Favorite Short Stories

[Random Precision]

Let's show some love for short fiction. Here are some of mine, not nearly a comprehensive list however:

The Dead by James Joyce
Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street by Herman Melville
The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre
Who Are We This Time? by Kurt Vonnegut
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
Any of the Red Cavalry Cycle by Isaac Babel
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
Mauricio "The Eye" Silva by Roberto Bolaño

Etc., Etc., Etc. Now tell me some of yours

[Os Cangaceiros]

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe and The Smoker by Roald Dahl are two of my favorites.

[Pinko Panther]

Anything by Poe, Asimov, or H.G. Wells.
The Tell-Tale Heart, I, Robot, and The Chronic Argonauts are amazing.

[MarxSchmarx]

"The Most Dangerous Game"
http://fiction.eserver.org/short/the_most_dangerous_game.html

"To Serve Man" Damon Knight. Much better than the Twighlight show version.

Anda's Game: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas_game/index.html
Tell-tale heart and black cat absolutely. Read them when I was 13 and they are still as vivid as ever.

A couple more I read as a kid but unfortunately the titles I can't remember.

[Led Zeppelin]

The Double by Dostoyevsky was pretty good, as was The Old Man And The Sea by Hemingway.

[Sam_b]

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Elephant by Mrocek
Miss Antonina by Orzeszkowa

[Angry Young Man]

Uncle Edmund. I once took out from the library a collection of short stories by Alan Sillitoe.
I should get more into short stories. I remember a couple I read by Franz Kafka. One was about a man being stalked through Prague, where it culminates in him finding out that the stalker was trying to help him.

[Oktyabr]

The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty (I think I spelled it right)

Great gem from the Irish Civil War. I heard about it during an online discussion of TWTSTB. Some user mentioned it as a perfect companion piece to the film.

[Random Precision]

I never really liked The Black Cat or The Tell-Tale Heart. I like Poe best where he can write a long, meandering, enjoyable tale like The Cask of Amontillado or The Fall of the House of Usher.

[Bright Banana Beard]

The Bet by Anton Chekhov.

[Dóchas]

i like Man From The South - Roald Dahl

[MarxSchmarx]

I never really liked The Black Cat or The Tell-Tale Heart. I like Poe best where he can write a long, meandering, enjoyable tale like The Cask of Amontillado or The Fall of the House of Usher.

I've heard that before from other people who really get into Poe.

That esp. the house of usher was meant as his "virtuoso" piece while tell-tale heart and black cat were written largely to pay the bills.

Still, I think both works are pretty amazing whatever Poe's motives. Seen within the broader context of their subject matter and style, the "fall of the house of usher" and the "black cat"/"tell-tale heart" are unquestionable masterpieces.

[Invariance]

People have mentioned Poe, so I'll mention a couple more of my favourites of his: The Pit and the Pendulum, Three Sundays a Week, The Oblong Box, Some Words with a Mummy, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, and of course, the Tell-Tale Heart and the Black Cat. I was read a lot of Oscar Wilde when I was young - like The Young King, the Birthday of the Infanta, the Fisherman and his Soul, the Star-Child, the Happy Prince, the Selfish Friend, the Remarkable Rocket etc.

The Sniper is also good.

[Soviet]

The best of Jack London:"The Road",The People of Abyss","The Call of the Wild","The Mexican","Aloha Oe".

[JimmyJazz]

"The Most Dangerous Game"
http://fiction.eserver.org/short/the_most_dangerous_game.html

This is a good one.

If Sartre's The Wall counts, then so do Camus' The Stranger, Steinbeck's The Pearl and Of Mice and Men, and Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, which are all good.

Also, basically all of Hemingway's true short stories are good. Some that I remember and could find online:

Soldier's Home (http://www.idst.vt.edu/modernworld/d/hemingway.html#3)
The Killers (http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/hemingwaykillers.html)
The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber (http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/hemingwaymacomber.html)
Hills Like White Elephants (http://www.moonstar.com/%7Eacpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/WhiteElephants.html)
A Very Short Story (http://records.viu.ca/%7Elanes/english/hemngway/vershort.htm)

[Oktyabr]

This is a good one.

If Sartre's The Wall counts, then so do Camus' The Stranger, Steinbeck's The Pearl and Of Mice and Men, and Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, which are all good.

Also, basically all of Hemingway's true short stories are good. Some that I remember and could find online:

Soldier's Home (http://www.idst.vt.edu/modernworld/d/hemingway.html#3)
The Killers (http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/hemingwaykillers.html)
The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber (http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/hemingwaymacomber.html)
Hills Like White Elephants (http://www.moonstar.com/%7Eacpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/WhiteElephants.html)
A Very Short Story (http://records.viu.ca/%7Elanes/english/hemngway/vershort.htm)

Francis Macomber was really good, as was Snows of Kilimanjaro