Masters of the Short Story
Short stories by writers who shaped the form, Chekhov and Maupassant first.
- Nothing much happens and somehow everything does. A woman with a little dog at a seaside resort, a man realizing his life went wrong over gooseberries.
- Maupassant does in ten pages what most writers need three hundred for, and he's not gentle about it: The Necklace alone will sting you for days. Fair warning, he's cynical about almost everyone, but if you like your irony dry and your endings sharp, he's your man.
- Nothing much happens in these stories, and that's the point: small humiliations, missed chances, whole lives caught in a glance. If you can sit with quiet sadness, the last one, with Gabriel at the party and snow falling over Ireland, will stay with you for years.
- Best read one story at a night, alone, when the house is quiet: the heartbeat under the floorboards, Montresor walling up his friend brick by brick, Usher's house splitting open. Poe gets under your skin slowly, so skip it if dread isn't your idea of fun.
- You get Gogol at his strangest and sharpest here: a nose walking around St. Petersburg, a petty clerk swallowed by his overcoat, and a diary quietly coming apart. The comedy is wonderfully deadpan, but the loneliness underneath keeps it from feeling weightless.
- You’ll like these for their quick, streetwise stories of shopgirls, drifters, policemen, and small-time schemers, where a last-minute turn can make you laugh and then wince. The Dillinghams in “The Gift of the Magi” show both his tenderness and his fondness for irony, though the sentiment can occasionally lay it on thick.
- Saki writes wicked little Edwardian comedies where children plot revenge, a talking cat exposes house-party secrets, and a girl's tall tale in The Open Window still lands after a century. Perfect in ten-minute doses, though the humor is cold-blooded, so skip it if you need warmth.
- Chopin can turn a whole life inside out in three pages, like the wife in The Story of an Hour who learns of her husband's death and feels something she can't admit. Quiet, sharp Louisiana stories about women wanting more, best read slowly, a few at a time.
- Nick Adams making camp in Big Two-Hearted River, saying nothing about the war, is the whole trick: what's left out does the work. If you like clean sentences and grief kept just offstage, these stories reward slow reading, though the terseness can feel cold at first.
- Young Fitzgerald selling to the magazines, so the surface glitters, but Bernice Bobs Her Hair and The Ice Palace already have the ache under the party. Quick, funny stories that turn out sadder than they first look.
- Tolstoy at story length is Tolstoy at his most direct: a peasant bargaining for land he'll never keep, a merchant snowbound with his servant, Ivan Ilyich staring at the ceiling. Fair warning, most of these end with death, but you come away oddly steadied rather than gloomy.
- You get stories that are compact but morally unsettling, especially “In a Grove,” where conflicting testimonies make certainty feel almost absurd, and “Hell Screen,” whose artist’s devotion turns horrifying. Akutagawa is dry, sharp, and often bleak, so this suits you if ambiguity stays interesting after the last page.
- Early Tanizaki, where obsession is already the whole subject: a tattooist pours his art into a spider on a sleeping woman's back, and wakes something. Perverse, gorgeous, exact; these stories stake out the ground his later novels work.
- Bunin writes about desire and loss with this cool, exact eye, a rich American dying mid-cruise in The Gentleman from San Francisco, a one-night affair that quietly wrecks a man in Sunstroke. Slow, melancholy stuff, but if you like Chekhov's sadder moods, you'll settle right in.