“If a book is well written it doesn’t matter if it’s about something horrific or depressing,” says Jon McGregor. A line-by-line wonder that’s both funny and profound. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.

. She deserves to be much, much better known. Beyond that, I’m happy to be disturbed.”, Tahmima Anam, however, feels quite differently. This weekend, Lydia Davis—crowned master of the very short story, not to mention a preeminent translator of classic French literature—turns 70.

Short stories are always a great choice. What comforts me is good writing. NB: this list should by no means be taken to reflect the “best of all time,” merely “my own personal favorites,” and is only a taste of what’s out there—so do us all a favor and point us to your own beloved micro-fictions in the comments. Why? One of the things I love most about short stories is their ambiguity and irresolution – the opposite of comfort. But they have 15 minutes. Yes, we promised no War and Peace, but The Death of Ivan Ilych is your opportunity to read a masterwork by one of the greatest writers of all time. “I’m finding stories a bit too long, and also made up,” Kate Clanchy tells me. Check out these short nonfiction books you can read in a day. “I have been so rattled by the news,” she says, “that other than the odd short story I have stopped reading fiction. I’m always impressed by the way Samatar conjures an sustains mood; this piece would poke a a wet black hole in any shining day. The literary Internet’s most important stories, every day. Disclosure: This post is brought to you by Reader’s Digest editors, who aim to highlight products and services you might find interesting. The busier people get, the less time they have to read a story … people often don’t have a straight half hour of time to read at all. Not because they slip down easily, but because whenever I put a book down, the move from fiction back to reality was so jarring that what I’d just read would be overpowered.

I imagine I’ll always love short stories, even in the apocalypse.”. “The Little Men” by Megan Abbott (from The Best American Mystery Stories 2016) I’m especially partial to this one since I’m a recent Megan Abbott convert (late the the party, I know!). In 62 laser-sharp pages, Ernaux zaps an obsessive, jealousy-fueled romance gone haywire. But Anam’s position isn’t about avoiding difficult subject matter.

I’m only able to read poetry, essays, and the newspapers.” Lionel Shriver feels the same way. . While flash is sort of out of fashion at the moment, I’ve been hearing rumors of a resurgence—The New Yorker has a flash fiction series going on this summer, for instance—so perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves what very short stories can do. I read “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane’s gripping tale of survival at sea, Joseph Conrad’s haunting account of doubleness, “The Secret Sharer”, and Julio Cortázar’s ingenious Möbius strip of a story, “Continuity of Parks”. Wow! I think of it as a ribbon that unwinds and unwinds, revealing a relationship, a way of life, and of course, a girl. You might also enjoy these 12 brilliant books you can read in a weekend. “Looking for a Rain God” by Bessie HeadHead’s stories, based on interviews she conducted with the villagers of Serowe, Botswana, are like elaborated folktales: the original story, in this case about a terrible drought, is overlaid with a sense of irony, knowledge of history and taste for enigma. But I didn’t only want to know the outline of what these writers had been reading. Just about any of the pieces in Ninety-nine Stories of God would do here, honestly, but I love the firm wink of “Aubade,” only the third story in the book. For those who like their fiction hard-boiled, nobody did it better than Raymond Chandler, who died in 1959. . Is it truth or fiction? “I just take pleasure in the construction and the writing of it.” Shriver, citing “You Will Never Be Forgotten” by Mary South, a story “about a woman stalking her rapist”, says that, “there’s nothing comforting about that material. When I first heard Deb Olin Unferth read, I was so desperate to write down what she’d said that I scribbled her phrases on my own pants in eyeliner. He has also gone back to Wendy Erskine’s collection Sweet Home, “because I can’t work out how she breathes so much life into her stories”. In a newly-released 128-page collection, Nettel offers five entrancing tales in which animals—even fish and insects—reflect hidden aspects of human nature.

McGregor has found himself returning to George Saunders, “for the fun he has with voice and register, and how much he loves his characters – even, or especially, the flawed ones”. This chimed with something Claire-Louise Bennett had said to me a few days earlier: “The first short stories I read were folk tales, which, on the one hand, are so vivid and specific, yet intensely mysterious and unyielding too.

We are no longer supporting IE (Internet Explorer) as we strive to provide site experiences for browsers that support new web standards and security practices. At 110 pages, it packs a punch all out of proportion to its size.

Schwartz enfolds fictional histories, a possible murder or two, and a slew of startling images in a work that delights and unnerves its adventurous readers. Also, the best short stories are every bit as engaging and meaningful as the best novels.

I like “The Outing” because it’s the skeleton of a story, poking fun at the notion of “what happens”—and yet still creates a powerful sense of what indeed happened.

Bestselling Baker’s cheeky debut, first published in 1986, takes place on a one-story escalator ride, and—in 142 pages—defamiliarizes the ordinary world and makes it dazzlingly fresh.

arcel Proust’s brother said the problem with. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), So You've Decided to Write: What I Learned From Editing Jim Harrison, Elif Shafak on What It Means to Belong in Many Places at Once, Prince Was One of the Loneliest Souls I've Ever Met, How a Scrap of Papyrus Launched a Reconsideration of Early Christianity. But then, I am a special case: I knew this was going to be a spring and summer of reading short fiction anyway, because I’m one of the judges for this year’s BBC National short story award. Davis didn’t invent flash fiction, but she is certainly its most famous—and perhaps its best—practitioner. Stories require concentration and seriousness. The novel opens in 1928 as the great eccentric composer embarks on a grand tour of the United States. We welcome your feedback. Short stories are shots of espresso – bitter, sharp, and always leaving you slightly unsatisfied. Saunders builds meaning out of nothing, slowly, it seems—although in a story this short there’s hardly room for slowness—and then rips it all away from you in the end, leaving you gutted and empty, which is just the sort of abject cruelty you really want from a writer. I’m sorry, but Amelia Gray doesn’t get enough credit for being fucking hilarious. It’s one of those that I read long ago but has stuck in my mind permanently—particularly the beat of that French film, French film. Lucy Caldwell, twice shortlisted and one of my fellow judges this year, tells a similar story of disturbed reading patterns, describing her engagement with books as “idle, frantic, slippery, vague. This modern classic, about a Latina girl growing up in Chicago, has been translated and taught all over the world. At 137 pages, it weighs in as one of the giants of 2014. Bonus: László Krasznahorkai, “I Don’t Need Anything from Here”.

Email us at [email protected]. Some have struggled to read fiction of any kind.

The First Major Novel of WWII: On Hemingway's, Five Great Books About the Korean Diaspora, Terry Tempest Williams on Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and Siding with the Grizzlies, Edward Gorey designed the sets for the 1970s Broadway run of, Mixing Genres Is All About Messing With Structure, Bringing the Traditional Murder Mystery to India, Seven Great Thrillers That Take Readers to Far-Flung Places, 'Rebecca' at Eighty: The Women Behind the Hitchcock Classic. Nudibranch by Irenosen OkojieOkojie, who is also judging this year’s NSSA, has an extraordinary imagination: from time-travelling monks to Ballardian islands, these stories show you things you’ll have never seen before. Here are some of our favorite short stories for middle schoolers to share with your students. Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah EisenbergEisenberg might work slowly – this is her fifth collection of stories in 35 years – but her stories are close to faultless: hilarious, ingenious, singular. Because all the stories I received were worthy and many were more technically ambitious when it came to language and form, by which I guess I mean experimental. Pick up one of these 50 books you should read before you’re 50.

As Glinda the Good Witch says in The Wizard of Oz, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.”That’s where editors and literary agents generally get going, so perhaps you should, too. “Where is the Voice Coming From?” by Eudora WeltyTold from the point of view of a racist killer, this story was written in the immediate aftermath of the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. The Dominant Animal by Kathryn ScanlanUnusually skilled at compression, Scanlan writes short short stories that are often just a page or so long. Probably a bit of both, and essential reading for anyone who’s ever messed up in love. What has everyone been reading? She describes reading a good short story as like “being held between two opposing magnetic forces, which has something to do with both compression of narrative form and the content of the story – that’s the real draw for me, the insecurity and possible reversals I’ll face as a reader.” Once she’s there, she says, “I don’t care how much I’m messed around with psychologically or morally – the more the better, probably. For Anam she’s “flawless”, while Hadley praised her story “Carried Away”, “because it’s magnificent, and because it’s set in the aftermath of the first world war and the flu epidemic, and yet it’s so clear-eyed, funny, hungry, salty with irony.” For something from the here and now, another former winner of the prize, KJ Orr, told me she’s been kept up at night by the stories in Dima Alzayat’s recent debut collection Alligator. Every sentence here is a story in itself—and then there’s the actual story, of a huntress (or two). Lloyd has been avoiding her favourites – Deborah Eisenberg and Edward P Jones – in favour of stories “with a little bit of magic or otherness”, including “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound” by Karen Russell, and “The Lonesome Southern Trials of Knut the Whaler” by Jessie Greengrass.