What are your favorite short stories?

I was never much of a reader but I've always enjoyed short stories. Ray Bradbury defined much of my adolescent reading with a bit of Stephen King towards the end, and now King my go-to for fiction in my young adulthood. I'll have to revisit some of those Bradbury stories. I must have read hundreds of 'em in my teens. I was voracious. I'll post a list in a couple days probably, along with my list of my favorite Kings because I love his short fiction.

Also like Poe and Lovecraft but I never consumed them as hungrily. Poe was in many ways my introduction to literary horror in my youth but I never did a deep-dive of his work. My favorites are the ones that probably everyone has read: "Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum." I also really liked "Hop-Frog" for its cathartic nastiness. At that time I hadn't read any stories that were more shocking or disturbing. Lovecraft came to me much later, post-King, and partly because references to his work pop up everywhere in King's oeuvre (especially the wonderful "N." and "Crouch End"). The one that stands out most to me is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," but that was before I discovered how unapologetically racist he was. It's harder to enjoy his creative descriptions of monstrous races of reptilian humanoid knowing that they stemmed from Lovecraft's revulsion of miscegenation. Knowing that his descriptions of these creatures could just as easily been him describing a black person throws a shade of ugliness over his work.

Was also obsessed with Kipling's Just So Stories. So delightfully whimsical and imaginative. Especially loved "The Elephant's Child" and "How the First Letter was Written."

Plain Pleasures by Jane Bowles.

www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdf

A friend shoved this story into my hand, "How to Become a Writer" by Lorrie Moore, who I've never heard of.... It's very witty, only 5 pages or so, I think some MAers would love it so I'm posting a PDF! It's like a satire of a self-help column meets mini auto-bio told in the second-person.

Well, I already mentioned two of Carroll's stories that came from this book...






It is very specifically my sort of thing: cosmic horror of the unknown, told with a folkloric twist. It's a comic book, but I think it is important to note that all of the stories could be read aloud as bedtime stories for impressionable young children (Carroll has stated that part of her writing process is reading aloud to get a rhythm to her words - it shows).

Featuring five stories:

Our Neighbor's House is the story of three sisters in a cabin that are told to pack up and leave for their neighbor's house should their father not return in three days. Naturally, he doesn't, and they don't.

A Lady's Hands Are Cold is a bloody twist on Bluebeard told primarily in verse.

His Face All Red is a mix of the biblical Cain and Abel/Coat of Many Colors steeped in guilt and shame, and the internet popularity of the story got her this book deal.

My Friend Janna follows a fake medium getting too close to the occult, with predictably awful consequences.

The Nesting Place is a deconstruction of the horror tropes present in the previous stories, following a woman seeing her brother and his new wife for the first time since her mother's death. The horror elements lie primarily under the surface here, but there is a reason she ends the collection with this one. My favorite of her tales. Also features one of my favorite dialogues ever:
"You must be Mabel."
"Bell, actually."
"Ah, Belle! As in 'Belle et la Bête', hm?"
"No. As in 'it tolls for thee.'"

I can't place my finger on why I find that so funny, but I can't help but smirk just thinking about it.

Anyway, it is the only short story collection I own, and one of my most read books. It's great for light reading before bedtime.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that there are brief prologue/epilogue sections to the book as well. The prologue is a quick story about Carroll's childhood reading horror stories (sort of an illustrated author's introduction) and the epilogue is a very short little riff on a classic folk tale that caps off the experience perfectly.