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#33
08-01-2008, 01:12 PM
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#34
08-01-2008, 01:42 PM
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SF:
- I second the Cordwainer Smith recommend, especially "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard". - Jack Vance is often criminally overlooked (in both short and long fiction) - Ursula K. LeGuin has already been mentioned, but her collection Orsinian Tales never fails to blow my mind - No one writes better crafted SF short stories than Connie Willis <-- this is a fact "Classics" - Much love for Saki - Also KIPLING: "The Man Who Would Be King" enough said. - Like Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction is much more accessible - Faulkner writes a mean short story too , especially the English class standby "A Rose for Emily" Modernish - Junot Diaz's collection Drown is excellent - Thirds for Murakami - Not enough people know about Ralph Lombreglia and it is a shame. Special recommend: "Late Early Man" - Gao Xingjian earned his nobel prize in literature - Roald Dahl's "Beware of the Dog" can make you forget that he also wrote James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, et al. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez is magical realism at it's finest. "Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" is the longest sentence I have ever read.
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#35
08-01-2008, 02:09 PM
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#36
08-01-2008, 03:17 PM
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Last edited by ravinoff; 08-01-2008 at 03:51 PM.
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#37
08-01-2008, 03:48 PM
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I knew "The Lottery" would probably be mentioned in the first or second post here, but I want to note that pretty much anything by Shirley Jackson is pure gold. That includes The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted into The Haunting, which was of course a pale, pale shadow of the original. Her work is funny, bleak, biting, beautiful, and rendered in some of the most perfect, crisp, humble sentences any writer has ever written. I can't recommend her collected short fiction highly enough.
I haven't read her memoirs, though. I'll get to it someday.
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#38
08-01-2008, 05:11 PM
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KCar: I would doubly recommend G.K. Chesterton to any fan of Borges, as Borges himself was a huge fan of Chesterton. Its not a short story but my favorite work by Chesterton is The Man Who Was Thursday, a spy novel containing equal portions madcap adventures and philosophical arguments. I disagree with Chesterton's religious and philosophical stances but that in no way detracts from my love of his writing.
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#39
08-01-2008, 05:56 PM
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You should always read things that you don't agree with, as it forces you to think critically about what you believe and why.*
*For this to work of course, you need to take the material seriously, so there's that caveat.
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#41
08-01-2008, 06:13 PM
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EDIT: Robert E. Howard, America's favorite mama's boy, did a shitload of stuff about a shirtless dude from central Europe, but you can skip right over that into his Sailor Steve Costigan work. That's the best pulp fiction ever written, so far as I can tell.
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#42
08-01-2008, 06:33 PM
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#43
08-01-2008, 06:48 PM
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I am guilty of this though, sometimes I read too much of what I like and not enough of what I don't like--books about female corporate executives trying to keep body and soul together during a tumultuous divorce or some such.
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#46
08-01-2008, 10:38 PM
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JAMES HERRIOT. So absolutely wonderful. I cried when he died.
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I highly recommend Chekhov's short stories. Really good writing. Jack London is also fantastic although often depressing.
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#47
08-01-2008, 11:39 PM
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#49
08-02-2008, 12:23 AM
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I can't really speak on much here, I have Neil Gaiman's Smoke & Mirrors and checked out Gene Wolfe's Castle of Days from the library and read a few from both, but I haven't gone through very many short stories. However, Sci Fi had apparently been posting various short stories for a few years, and they even have one that I've read out of Castle of Days, Paul's Treehouse.
Of those posted I've only read Haruki Murakami's 100% perfect girl story, I've wanted to read his stuff but didn't want to go through Hard Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World before finishing A Game of Thrones, and I'm stupid about finishing books.
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#50
08-02-2008, 01:01 AM
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Memorare - http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/gw01.htm The Arimaspian Legacy - http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/arimaspian.htm Unrequited Love - http://subterraneanpress.com/index.p...by-gene-wolfe/ Under Hill - http://www.infinitematrix.net/storie...nder_hill.html Copperhead - http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/orig...fe/wolfe1.html Castaway - http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/orig...2/wolfe21.html Easter Sunday - http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=1799 The Case of the Vanishing Ghost - http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=1688 Another superb author of short fiction is Vladimir Nabokov. While overall I find his novels superior to his short fiction thats like saying I like super extremely great better than merely extremely great. My favorite Nabokov short story is probably Terror. (Totally disregarding that fact that I created this post for short fiction I am going suggest anyone who loves words read Nabokov's Pale Fire. one of the best books ever, featuring the greatest pompous asshole in all of fiction)
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#51
08-02-2008, 02:51 AM
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#52
08-02-2008, 03:11 AM
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, by Roald Dahl. Most Roald Dahl books are basically short stories (at least I usually read them in one sitting), but these are really some of his best work, and at times a lot darker that most of his other stuff. They cover such a wide variety of topics and moods that it's hard to read through them and not be completely satisfied. And one of them is even true! I think!
Favourites: The Swan, The Hitch-hiker, well all of them really. But mostly those two.
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#53
08-02-2008, 08:59 AM
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I'm kind of surprised no one's mentioned Anton Chekov's "The Bet" yet(unless I missed it). Another short story that everyone reads at some point during middle or high school.
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#54
08-02-2008, 10:07 AM
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Man, you guys must have had some nice English classes. The only things we read were a couple of Shakespeare plays and Cyrano de Bergerac. We'd spend a couple of weeks reading and going over each one, and it was sheer torture because I'd be done reading anything assigned within a day or two.
I don't even remember what we did for the rest of the time. I spent most of my class time in high school reading books unless it was a math or science class.
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#55
08-02-2008, 12:10 PM
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Flowers for Algernon is one of the best-evar short stories out there. There's also a great novel-length adaptation, though you can kind of smell the filler.
When he worked at the Toronto Star, Hemmingway wrote a short story/article about the oak trees in Toronto's High Park dying from the inside-out because of pollution. This is relevant because one of those very same oak trees recently fell down and nearly killed a bunch of kids. It was kind of a dry story, though, despite the grim prophecy. I lost interest halfway through. People say I suck because I like Stephen King, but The Mist is still one of my favourite short stories (more of a novella). It inspired Half-Life, so you know it's grand. Skeleton Crew is a good short story collection.
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#56
08-02-2008, 12:14 PM
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There was one English teacher in my high school who genuinely cared about students doing more than reading slowly out loud from books they hated. Unfortunately, I never got her; we would have to spend lunch hours talking about books. I got stuck with a coke addict who would give us a month of class time to write a six-hundred word essay on Othello.
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#57
08-02-2008, 12:29 PM
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That Murakami story reminded me of an infographic on The Onion; "Who Would We Rather Be Married To?". One of the choices was "Woman in white dress stepping off ferry forty years ago".
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#58
08-04-2008, 12:20 AM
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I'm saddened by the lack of Raymond Carver in this thread. His collections Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are recommended. Some of the stories are almost just sketches and they can be bleak, but I find them mesmerizing. I'll chime in on the recommendations for Shirley Jackson and James Joyce (Dubliners is probably my favorite collection of short stories). The Ray Bradbury collection I usually recommend to people is The October Country which includes two of my particular favorites ("Uncle Einar" and "The Scythe"). Ellison has always been a favorite of mine. Recommendations include "Paladin of the Lost Hour", "Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktockman", and "The Crackpots". I think I need to investigate this Borges character.
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#59
08-04-2008, 08:47 AM
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See also: King, Stephen - Horror short stories
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#60
08-04-2008, 02:09 PM
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"The Fix" by Percival Everett.
And just about anything from Sherman Alexie.
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