneasily, considering himself a failure, feeling until the end the grief of giving up his heritage and all the pain and joy that came with it.

Thomas Mann, tr. Michael Henry Heim, Death in Venice (1912) : 142 pages

What it says on the tin—a story as doomed as Venice itself, but also a queer and philosophical mini-masterpiece. The year before the book’s publication, Mann wrote to a friend: “I am in the midst of work: a really strange thing I brought with me from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You say, ‘Hum, hum!’ but it is quite respectable.” Indeed.

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) : 146 pages

If you’re reading this space, you probably already know how much we love this book at Literary Hub. After that excellent opening paragraph , it only gets better.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964) : 152 pages

Isherwood’s miniature, jewel-like masterpiece takes place over a single day in the life of a middle-aged English expat (who shares a few qualities with Isherwood himself), a professor living uneasily in California after the unexpected death of his partner. An utterly absorbing and deeply pleasurable novel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Notes from Underground (1864) : 154 pages

Probably the best rant ever passed off as literature. Doestoevsky’s first masterpiece has been wildly influential in the development of existential and dystopian storytelling of all kinds, not to mention in the development of my own high school misanthropy. Maybe yours, too? “It was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me . . .” Actually, now I’m thinking that it might be a good book to re-read in pandemic isolation.

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967) : 158 pages

The narrator of this strange and terrifying novel obsessively pursues a young woman through an icy apocalypse. You might call it a fever dream if it didn’t feel so . . . cold. Reading it, wrote Jon Michaud on its 50th anniversary, is “a disorienting and at times emotionally draining experience, not least because, these days, one might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” Help.

Jean Toomer,  Cane   (1923) : 158 pages

Toomer’s experimental, multi-disciplinary novel, now a modernist classic, is presented as a series of vignettes, poems, and swaths of dialogue—but to be honest, all of it reads like poetry. Though its initial reception was uncertain, it has become one of the most iconic and influential works of 1920s American literature.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) : 158 pages

Only in a Ballard novel can climate change make you actually become insane—and only a Ballard novel could still feel so sticky and hot in my brain, years after I read it in a single afternoon.

Knut Hamsun, tr. Sverre Lyngstad, Hunger (1890) : 158 pages

The Nobel Prize winner’s first novel is, as Hamsun himself put it, “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” An modernist psychological horror novel that is notoriously difficult, despite its length, but also notoriously worth it.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) : 159 pages

Still my favorite Baldwin, and one of the most convincing love stories of any kind ever written, about which there is too much to say: it is a must-read among must-reads.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) : 159 pages

A mythic, proto-feminist frontier novel about a young Swedish immigrant making a home for herself in Nebraska, with an unbearably cool and modern title (in my opinion).

Françoise Sagan, tr. Irene Ash, Bonjour Tristesse (1955) : 160 pages

Sagan’s famously scandalous novel of youthful hedonism, published (also famously) when Sagan was just 19 herself, is much more psychologically nuanced than widely credited. As Rachel Cusk wrote , it is not just a sexy French novel, but also “a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing.” It is a novel concerned not only with morals or their lack, but with the very nature of morality itself.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) : 160 pages

Bartleby may be more iconic (and more fun), but Billy Budd is operating on a grander scale, unfinished as it may be.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) : 160 pages

Everyone’s gateway to Pynchon, and also everyone’s gateway to slapstick postmodernism. Either you love it or you hate it!

Franz Kafka, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Trial (1925) : 160 pages

Required reading for anyone who uses the term “Kafkaesque”—but don’t forget that Kafka himself would burst out laughing when he read bits of the novel out loud to his friends. Do with that what you will.

Kenzaburo Oe, tr. John Nathan, A Personal Matter (1968) : 165 pages

Whew. This book is a lot: absolutely gorgeous and supremely painful, and probably the Nobel Prize winner’s most important.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936) : 170 pages

In his preface to the first edition, T.S. Eliot praised “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” It is also a glittering modernist masterpiece, and one of the first novels of the 20th century to explicitly portray a lesbian relationship.

Yasunari Kawabata, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker, Snow Country (1937) : 175 pages

A story of doomed love spun out in a series of indelible, frozen images—both beautiful and essentially suspicious of beauty—by a Nobel Prize winner.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) : 176 pages

This novel, Rhys’s famous riposte to one of the worst love interests in literary history, tells the story of Mr. Rochester from the point of view of the “madwoman in the attic.” See also: Good Morning, Midnight (1939), which is claustrophobic, miserable, pointless, and damn fine reading.

George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861) : 176 pages

Like Middlemarch , Silas Marner is exquisitely written and ecstatically boring. Unlike Middlemarch , it is quite short.

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963) : 176 pages

The girls of Spark’s novel live in the May of Teck Club, disturbed but not destroyed by WWII—both the Club, that is, and the girls. “Their slenderness lies not so much in their means,” Carol Shields wrote in an appreciation of the book, “as in their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world. They are fearless and frightened at the same time, as only the very young can be, and they are as heartless in spirit as they are merry in mode.” Can’t go wrong with Muriel Spark.

Robert Walser, tr. Christopher Middleton, Jakob von Gunten (1969) : 176 pages

Walser is a writer’s writer, a painfully underrated genius; this novel, in which a privileged youth runs off to enroll at a surrealist school for servants, may be his best.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) : 179 pages

Read for proof that Holly Golightly was meant to be a Marilyn.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) : 181 pages

A powerful, clear-eyed, and haunting novel, which at the time of its publication was transgressive in its centering of African characters in all their humanity and complexity, and which paved the way for thousands of writers all over the world in the years to follow.

Leonard Gardner, Fat City (1969) : 183 pages

Universally acknowledged as the best boxing novel ever written, but so much more than that: at its core, it’s a masterpiece about that secret likelihood of life, if not of literature: never achieving your dreams.

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968) : 185 pages

House Made of Dawn , Momaday’s first novel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and is often credited with ushering in the Native American Renaissance. Intricate, romantic, and lush, it is at its core about the creaking dissonance of two incompatible worlds existing in the same place (both literally and metaphysically) at the same time.

Chester Himes,  If He Hollers Let Him Go   (1945) : 186 pages

Himes’ first novel spans four days in the life of a Californian named Bob Jones, whose every step is dogged by racism. Walter Mosely called Himes, who is also renowned for his detective fiction, a “quirky American genius,” and also “one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.”  If He Hollers Let Him Go , while not technically a detective story, is “firmly located in the same Los Angeles noir tradition as The Big Sleep and Devil in a Blue Dress ,” Nathan Jefferson has written . “Himes takes the familiar mechanics of these novels—drinking, driving from one end of Los Angeles to another in search of answers, a life under constant threats of danger—and filters them through the lens of a black man lacking any agency and control over his own life, producing something darker and more oppressive than the traditional pulp detective’s story.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) : 189 pages

All my life I have wanted to scoff at The Great Gatsby . Usually, things that are universally adored are bad, or at least mediocre. But every time I reread it, I remember: impossibly, annoyingly, it is as good as they say.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) : 190 pages

Still one of my favorite campus novels , and short enough to read in between classes.

Charles Portis, Norwood (1966) : 190 pages

Portis has gotten a lot of (well-deserved) attention in recent years for True Grit , but his first novel, Norwood , is almost as good, a comic masterpiece about a young man traipsing across a surreal America to lay his hands on $70.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) : 191 pages

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly have more mainstream name recognition (thank you Hollywood) but Ubik is Dick’s masterpiece, filled to the brim with psychics and anti-psis, dead wives half-saved in cold-pac, and disruptions to time and reality that can be countered by an aerosol you get at the drugstore. Sometimes, anyway.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Alison Entrekin, Near to the Wild Heart (1943) : 192 pages

Lispector’s debut novel, first published in Brazil when she was only 19, is still my favorite of hers: fearless, sharp-edged, and brilliant, a window into one of the most interesting narrators in literature.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) : 192 pages

This novel is probably more famous these days for the Kubrick film, but despite the often gruesome content, the original text is worth a read for the language alone.

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) : 193 pages

Comyns is a criminally under-read genius, though she’s been getting at least a small taste of the attention she deserves in recent years due to reissues by NYRB and Dorothy. This one is my favorite, permeated, as Brian Evenson puts it in the introduction of my copy, with marvelousness, “a kind of hybrid of the pastoral and the naturalistic, an idyllic text about what it’s like to grow up next to a river, a text that also just happens to contain some pretty shocking and sad disasters.” Which is putting it rather mildly indeed.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) : 194 pages

In 194 pages, Janie goes through more husbands than most literary heroines can manage in twice as many (and finds herself in equally short order).

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911) : 195 pages

To be honest with you, though it has been variously hailed as a masterpiece, I find Ethan Frome to be lesser Wharton—but even lesser Wharton is better than a lot of people’s best.

Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) : 198 pages

The mood this novel—of disappeared teens and Australian landscape and uncertainty—lingers much longer than the actual reading time.

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967) : 200 pages

“The summer she was fifteen,” Carter’s second novel begins, “Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood.” It is that year that she is uprooted from her home in London to the wilds of America, and it is that year she comes to term with herself. “It is often the magical, fabular aspects of Carter’s stories that people focus on, but in The Magic Toyshop I responded to the way she blended this with a clear-eyed realism about what it was to live in a female body,” Evie Wyld wrote in her ode to this novel. “In a novel so brilliantly conjured from splayed toothbrush heads, mustard-and-cress sandwiches and prawn shells, bread loaves and cutlery, brickwork and yellow household soap, the female body is both one more familiar object and at the same time something strange and troubling.”

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15 of the Best Short Stories Written by Women

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What are some of the best short stories by female writers? Women have been making their mark on the short story form since the form became popular in the nineteenth century, and many notable female practitioners of the short story, such as Katherine Mansfield and Kate Chopin, were among the first to take the story in new directions, replacing plot with character and focusing on the internal lives of the (mostly female) protagonists.

Below, we select and introduce fifteen classic short stories written by women. These stories range from a few pages to more than twenty, but all are masterpieces of the short story form which can be read in a lunch break or before bed of an evening.

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘ The Yellow Wallpaper ’.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, an 1892 short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), has the structure and style of a diary. This is in keeping with what the female narrator tells us: that she can only write down her experiences when her husband John is not around, since he has forbidden her to write until she is well again, believing it will overexcite her. Through a series of short instalments, we learn more about the narrator’s situation, and her treatment at the hands of her doctor husband and her sister-in-law.

One reason why the story is so unsettling is that it plays with established Gothic horror conventions and then subverts them, in order to expose the misguided medical practices used in an attempt to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ women who are suffering from mental or nervous disorders. It has become a popular feminist text about the male mistreatment of women.

2. George Egerton, ‘ A Cross Line ’.

Before Woolf and Mansfield (see below), there was George Egerton (1859-1945), whose 1890s collections Keynotes and Discords took women’s writing into new, more experimental territory (inspired by, among others, the works of Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun).

In ‘A Cross Line’ (1893), Egerton presents us with a strong woman who is married to a rather feminine husband, and who longs for something more out of life. Towards the end of the story, she learns (spoiler alert) that she is expecting a baby, but Egerton never directly tells us this, dropping hints and clues instead and letting us infer the rest.

3. Kate Chopin, ‘ The Story of an Hour ’.

Some short stories can say all they need to do in just a few pages, and Kate Chopin’s three-page 1894 story ‘The Story of an Hour’ (sometimes known as ‘The Dream of an Hour’) is a classic example. Yet those three pages remain tantalisingly ambiguous, perhaps because so little is said, so much merely hinted at.

Written in April 1894 and originally published in Vogue in December of that year, the story focuses on an hour in the life of a married woman who has just learnt that her husband has apparently died.

4. Willa Cather, ‘ A Wagner Matin é e ’.

This story by the American writer Willa Cather was first published in Everybody’s Magazine in 1904 before being collected in Cather’s collection The Troll Garden the following year. In just a few pages, Cather sketches out a wasted life where a woman, who left Boston to go and live on a remote farm, experiences the music of Wagner for the first time when she returns to the city, and realises how much she has missed out on.

‘A Wagner Matinée’ is a moving story about isolation, loss, and the distance between frontier life versus the metropolitan life of the American city.

5. Katherine Anne Porter, ‘ He ’.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) wrote just one novel and fewer than thirty short stories, yet she is regarded as an important twentieth-century American writer, with ‘He’ among her most celebrated and critically acclaimed works. An important theme of Porter’s work is the search for meaning in a modern and increasingly materialist world.

This 1927 story is about a poor American family. The mother, Mrs Whipple, loves her second son best of all: a boy who is identified only as ‘He’ and who appears to be mentally and physically weak.

6. Virginia Woolf, ‘ The Mark on the Wall ’.

The first two novels the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) published were more conventional than her work that would follow later. In many ways, she found her distinctive voice when writing short stories such as this, which was published in 1917.

This short piece is narrated by someone who recalls noticing a mark on the wall of their house. But the story is not really ‘about’ the mark on the wall, but rather what it prompts the narrator to think about, muse upon and recollect.

As well as speculating on what the mark on the wall might be – a small hole, or perhaps a leftover rose leaf – the narrator’s mind wanders to much bigger questions and meditations, such as the nature of life, where Shakespeare found his inspiration, and even what the afterlife might be like.

7. Katherine Mansfield, ‘ The Garden Party ’.

The New-Zealand-born Mansfield (1888-1923) never wrote a full-length novel, but she was a prolific writer of short stories whose work was admired by Virginia Woolf, among many others. ‘The Garden Party’ is a 1920 short story about a rich upper-middle-class family whose daughter, Laura, is shocked when a working-class man from the nearby village dies in an accident.

Although Laura insists her mother cancel their garden party as a mark of respect, the rest of her family disagree. So Laura sets off to pay her own respects to the dead, in a moving and powerful story about coming to terms with death.

8. Zora Neale Hurston, ‘ Sweat ’.

Published in 1926, this story by one of the leading African-American female writers of the early twentieth century is set in Florida and focuses on Delia, a washerwoman, and Sykes, her unemployed husband. Sykes mistreats his wife, and resents the fact that she has to clean the clothes of ‘white folks’.

But Delia will take delicious revenge on her husband when he attempts to harm her …

9. Eudora Welty, ‘ A Worn Path ’.

One of the most celebrated stories by Eudora Welty (1909-2001), first published in the Southern Review in 1937, is ‘A Worn Path’. The story details the journey an elderly black woman makes into town one Christmas time, in order to get some medicine for her grandson. The journey is subtly infused with suggestions of the epic descent into the underworld found in classical poetry, elevating the protagonist’s journey above the everyday.

There is some ambiguity in the story surrounding whether her grandson is even still alive, making this story potentially a tragedy about one lonely elderly woman’s inability to let go. The ‘path’ she walks is a metaphor for life, and for carrying on.

10. Shirley Jackson, ‘ The Lottery ’.

This is the best-known story of the American writer Shirley Jackson, who has inspired, among others, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Joanne Harris. Published in the New Yorker in 1948, the story is about a village where an annual lottery is drawn. However, the fate of the person who draws the ‘winning’ slip is only revealed at the end of the story in a dark twist.

Jackson’s story, in some ways a descendant of the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, forces us to address some unpleasant aspects of human nature, such as people’s obedience to authority and tradition and their willingness to carry out evil acts in the name of superstition.

11. Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas ’.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) wrote both science fiction and fantasy, although some of her short stories are perhaps best labelled as ‘speculative fiction’, because they rely less on hard science than on imagined places and landscapes. These places are then used to explore some intriguing and troubling philosophical and ethical issues.

This story, from 1973, is set in the fictional city of Omelas (Le Guin saw ‘Salem, O.’ – as in Oregon – reflected in her car’s rear-view mirror and liked the name), an ideal society in which everyone is happy. Or rather, almost everyone – for the happiness of the people of Omelas is apparently dependent on the suffering of a scapegoat, a child who is kept locked up in miserable conditions so that the rest of the city can enjoy health, wealth, and happiness. We discuss the rich symbolism of this story in more detail in our longer analysis of it .

12. Joyce Carol Oates, ‘ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? ’.

This 1966 story was inspired by a series of real-life murders and dedicated to Bob Dylan, whose song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was another inspiration on the story.

The story is about a fifteen-year-old girl who is approached by a sinister older man (though he claims he’s her age) and demands that she come out for a drive with him. Although Connie refuses, it’s clear that the man isn’t going to give up, and her own family may be at risk. A truly dark and unsettling story from a modern master of the short story.

13. Angela Carter, ‘ The Bloody Chamber ’.

The title story of Carter’s most famous collection and long enough to be called a novella, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ takes its cue from the old French folk tale of Bluebeard, the man who murdered his successive wives and kept their bodies locked up in his castle.

The Bluebeard of Carter’s tale is refigured as a French Marquis, who marries a teenage bride. He has already married three times before, and his fourth wife discovers the fates of his previous wives when she takes the forbidden key and opens his ‘bloody chamber’ while he is away on business.

14. Margaret Atwood, ‘ Happy Endings ’.

Nowadays, Atwood (born 1939) is best-known for her novels, but she also wrote many poems and short stories earlier in her career. ‘Happy Endings’ was first published in 1983 and features six variations on the same characters, scenarios labelled A to F, all of which end in death.

Although it’s usually categorised as a short story, Atwood herself has written (like Woolf before her) of how ‘Happy Endings’ evolved as something that wasn’t quite a short story, nor yet a prose poem, but something distinct from both.

15. Lydia Davis, ‘The Caterpillar’.

Let’s conclude this pick of the best short stories by women with a very short story by the American writer Lydia Davis (born 1947). This story is about memory, consideration, and the small and ordinarily overlooked, focusing on someone who finds a caterpillar in her bed one morning and then drops it while trying to carry it downstairs and outside.

The joy of a Lydia Davis story is found partly in the way she opens up language to subtle, multiple meanings. We discuss the use of language and imagery in this story in a separate post .

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A 20-Story Tour Through 19th Century American Literature

Tour American literary history: 20 days of stories!

It’s summer, when many of us make plans to visit beautiful or historic places, but we also like the idea of relaxing on our vacations. In today’s post, I offer you a way to do both. You can tour all of 19th and early 20th century American literary history without leaving your chair. Read one of these classic short stories each day for 20 days, and you’ll have a great sense of the variety, richness, and evolution of American fiction, from the Romantic era beginning in 1820 right through the late Gilded Age, ending in the first few years of the 20th century.

Relax while you read.

If you read through the whole list, you’ll be reading famous works by America’s most celebrated writers from the 19th century.

You’ll also be touring many areas of the country, and even the world, from New England forests and villages to a plantation in the south to a battlefield in Tennessee to Switzerland and Rome to the Wild West to the Yukon to Nebraska and back to New York City. All these stories are absorbing to read, though written in many different styles. It’s especially appropriate to approach American literature via the short story genre, since American writers were instrumental in developing this genre into an art form.

You can find all 20 of the stories on our tour list online; all but two are available on Americanliterature.com , a wonderful website that preserves and promotes classic American literature. For the stories that aren’t on that site, I provided a link to another online text. I also provide a brief note about each story and why I chose it for this list.

Pick and choose, or read them all! If you do read any or all of them, I would love to hear your thoughts and reactions. Please leave a comment at the end of the post. (You will enter your nickname and email, but your email will not appear on the site.)

Happy reading!

This list of 20 classic American short stories is a road map through American literary history.

20 Classic American Short Stories

1. “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving, 1820

Irving shot to international fame by importing plot devices of German folk tales into American settings. He also uses “Rip Van Winkle” to showcase how American culture changed from a slow-moving rural culture to a bustling, politically-oriented culture after the Revolutionary War brought Americans independence from Britain. “Rip Van Winkle” is the granddaddy of the American short story.

2. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allen Poe, 1839

3. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, 1843

Great examples of the American romance (not the love-story kind of romance, but the supernatural, spooky-story kind). Poe doesn’t just tell a scary tale; he examines the roots of fear and guilt in the human psyche.

4. “The Birthmark,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1843

5.“Rappacini’s Daughter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1844

Like Poe, Hawthorne’s romances touch on the supernatural and feel a bit spooky. In these two stories, he presents two men of “science” who think they can play God, and how their overstepping affects the women who love them. He also ponders on the difference between true love and obsession.

6. “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street” by Herman Melville, 1853

This tale has its romantic (supernatural) elements, but is also an examination of the nature of working in business, and how becoming too dedicated to a job can suck the life out of people and put up walls between them.

7. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” by Mark Twain, 1865 

This story is purely humorous. It also offers the quintessential description of a familiar American character: the tall-tale teller. The story-teller in this tale will say just about anything as long as he can keep his listener pinned to his chair.

8. “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” by Mark Twain,1876 

This story is broadly humorous as well, but Twain also enters into a more serious discussion of the nature of guilt and responsibility when the central character meets his own conscience face to face.

9. “Daisy Miller,” Henry James, 1878

We can’t tour the American literary 19th century without taking in a work by Henry James, the father of American psychological realism. His style is elaborate, which can make reading him a little difficult at times. But it is well worth any effort, not just for the elegance of expression but also for interesting,detailed observations of how people think about other people, and how they influence each other moment by moment as they interact.

In “Daisy Miller,” a young American man who grew up in Europe meets a very free-seeming American girl who doesn’t follow any of the usual social strictures that European young ladies do. He spends the whole story trying to decide what to make of her; is she an innocent girl who just doesn’t know the rules, some kind of rebel, or a girl who is not very “nice” in her behavior with men?  What does she want and expect of him? James keeps readers inside this young man’s point of view, with no glimpses into the mind of Daisy, forcing readers to try to figure out Daisy as well. Besides presenting relationship difficulties between young men and women, this story describes the contrast between European and American social values that many might still recognize today.

10.  “ A White Heron,” by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1886  

This is a lovely piece of Regionalism, which are stories that highlight customs of a particular region of America. Regionalism was the most popular type of fiction in America for much of the 19th century. This story is about a young girl growing up isolated near a New England forest in close proximity with nature. What happens when a beautiful young man, an ornithologist, comes to the woods looking for the rare white heron for his collection?

11. “Chickamauga” by Ambrose Bierce, 1889

Known as “bitter Bierce,” this author emerged from service in the Civil War with great cynicism about human kind. In this story, a little boy wanders away from his cabin home into the nearby woods, which just happens to be near one of the biggest battles of the Civil War. What does, indeed, what can, the little innocent make of his experiences of the battle’s aftermath? A powerful story about the hellishness of war.

12. “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, 1890

The character “Mother” is part of a strict religious community where what the men say is pretty much what the women do. For forty years she has been obedient to her taciturn husband, but when “Father” breaks his 40-years’ promise to build her a proper home, and builds a barn instead, how will “Mother” react?

13. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892

No one who reads this story ever forgets it. The story unfolds through the journal entries of a new mother who is suffering from a nervous malady. Following the accepted psychological treatment for depression of that era, her physician husband has moved the family to a remote country house for the summer to help “cure” her. He prescribes copious rest, no excitement, no company, no work, and above all, no journal writing. Instead of curing her, her isolation in a room with ugly wallpaper, along with other factors, drives her slowly mad, and readers watch it all happen. Gilman wrote this story as a protest against the so-called “rest cure” for “female hysteria,” known today as postpartum depression. It is also a feminist protest against the cultural assumptions that men should make all the decisions in marriage, treating their wives as weak and childlike.

14. “Christmas Every Day,” by William Dean Howells, 1892

Howells wrote so many stories it’s hard to choose one that is representative. This one was popular in its day and meant for family reading. It’s a light-hearted moral tale a dad tells his little girl when she wishes that every day could be Christmas. If you like this one, explore other, more serious stories by Howells, who was known for his ultra-realist style, and for championing American realism among other writers through his role as editor of “The Atlantic Monthly.” Howells did not promote Hawthorne-style “romance” but instead argued that fiction should closely mirror reality.

15. “Desiree’s Baby,” Kate Chopin, 1893 

Kate Chopin

St. Louis- born Chopin is famous for portraying the Creole culture of Louisiana, where she lived for many years with her husband, a Louisiana native. She is also famous for protesting patriarchal suppression of women, her work undergoing a great revival during the rise of feminism in the 1970s. This particular story is a beautiful, memorable, and very poignant presentation of the high and senseless cost of racism.

16. “The Wife of His Youth,” by Charles Chestnutt, 1898

Chestnutt was an African-American lawyer and fiction writer, born in Cleveland, Ohio of free black parents two years before the Civil War. Chestnutt was the first African-American writer to be published in The Atlantic Monthly, and was one of the first fiction writers to deal with problems of race after the Civil War. In this thought-provoking story, a fair-skinned African-American man has been “passing” in his community as a white man, and has achieved prominence in the town. How will he respond when his long-lost, darker skinned wife suddenly arrives at his door?

17. “The Blue Hotel,” by Stephen Crane, 1898 

Stephen Crane

Tempers will flare during a “friendly” card game at The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper, Nebraska, leading inexorably to a town tragedy. What are the forces that conspire to push men past civil limits? Crane could be classified as an American Naturalist, a writer of this era who believed that nature and subconscious psychological forces are much more powerful than conscious choice in determining human behavior, and this story is Naturalism’s Exhibit A. There are some wonderful impressionistic writing and scene-painting in this story, propelling readers right into the center of the characters’ experience.

18. “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, 1902

Author of Call of the Wild , Jack London was an adventurer who became a very famous author in his day. This is another story that most people don’t forget once they read it, and which places London in the group of American Naturalists who see people as outclassed by the forces of nature.  Here, the central character’s dog is smarter about the ways of nature than he is. If only he didn’t lack the one human quality that might help him cope with the uncontrollable forces of nature: imagination.

19. “The Other Two” by Edith Wharton, 1904

New York stockbroker Waythorn’s new wife Alice is beautiful, refined, and as comfortable to live with as a well-worn shoe. The only trouble: she is twice-divorced in a culture where divorce just isn’t done, and both husbands are still hanging around. Waythorn starts to wonder whether he likes being just one more share-holder in a “joint stock company.” Wharton keeps her readers locked inside Waythorn’s point of view through this story, so at first readers may tend to see Alice as a shallow social-climber. But just maybe her husband should be regarding her as something other than a fine possession?  Perhaps the story is not a portrait of a conniving woman but rather a subtle piece of feminism.

20. “The Sculptor’s Funeral” by Willa Cather, 1905

A celebrated American sculptor, Harvey Merrick, has died, and his pupil Steavens accompanies his coffin back to the small out-of-the way Kansas town where Merrick was born. Steavens is shocked to encounter the narrow, uncharitable, materialistic community, completely unsympathetic to the aesthetic values or achievements of Harvey Merrick. The story is an indictment of provincial American places where art, as well has human differences, are unwelcome.

Remember to visit Americanliterature.com to find most of these stories.

Find all these great American short stories online.

Have you read any, or all, of these stories? Do you know of a story you would add to this list? Please leave a reply sharing your thoughts in the comment section!

*Photo Credits:

Mark Twain [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Kate Chopin. Click   for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Crane. Click for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mary Jane is a longtime literature lover who lived in the Cincinnati area for many years, then in central Louisiana for three years (what a treat!), teaching literature classes at universities in both locations. Now back in the Cincinnati area, she pampers her grandchildren, experiments with cooking, and visits art museums as often as possible.

You May Also Like:

19th century American literture American literature American writers Authors classic American fiction classic literature close reading Edith Wharton Hawthorne Henry James Kate Chopin Mark Twain meaning of literature reading fiction short stories Teaching English writers

January 16, 2019 at 3:34 pm

What a great list! Even though I got my BA in Literature, I was surprised to find that I had only read the earliest ones (up through Twain and then Jack London). I have read something by each of the authors, but not these particular stories. As I’m on a quest to create my own short stories this year (I’ve only written novels up to now), I’m looking forward to reading the rest of them, and to revisit some of the earlier ones.

January 17, 2019 at 11:20 am

Thanks for your comment, Denise! I hope you enjoy touring through the stories that are new to you. If you have further thoughts on any, I welcome your comments, especially if you find any techniques that inspire your own short-story writing.

February 2, 2021 at 7:38 am

Now we need one for the 20th Century! 😁

February 2, 2021 at 12:21 pm

Thanks Chelsea! Great idea. Right now I’m researching and re-reading 18th Century English literature so I can write the next Timeline (see Lists and Timelines menu for the classic reading lists already complete). When that is done, maybe I’ll put together that 20th century short story list! Glad you enjoyed the 19th Century one.

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16 Famous Short Story Authors and Their Best Stories

Short stories are short pieces of fiction focused on a single plot, character, setting, and theme. Since the 1800s, famous short story authors have left their mark on literary history, preserved in books and other publications.

Table of Contents

Edgar Allan Poe

The influential short story writer was born in 1809. At 24, he wrote “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,” which set him on course as one of the most critically acclaimed writers ever. Edgar Allan later gained fame for his dark tales such as:

• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Cask of Amontillado

Despite winning awards and selling out newspapers, Poe didn’t receive much recognition until after his death in 1849. Poe’s legacy lives on today, with media adaptations and literature classes studying his work.

Aside from being a short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe is also one of the most famous poets in the world .

This prolific author was a master of satire and a genius for creating unforgettable characters. He gained international fame for works like “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Humorous Tales ” and “ The Million Pound Bank Note .”

Twain also wrote scathingly honest social commentaries and admired lectures on various topics. He was also a fierce abolitionist, growing up on the border between free Missouri and slave-owning states. Newspaper stories he wrote while traveling the globe were popular reads. The American literature giant grew up as Samuel Clemens and died in 1910.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway  was a Nobel Prize-winning journalist and hunter who greatly influenced 20th-century literature. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he began his career as a writer while working as an ambulance driver during World War I. His works were known for their simplicity of language and modern themes. 

Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature for “ The Old Man and the Sea ” in 1954. Hemingway was also well known for his adventurous lifestyle, hunting abroad, and fishing expeditions. Some of his other notable works include: 

• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Virginia Woolf

The iconic English author became one of the famous short story authors thanks to her modernist writing style. She was a member of the  Bloomsbury Group  and wrote prose works such as “ The Voyage Out ” (1915) and “ Mrs. Dalloway ” (1925). 

Her ground-breaking book “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) argued for equal opportunity for women in literature and brought the issue to international attention. 

She unhappily suffered from bouts of mental illness throughout her life, culminating in her death by drowning. 

James Joyce

Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and playwright. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers, celebrated worldwide for using the novelistic technique in his novels. 

A driving force behind  modernism  and a revered figure to both English language literature enthusiasts and postmodernist critics, Joyce published many short stories in magazines. He eternally remains one of history’s most profound minds whose works continue to shape literature seen everywhere today.

Ambrose Bierce

This celebrated American author’s career covered the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing style, which could be both cynical and darkly humorous, garnered him a strong following of devoted readers. Bierce’s most famous works include Killed at Resacaand Beyond the Wall. 

Still, he also wrote poetry, fiction, plays, essays, reviews, and letters and was widely acclaimed for his work in investigative journalism. Bierce penned several iconic war stories, such as “ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ,” which many consider one of the most significant pieces of American literature. 

James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s works elaborated on themes of racial inequality, sexuality, and religious issues during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1924 in New York City, Baldwin struggled with his identity as an openly gay black man in America. He’s best known for his works, such as “ Going to Meet the Man and “ The Outing “.

Most of his works focused on human relationships with truth and morality during a difficult period in US  history . In addition, he gave powerful speeches discussing social justice issues through his words and advocacy for African American rights. During the latter years of his life, he became popular globally due to his genius writing skills and charitable causes.

Flannery O’Connor

The passionate American writer loved to depict the Southern lifestyle from her Catholic faith-infused perspective.  Flannery O’Connor  was born in 1925 in Georgia and published two books of short stories and two novels during her lifetime – “ Wise Blood ” and “ The Violent Bear It Away .”

O’Connor also wrote numerous letters and nonfictional essays that were later collected and published. Her works earned many prestigious awards, including the National Book Award (1972) and the National Medal of Arts in 1996. 

George Saunders

Sander’s unique blending of humor and pathos makes him one of today’s most famous short story authors. He has written stories, essays, novellas, novels, children’s books, and screenplays which have won him critical acclaim from critics. He penned the National Magazine Award-winning work early in his career, later expanding into a novel. 

His “ Tenth of December ” publication was a significant turnaround for his career. George recently won The Man Booker Prize for his 2017 book and received numerous other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This Scottish writer became famous for creating the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. Although he published over 200 works, including novels, poems, plays, and nonfiction, many know him for his 66 detective stories.

He also wrote popular historical romances such as “ The White Company ” (1891) and produced formidable science fiction tales such as “The Lost World” (1912). Doyle was a pioneering author in crime writer who used real-life issues to create compelling mysteries. 

Despite being immensely successful as an author,  Doyle  held firm religious beliefs, which led him to become a spiritualist advocate. 

Kate Chopin

Chopin began writing in the late 1890s after being inspired by local folk stories, Creole culture, and other famous short story authors. 

Her “ The Awakening ” is a forerunner to modern feminist literature, revealing feelings of  freedom  among women living in oppressive environments. Other works include: 

• The Story of an Hour

Several short story collections were published posthumously. Despite initial criticism for their focus on female sexuality and free will, many consider her a trailblazer for feminist writers.

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver  was a celebrated American short story writer, poet, and essayist. He associated his work with the “dirty realism” writing style due to its focus on ordinary people. They explore complex themes such as loneliness, depression, and alcoholism. 

Carver began his career in small magazines throughout the United States before having his first book published in 1976. He won an O. Henry award for “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love ” in 1981. He also received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and later died from cancer in 1988.

Shirley Jackson

This hugely influential figure is known for her works that blend horror, psychological terror, and black comedy. She became famous due to her short story “The Lottery.” 

Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Rochester before graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in English.  She  later moved to North Bennington, Vermont, where she’s written most of her works, which would become literary classics. 

An ardent feminist who wrote about women’s inner lives in ways unheard of for their time, it’s no surprise her legacy continues. Jackson died at her Vermont home from natural causes on August 8th, 1965.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte  was an American feminist, scholar, novelist, and social reformer who advocated for women’s rights to employment and education. She is best known for her short story “ The Yellow Wallpaper ” (1892), which discusses a woman’s mental health struggles. 

Gilman also wrote nonfiction works exploring issues of sex and gender roles. She wrote over two hundred poems and hundreds of other pieces on various social reform-related topics. Her efforts in influencing the world through scholarly works helped advance the cause of women everywhere during this historic time.

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov is widely considered one of the famous short story authors, alongside Alexandr Ostrovsky and Nikolai Gogol. Born in 1860, he initially worked as a physician while writing short stories. Consequently, he marked 19th-century literature with short stories such as “ The Darling ” and “ Vanka .”

He later turned his attention to plays, producing some of his most notable works. Additionally, he wrote over 500 letters collected in 1952 and can provide insight into his life and work as a writer. His stories often used understatement to make an emotional impression rather than relying on dialogue or plot.

Washington Irving

This legendary figure is one of the earliest American writers to combine influences of his home country and Britain successfully. He rose to fame with tales like “ Rip Van Winkle ” and “ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ,” which not only spoke to the spirit of the people at that time but have become iconic cultural touchstones in the present day. 

Outside of writing, Washington was also an accomplished businessman and diplomat, becoming the United States ambassador to Spain from 1842-1846. As a result, Irving kept very close relationships with many influential figures, including William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper. He broadened the literature palette through clever wordplay and sketches derived from local stories or European folklore. 

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka  was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist regarded as one of the most famous short story writers of the 20th century. Born in 1883 in Prague, his works often reflect alienation, anxiety, and isolation themes. He wrote extensively on existential topics and used his writing to address political tyranny and bureaucracy. 

Many of his works remained incomplete at his death. Kafka’s influence can still be seen today in literature, philosophy, film, visual arts, and beyond, despite his limited recognition during his lifetime. He died in 1924 after suffering from tuberculosis.

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13 Short Stories From Classic Novelists You Can Read Over Lunch

It's easy to feel like you don't have time to read literature — especially hefty works by classic novelists. Between busy jobs and hectic weekends, cracking open a lengthy book that tackles humanity's biggest questions doesn't always seem like the most fun pastime. 

Luckily for us, many writers famous for their long sagas wrote short stories too.

Here are some suggestions for poignant stories from the world's most beautiful writers, all of which you can read in the time it takes to scan your newsfeed.

1. 'A Haunted House' by Virginia Woolf

This very short story — barely over 700 words — showcases Woolf's signature modernist style. Unlike Woolf's other works, the story is a fantasy. In "A Haunted House," a ghost couple searches for buried treasure in the house of a living couple. Mysterious in topic and writing style, the story takes on the power of love.  

Read it for free here . 

2. 'Shooting an Elephant' by George Orwell

This short story by Orwell follows an English policeman in Burma who is called upon to shoot an elephant. The strain of imperialism is represented through the officer's anguish while watching the majestic creature suffer and slowly die. It is also a great companion read to Orwell's novel Burmese Days.

3. 'A Sound of Thunder' by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury wrote 11 novels — and over 400 short stories. He was famous for writing a story every week , a practice many other writers have since tried to emulate. "A Sound of Thunder" is the most republished science fiction story of all time and is the origin of the sci-fi theme called " the butterfly effect ." 

4. 'The Nightingale and the Rose' by Oscar Wilde

"The Nightingale and the Rose" uses the fairy tale form to take a much more serious look at themes of love and sacrifice. While the nightingale is a character you would expect in a fairy tale, willing to sacrifice herself for true love, the lovers in this story are quite a surprise. 

5. 'Stone Mattress' by Margaret Atwood

Best known for her novels, including classics like  The Handmaid's Tale , Atwood is also a prolific short story writer. This story follows a serial seductress as she runs into her old high school crush on vacation 50 years later — and starts planning his murder. 

6. 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' by J. D. Salinger

Salinger is considered one of the best American writers of the 20th century, but he only actually wrote one novel: The Catcher in the Rye . His other works were all short stories or novellas. This one follows the comical conversation of a woman on vacation with her husband, who has PTSD, talking on the phone to her concerned mother.

7. 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' by Ernest Hemingway

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" follows a writer, Harry, on safari in Africa with his wife who is dying from gangrene. A member of Hemingway's "lost generation," Harry reflects on how a marriage with luxury and without love caused him to waste away his life and his talent.  

8. 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In Marquez's signature style of magical realism, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is about a couple who find an angel in their front yard. Soon everyone in town has a different opinion about what should be done with the angel and why exactly it is that he can't fly. 

9. 'Three Questions' by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy took a break from his famously long novels to write this short parable about a king searching to find how he can learn to do the right thing at the right time. The answer comes to him in a very surprising way.

10. 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' by Mark Twain

This short story was Mark Twain's first success as an author. In it a rather cynical narrator recounts a story told to him by a small town bartender about a gambler and his famous jumping frog. The tall tale was written as part of a contest Twain had with his friends to see who could create the most absurd yet believable story .

11. 'Eveline' by James Joyce

While best known for  Ulysses, one of the longest books in the English language, Joyce also wrote many short stories about the people of Ireland. This one follows a young woman who has to choose between duty to her family and the potential for a better life abroad with her lover. 

12. 'Symbols and Signs' by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov wrote this piece for The New Yorker in 1948, seven years before Lolita was published. In it he follows an elderly couple going to visit their mentally ill son for his birthday. As everything starts to go wrong, the story explores the truly touching efforts of these loving parents. 

13. 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Best known for his novel  The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald once again enters the world of the rich and glamorous in this short story. Fitzgerald's critique of wealth remains scathing, this time exploring how far one family is willing to go to hide the secret behind their wealth. 

For more reading suggestions, check out " 14 Brilliant Pieces Of Literature You Can Read in the Time It Takes to Eat Lunch ." 

Book Scrolling

Best Book Lists, Award Aggregation, & Book Data

The Best Short Story Collections Of All-Time

“What are the best Short Story Collections Of All-Time??” We looked at 382 of the top books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 25 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Short Story” book lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 350+ books, as well as the lists we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 25 Short Story Collections

25 .) 20th century ghosts by joe hill.

Lists It Appears On:

• Long Beach Public Library

“Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. . . . Francis was human once, but now he’s an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . . John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. . . . Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of ’77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. . . . The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. . . .”

Purchase / Learn More

24 .) A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

• Paste Magazine

“A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.”

23 .) Can’t And Won’t by Lydia Davis

• Scottic Book Trust

“Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of “”Bloomington”” reads, “”Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.”” Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in “”A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates,”” a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis’s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.”

22 .) Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

“A collection of fourteen dark tales, Everything’s Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and “Riding the Bullet,” King’s original ebook, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade. Two of the stories, “The Little Sisters of Eluria” and “Everything’s Eventual” are closely related to the Dark Tower series. “Riding the Bullet,” is the story of Alan Parker, who’s hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” a sparring couple’s contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d’ gets out of sorts. “1408,” the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards” or “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses,” and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn’t kill him, he won’t be writing about ghosts anymore.”

21 .) In the Country by Mia Alvar

• Knopf Doubleday

In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.

20 .) Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

• Cool Material
• Publishers Weekly

Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson’s prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.

19 .) Night Shift by Stephen King

Night Shift—Stephen King’s first collection of stories—is an early showcase of the depths that King’s wicked imagination could plumb. In these 20 tales, we see mutated rats gone bad (“Graveyard Shift”); a cataclysmic virus that threatens humanity (“Night Surf,” the basis for The Stand); a smoker who will try anything to stop (“Quitters, Inc.”); a reclusive alcoholic who begins a gruesome transformation (“Gray Matter”); and many more. This is Stephen King at his horrifying best.

18 .) Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

• Huffington Post

The Stories: A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, Just Before the War with the Eskimos, The Laughing Man, Down at the Dinghy, For Esme — With Love and Squalor, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, and Teddy.

17 .) No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly—they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.

16 .) Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today’s most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic.

15 .) The Best American Short Stories (annual)

• Acton Memorial Library

The Best American Short Stories 2017 casts a vote for and celebrates all that is our country. Here you’ll find a man with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, naval officers trapped on a submarine, a contestant on America’s Funniest Home Videos, and a gay man desperate to be a father—unforgettable characters waiting for an outcome, burning with stories to tell.

14 .) The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

“One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. “”Power and haunting,”” and “”nights of unrest”” were typical reader responses. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, a story remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane. The Lottery and Other Stories, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson’s lifetime, unites “”The Lottery”” with twenty-four equally unusual short stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson’s remarkable range — from the hilarious to the horrible, the unsettling to the ominous — and her power as a storyteller.”

13 .) The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• The Guardian

In these twelve dazzlng stories, the bestselling, award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

12 .) Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works by Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

11 .) Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

10 .) Dubliners by James Joyce

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.

9 .) Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

“Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear. In “Nirvana,” a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.”

8 .) Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

“She has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.” Now Kelly Link’s eagerly awaited new collection—her first for adult readers in a decade—proves indelibly that this bewitchingly original writer is among the finest we have. Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.”

7 .) Pastoralia by George Saunders

Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as “graceful, dark, authentic, and funny,” George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape.

6 .) Runaway by Alice Munro

This acclaimed, bestselling collection also contains the celebrated stories that inspired the Pedro Almodóvar film Julieta. Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

5 .) Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things is a sterling collection of exceptional tales from Neil Gaiman, multiple award-winning (the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Newberry, and Eisner Awards, to name just a few), #1 New York Timesbestselling author of The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and the groundbreaking Sandman graphic novel series. A uniquely imaginative creator of wonders whose unique storytelling genius has been acclaimed by a host of literary luminaries from Norman Mailer to Stephen King, Gaiman’s astonishing powers are on glorious displays in Fragile Things. Enter and be amazed!

4 .) Tenth of December by George Saunders

“One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet. In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation. Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.”

3 .) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

2 .) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

1 .) This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

“From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness–and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses.”

The 350+ Additional Short Story Books

20 best short story collection sources/lists, related posts.

The Best Books of 2023 – Science Fiction And Fantasy (A Year-End List Aggregation)

The Best Books of 2023 – Graphic Novels And Comics (A Year-End List Aggregation)

Watch CBS News

See the full list of past total solar eclipses in the U.S. since 1778

By Kerry Breen

Updated on: April 9, 2024 / 4:36 AM EDT / CBS News

A  rare total solar eclipse was visible in parts of the United States Monday. Those in the path of totality  had the opportunity to see the sun be fully covered by the moon for several minutes.

Total solar eclipses are rare , and aren't often visible from the U.S. The last time one occurred here  was in 2017 , and the U.S. won't see another until 2044 .

Here's a list of all the times a total solar eclipse has been recorded in the United States. 

Total solar eclipse in the U.S. during the 18th century

The first recorded total solar eclipse was in 1778, according to NASA , just a few short years after the United States became an independent country. The eclipse was visible from the Carolinas to New England, and was noted by historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, according to Mount Vernon , the museum established in former President George Washington's estate. Troops in Washington's army also noted the event. 

List of total solar eclipses in the U.S. during the 19th century

1806: The first total solar eclipse of the 1800s occurred in 1806, according to the National Parks Service . The path of that eclipse would have crossed from Arizona, through the Midwest and into New England, according to NASA . 

1869: The next total solar eclipse was recorded in 1869. The path of totality stretched from Alaska to the Carolinas, according to NASA . Photos of the event were published in Harper's Magazine, the service said, the first mass publication to do so. 

1878: The next total solar eclipse occurred in 1878, and the path of totality arced from Alaska through Louisiana, according to NASA . It was studied by an all-woman team of astronomers, according to the parks service, and Thomas Edison himself traveled to see the event, bringing scientific equipment to study the sun's corona during the eclipse. 

List of total solar eclipses in the U.S. during the 20th century

1900: The first eclipse of the 20th century was in 1900, according to the parks service. The path of totality of that eclipse brought it over Wadesboro, North Carolina.

1918: In June 1918, a total solar eclipse was visible from Washington to Florida, according to the parks service. It was the last time a total solar eclipse would be visible across the entire continent for nearly 100 years. 

1925: This was followed by another total solar eclipse in January 1925, which was visible from Minnesota through New England, according to NASA . 

1932: In August 1932, another total solar eclipse was visible in North America. The path of totality for this eclipse was mostly in Canada, according to NASA , but was visible in northern New England including parts of Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. 

1963: The next total solar eclipse in the U.S. wasn't until July 1963. This eclipse was visible in Alaska and parts of northern New England, according to NASA . 

1970: In March 1970, another total solar eclipse was visible from the coast of the Southwest United States. Watch CBS News coverage of that event in the video below:

1979: The last eclipse that NASA recorded in the 20th century took place in 1979. This eclipse was visible in the Pacific Northwest and parts of Idaho and the Dakotas, but the path of totality mostly arced through Canada. 

Total solar eclipses in the U.S. during the 21st century so far

Only two total solar eclipses have been visible from the United States during the 21st century. The first was the total solar eclipse of 2017 , which was visible across the country . This was the first time such an event had occurred since 1918, and millions gathered to watch . 

The April 8, 2024, eclipse was the next total solar eclipse visible in the U.S. The path of totality for this eclipse stretched from Texas to the Northeast. The eclipse started  on Mexico's Pacific coast at just after 11 a.m. PDT before traveling across the U.S. and into Canada. The eclipse left North America around 5:19 p.m. EDT. 

The eclipse attracted millions of spectators. Some areas where the event was most visible declared local states of emergency to account for the number of expected visitors. 

When will the next total solar eclipse be visible in the U.S.?

After the April 8 eclipse, the U.S. won't see another total solar eclipse for decades. The next total solar eclipse visible from the United States will occur in August 2044. 

Total solar eclipses typically happen every one to three years somewhere around the globe, but the events are often only visible from Earth's poles or from the middle of the ocean. 

Kerry Breen is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University's Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News' TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use.

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Rescued artwork of Salvador Dalí to be exhibited in Fullerton

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Last month, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton filmed a special video of staff carefully pulling sculptures from cardboard boxes. Packing peanuts tumbled out as precariously bubbled-wrapped bundles were removed. The protective material was pulled back to reveal curious figures, like the cast of a gold goat and a headless female form. The works were by renowned Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, part of the latest exhibit at the Muck.

Curated by Annabella Pritchard, the exhibit, opening to the public on April 25, includes 50 signed pieces by Dalí, best known for his instantly recognizable and often parodied paintings, such as “The Persistence of Memory.”

The works on display at the Muck, including “Woman Aflame,” “Space Elephant” and “The Pantagruel Suite,” come from the personal collection of Benjamin Feldman, whose serendipitous discovery of the pieces saved them from a dumpster fate.

“The rescue of this collection is a story unto itself and worthy of the surrealist bent of the artist,” said Farrell Hirsch, chief executive officer of the Muckenthaler.

Feldman is a Washingtonian and no stranger to treasure hunting. Most weekends he can be found exploring the hollers of Appalachia. It was through his excursions that he came upon the collection, which had been in storage for nearly 20 years.

“There was man who had passed away who had these in his shed,” said Callie Prendiville Johnson, communications director at the Muckenthaler. “One of Ben’s friends in Appalachia said, ‘I found these things and I am going to throw them away unless you want them.’”

Feldman discovered a trove of signed, lesser known works from Dalí. Once he realized what he had on his hands, he reached out to Pritchard, a Fullerton art curator with connections to the Muckenthaler.

“Woman Aflame” and “Space Elephant” are the most recognized 3-dimensional works in the collection, while the lithographs of “The Pantagruel Suite” depict father and son Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired from a series of novels drafted in 16th-century France by François Rabelais.

Besides painting, Dalí was known for graphic arts, film, sculpture, photography and poetry. When he began his art career, he was influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters but began to dabble in Cubism before joining the Surrealist group in 1929. The Surrealist movement began in Europe after World War I, with artists exploring the unconscious mind as a form of expression. Dalí’s work often plumbed the subconscious and dreams as well as sexuality, religion and science. “The Persistence of Memory,” completed in 1931, is among the most famous surrealist paintings in the world.

“Dalí is a name that is instantly recognizable to even the casual art fan. In terms of 20th-century artists, this is a household name.” said Johnson. “The fact that these works were almost destroyed makes them all the more precious.”

The exhibit comes at the start of the centennial of Surrealism. The show will run from April 25 until June 28, with a live musical performance from Elvis Schoenberg and Orchestre Surreal on June 27, closing the show’s last week.

Multiple points of serendipity landed this collection at the Muck, Hirsch said, and staff hopes the Orange County community will come take advantage of this special exhibit.

“It’s one of those rare moments when the story behind a great art show rivals the art itself.”

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Sarah Mosqueda covered Orange County food, art and culture for TimesOC and is now a staff writer in Food for the Los Angeles Times. She also has several years of experience in the restaurant industry, including as a proprietor. Mosqueda earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from Cal State Fullerton.

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O.J. Simpson, football legend acquitted of notorious killings, dies at 76

Russell Lewis

Becky Sullivan

Emma Bowman

O.J. Simpson, pictured in September 2008 in Las Vegas, died Wednesday, according to a statement from his family. Isaac Brekken/Getty Images hide caption

O.J. Simpson, pictured in September 2008 in Las Vegas, died Wednesday, according to a statement from his family.

The football great Orenthal James Simpson, known as O.J., who was accused and ultimately acquitted in the killings of his ex-wife and her friend, has died. Simpson was 76.

In a post on X , his family said he died on Wednesday. He "succumbed to his battle with cancer," and was surrounded by his children and grandchildren.

Simpson was a cultural icon who starred on the football field and in movies and commercials. That legacy was forever eclipsed after he made headlines in 1994 for another reason when he was accused of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. In 1995, jurors determined he was not guilty in the stabbing deaths. No one else was ever charged. Dubbed the "trial of the century," the nationally televised proceedings captivated the country with a verdict that reverberated across the U.S. with debates about police misconduct, race, celebrity and domestic abuse.

On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace. -The Simpson Family — O.J. Simpson (@TheRealOJ32) April 11, 2024

O.J. Simpson first found fame on the football field. Once a kid who wore leg braces until age 5 after developing rickets, Simpson went on to become one of the greatest running backs of all time. He played at the University of Southern California (USC) in the late 1960s. The powerful tailback danced, dashed and dazzled on the field, propelling the Trojans to a national championship in 1967. He won the Heisman trophy, as college football's best player, in 1968.

After graduating from USC, he played 11 seasons in the NFL; nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, and two seasons with the San Francisco 49ers. Known as "The Juice," he collected four rushing titles, played in five Pro Bowls and, in 1973, became the first running back to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark.

During and after his pro career ended in 1979, he starred in TV commercials, mostly notably as a pitchman for Hertz as he rushed through airports for the rental car company. He also later appeared in several shows and movies, including The Naked Gun and the TV miniseries Roots , as producers seized on his fame and likeability.

O.J. Simpson, accompanied by his parents, his son, Jason, and Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills, is inducted into the Wall of Fame in Rich Stadium on Sept. 14, 1980. Ross Lewis/Getty Images hide caption

O.J. Simpson, accompanied by his parents, his son, Jason, and Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills, is inducted into the Wall of Fame in Rich Stadium on Sept. 14, 1980.

In 1994, the bodies of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, were found stabbed outside her home in Los Angeles. Not long after, Simpson was arrested and his subsequent "low-speed" white Bronco car chase on L.A. freeways was televised nationwide; some 95 million people tuned into the chase coverage. In 1995, a criminal jury determined he was not guilty of committing the killings.

The most famous moment of the months-long trial was when a prosecutor asked OJ to try on the gloves believed to belong to the killer. In a dramatic showing, Simpson struggled to pull on the snug pair.

Defense lawyer Johnnie Cochrane seized on this, delivering the most famous line of the whole spectacle in his closing arguments: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

On June 17, 1994, Los Angeles police "chased" a white Ford Bronco carrying O.J. Simpson and driven at low speed by Al Cowlings on a freeway in Los Angeles. Joseph R. Villarin/AP hide caption

On June 17, 1994, Los Angeles police "chased" a white Ford Bronco carrying O.J. Simpson and driven at low speed by Al Cowlings on a freeway in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors Marcia Clark, William Hodgman and Christopher Darden came to the trial with strong evidence linking Simpson to the killings, including DNA tests, the right hand of a pair of blood-stained gloves that were found at his home, and his history of spousal abuse.

Simpson's legal team of prominent criminal defense lawyers, including Johnnie Cochran and Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey and Robert Kardashian, successfully made the case to the jury that there was reasonable doubt. It cast the LAPD as racist and corrupt, arguing that it had tampered with forensic evidence at a shoddy crime scene.

When the mixed-race jury announced the not guilty verdict, public reaction seen in media coverage largely fell along racial lines, showing Black people celebrating and white people shocked by his acquittal.

Those TV clips didn't tell the full story, says Camille Charles, a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn't that Black Americans all thought he was innocent, she says.

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"Black people were more conflicted than was really ever shown in the media," Charles says. But, she says, "Black folks had had such a bad experience with the criminal justice system that they rooted for him as a Black man who actually had the resources to mount a proper defense."

The trial took place three years after the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King had inflamed the deep distrust among Black people and police.

But, as a wealthy celebrity who married a white woman, Simpson was "never seen as a staunch proponent of the African American community," says Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and African American studies at UCLA, and as a result, didn't engender overwhelming sympathy among African Americans during his trial.

Two years later, a different civil jury determined he was liable in the deaths and ordered him to pay $33 million to the families of Brown and Goldman.

Simpson continued to maintain his innocence in media interviews.

That wasn't his last tangle with legal trouble. In 2007, he led a group of men to a Las Vegas hotel room to confront some sports memorabilia dealers. Several people brought guns with them, and Simpson was later convicted of armed robbery. He served almost a decade in a Nevada prison and was released on parole in 2017 .

The public's fascination with O.J. Simpson never waned. He was the subject of numerous documentaries about the killings and his life.

• O.J. Simpson