Short stories are more difficult to master than novels. In order to execute a short story, you must accellerate everything in the story's development - without making it feel rushed. In fact, those short stories that feel "perfect" are often the ones that feel slowed-down - that feel longer than the actual word count or number of pages - in spite of having this accellerated pace. These are the stories that stick with you, that hit you harder than you imagine something so small could.
If you want to reach your goals as a writer, you should mix in some short story reading (and writing) with the regular reading (and writing) you make time for.
Here are three books that master the art of the short story; they are three books every aspiring author should read:
Everything that Rises Must Converge
by Flannery O'Connor
by Flannery O'Connor
The yard around her house looked like a dump and her five girls were always filthy; even the youngest one dipped snuff. Instead of making a garden or washing their clothes, her preoccupation was what she called "prayer healing."
*
He looked like one of those dying children who must have Christmas early.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
by Raymond Carver
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in the front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom - nightstand and reading lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
Rock Springs
by Richard Ford
by Richard Ford
I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one. It was about never being in that place you said you'd never be in. And it was not about being alone. Never that. Never that.
*
Shame didn't mean any more to her than some other way you could feel on a day - like feeling tired or cold or crying. It went away, finally.Know any good ones I missed?
What are some of your favorite short story collections?
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I love Flannery O'Conner. A Good Man is Hard to Find is one of my all time favorite short stories.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite collections of short stories is "Nine Stories" by Salinger. The short story is what I prefer to write. Something about the short space of time you're given to make an impact has always been so interesting to me.
ReplyDelete"Jesus' Son" by Denis Johnson:
ReplyDelete"I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we'd have an accident in the storm." (from 'Car Crash While Hitch Hiking')
"Selected Stories" by Anton Chekhov:
"Thus his youth languished and wore away, without joy or love or friendship; without peace of mind; without everything, in fact, that he liked to write about during his moments of inspiration in the evenings." (from 'In Spring')
I don't have all of these books handy to quote from but I would add:
"Airships" by Barry Hannah
"At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom" by Amy Hempel
"The Stories of John Cheever" by John Cheever
"Pastoralia" by George Saunders
"The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" by Sherman Alexie
"Drown" by Junot Diaz
"The Overcoat & Other Stories" by Nikolai Gogol
"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
And while it's technically not a collection of short stories, I also recommend "We the Animals" by Justin Torres because it is a ferocious little novel that is a hymn to the art of compression.
I actually like and think I might prefer the later Ford stories, such as in A Multitude of Sins. Also, Andrew Sean Greer's How It Was for Me, Tobias Wolff's The Night in Questions, Annie Proulx's Close Range, and stories by Murakami, Coleman Dowell, and Julio Cortazar.
ReplyDeleteThat should be The Night in Question. Although I kind of like the plural for something else.
ReplyDeleteI never liked short stories until I checked out Neil Gaiman's two short story collections: Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors.
ReplyDeleteI love the opening sentence of the story Chivalry:
Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.
I think you may appreciate a newish book, out by a debut author named Alan Heathcock. The story collection is called "Volt: Stories" and reads like a Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Nathaniel Hawthorne mash-up. Truly excellent, poignant, sad work. Please do yourself a favor and read it.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite short story collections generally feature coked up celebrities in the pages of US Weekly.
ReplyDelete