Your favorite short story?

[NotWise]

Regardless of whether it's erotic or not, what fictional short story is most captivating to you? What catches your imagination in the fewest (prosaic) words? Why? How?

For me, I think it's Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades" which I think I can link here. His characters are believable people even 180 years later, and one obsession drags them all to death and destruction.

That is about the only way to really end a story, isn't it?

The link is a translation. I don't know, but I expect it was originally written in French. I still struggle with that.

 

[lovecraft68]

Not sure on your definition of short, but I would go with The Rats in the Walls by Lovecraft.

For some reason that story gave me nightmares despite the fact I was reading Stephen King and others by then and watching gore films and none of that bothered me.

There was just something about the imagery and the fact HPL left things to the imagination meaning it was more my own thoughts affecting me based on the kernels he put there

That was true writing, the reader got to interpret and use their imagination, not like recently where every little thing has to be presented to us in both books and movies for shock value.

 

[TxRad]

It's funny how things seem to line up certain ways. Someone reminded me about the first story I ever posted to Lit. I reread it for the first time in many many years just before i came into the AH this morning. Yeah, it needs cleaning up and reformatting but like I said it was the first thing I posted. It's even in the wrong category.

I remember writing it. I remember finishing it and going to bed, only to get up fifteen minutes later and add the last four or five paragraphs too it.

I also remember one of the big name writers here at the time had a series going on by the same name. I didn't know anything about it but i caught hell on the forums for a while because people thought I was trying to cash in on his success.

Funny how thing work.

Anyway, here is my favorite story:

Blindman's Bluff

 

[oggbashan]

Of of my favourite short stories isn't a story, it's a short poem by Kipling:

The Way Through The Woods

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_woods.htm

 

[lovecraft68]

It's funny how things seem to line up certain ways. Someone reminded me about the first story I ever posted to Lit. I reread it for the first time in many many years just before i came into the AH this morning. Yeah, it needs cleaning up and reformatting but like I said it was the first thing I posted. It's even in the wrong category.

I remember writing it. I remember finishing it and going to bed, only to get up fifteen minutes later and add the last four or five paragraphs too it.

I also remember one of the big name writers here at the time had a series going on by the same name. I didn't know anything about it but i caught hell on the forums for a while because people thought I was trying to cash in on his success.

Funny how thing work.

Anyway, here is my favorite story:

Blindman's Bluff

Seeing this is a free site, I bet your story made just as much as the other author's entire series

But I can see how the rabid fans of the other author would be pissed, they take things way too seriously here when it comes to their favorite writers.

 

[TxRad]

Seeing this is a free site, I bet your story made just as much as the other author's entire series

But I can see how the rabid fans of the other author would be pissed, they take things way too seriously here when it comes to their favorite writers.

It actually made quite a bit of money but not for me. The blind veterans association cashed in on a sonic device i came up with in the story. Also the story ended up getting circulated at the blind veteran association convention in Washington that same year. I made a hell of a lot of friends through all the e-mail feedback i got from that.

Yes, blind people do read porn, uh, I mean erotica. I've got two or three hundred e-mails to prove it.

 

[Areala-chan]

I'm just going with the first one to pop into my mind, which is "Lavatory Buddahood" by Yasunari Kawabata.

Kawabata had a ridiculously depressing life, starting with the death of his parents when he was four, and continuing on up through the death of his older sister at 11, the loss of both his grandparents by the time he was fifteen, watching the devastation wrought to Japan in World War II, and ending with a diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease when he was in his seventies, so virtually everything he wrote over the course of his life is thoroughly sad.

"Lavatory Buddhahood" is the one exception I've read so far. Written in 1929, it's the story of the absurd lengths to which one peasant in the Kyoto countryside goes in order to make money off his pay toilet. Three pages long, and no matter how many times I read it, I still crack up.

I don't think it's available anywhere online to read for free (use that Google and prove me wrong), but it's in the short story collection "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories" should anyone want to track it down.

 

[NotWise]

I'm just going with the first one to pop into my mind, which is "Lavatory Buddahood" by Yasunari Kawabata.

I found the last two pages of it on line, and plenty of detailed reviews. Maybe I'll buy the book.

 

[AMoveableBeast]

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.

 

[PennLady]

I can never remember the name of this one, but I think it was by Isaac Asimov, about a search for all the names of god, and the last line is something like "And overhead, one by one the stars winked out."

Other stories that have stuck in my head are "The Roads Must Roll" by Robert Heinlein, and "The Cold Equations" by someone I'd have to look up.

I'm not sure I really have a favorite, but those have stuck with me.

 

[Dianthus]

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison

 

[NotWise]

I can never remember the name of this one, but I think it was by Isaac Asimov, about a search for all the names of god, and the last line is something like "And overhead, one by one the stars winked out."

Other stories that have stuck in my head are "The Roads Must Roll" by Robert Heinlein, and "The Cold Equations" by someone I'd have to look up.

I'm not sure I really have a favorite, but those have stuck with me.

I didn't know that you were into classic sci-fi. I used to consume their anthologies like food.

 

[Hypoxia]

The best? THEY BITE by Anthony Boucher, opera critic for the NY Times and SF Chronicle, co-founder of Pacifica Radio and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (and editor thereof), and noted lay Catholic theologian. THEY BITE is the spookiest story I know.

Next greatest might be Robert A Heinlein's ALL YOU ZOMBIES, the perfect time-travel tale where the narrator is his own mother, father, kidnapper, and savior.

Then I'd go with RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI by H.H.Munro. Absolutely classic.

 

[rgraham666]

I can never remember the name of this one, but I think it was by Isaac Asimov, about a search for all the names of god, and the last line is something like "And overhead, one by one the stars winked out."

Other stories that have stuck in my head are "The Roads Must Roll" by Robert Heinlein, and "The Cold Equations" by someone I'd have to look up.

I'm not sure I really have a favorite, but those have stuck with me.

The Asimov story is "The Five Billion Names of God."

Soon as I saw this thread the first thing I thought of was The Screwfly Solution by Racoona Sheldon. It's an alien invasion story, except the aliens don't invade.

Seriously creeped me out and I've never read it since.

 

[PennLady]

I didn't know that you were into classic sci-fi. I used to consume their anthologies like food.

I read those stories when I took a sci-fi class in college. I do like classic sci fi as well as new. I recently bought a collection of Phillip K. Dick short stories and am enjoying those.

The Asimov story is "The Five Billion Names of God."

thank you!

 

[Graf_Severin]

Demonology

"Demonology," the eponymous story in the collection by Rick Moody. It's tied for first with countless other short stories, but that one comes to mind at the moment.

 

[glynndah]

Just one?!? No.

"The Night the Bed Fell" by James Thurber.
"The Open Window" by Saki.
"All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury.
"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin.

 

[GoldenCojones]

"The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway. I don't know if is is considered a short story or a novella but it's my favorite "Short" story

 

[YDB95]

"Let's All Go to the Dairy Queen" by William Hathaway. A brilliant look at teenage angst and first love, with a realistic sex scene for a first time (realistic in that the sex wasn't very good, but his sense of joy just beforehand is palpable), and a heartbreaking final twist which I confess I copied for this story.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Two.

Mumu by Turgenev. An old bitch makes her serf drown his dog.

The Pardon by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A man in prison for murder gets out and goes home. His wife made a baby with his best friend. She makes her husband sleep in the baby's room.

 

[lovecraft68]

I also want to throw in another HPL story "The Outsider" That's the one Lovecraft story most know because for quite some time you had to read it in school for some reason.

I read that at a very tough time in my early teens and totally identified with it. I had just been put in a foster home with all these sweet nice people and I was rabid little nut bag (here's where people say and um, you're not now?") and it hit home to me.

Years later I still feel like an outsider in many ways, except now I like it.

 

[oggbashan]

Guy de Maupassant: Boule de Suif

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_de_Suif

 

[ishtat]

1 Sredni Vashtar, by Saki (HH Munro). It is about the redeeming joy of the hatred a ten year old boy feels for his aunt.

2 The Lottery ticket by ?? It is about a man who wins a woman for a night in a lottery. He tears up the ticket in rejection and is later killed by affronted losers. I think the woman was white and the man black but am not sure - it's 40 years since I read it.

 

[DwellerDark]

I have a few favorites. "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. "Communist" by Richard Ford. Yet my all-time, number one favorite short story is the heartbreaking "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel. http://fictionaut.com/stories/amy-hempel/in-the-cemetery-where-al-jolson-is-buried.pdf

Her stories are like poetry in prose form, every word is meaningful and her economy of language is breathtaking. She has a number of stories that I love, but the one above is heartbreakingly sad and worth reading again and again to find new details.

 

[beachbum1958]

'Carmilla' by Sheridan Le Fanu, which I read when I was a teenager and never really let go; it's creepy, gothic, and predates Stoker's grim fable by more than 20 years, and really deserves to be better known. It's still the yardstick by which I judge all the other stories I have read in this genre, and so far none has weaned me away.

The second isn't a book at all, rather a chapter from a children's book that never seems to appear in the American version; it's 'The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn' segment in 'The Wind In The Willows'; the book itself is, to me, one of the most perfect examples of the written English language, I still read it several times a year, and find new joy and delight in it every time, but the part I will always remember for it's sheer lyrical beauty is that one short chapter, which, as I said, never seems to find its way into the American editions; perhaps it's the overtly pagan symbolism. Whatever the reason, it has haunted and beguiled me all my life.