"...nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." --Ernest Hemingway






My last post introduced you to the four groupings of short stories that have really jazzed me over the years.  They were not in any way hierarchical, that is, Group I doesn't mean Top Shelf.  Actually, I'm pretty sure I ordered them alphabetically by first name when I started and then mixed them up so as not to be too orderly.  (And me, having worked in the Lincoln Jr. High School and Orville H. Platt High School libraries.)

Now this is the second post, and so it's the second group; not second-best.  I don't get paid to rate the writers, I don't get paid.  This is a sheer Love-of-Writing flag that I'm waving.  I'm encouraging you to read them.

II.  Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, Franz Kafka, G.K. Chesterton, Grace Paley, Guy de Maupassant, H.H. Munro (Saki), H.P. Lovecraft

#1  Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)

It wasn't until I started college that I began to read all of Hemingway's stories.  One that grabbed hold of me so profoundly was "Big Two-Hearted River."  I found a stripped copy of the Nick Adams Stories in a Five and Dime store in Meriden (Conn.), after I'd moved back there during the summer of 1975.  They'd made a great impression on a highly impressionable young man.  



#2  Eudora Welty
(1909-2001)

"..When I did begin to write, the short story was a shape that had already formed itself and stood waiting in the back of my mind.  Nor is it surprising to me that when I made my first attempt at a novel, I entered its world--that of the mysterious Yazoo-Mississippi Delta--as a child riding there on a train: "From the warm window sill the endless fields glowed like a hearth in firelight, and Laura, looking out, leaning on her elbows with her head between her hands, felt what an arriver in a land feels--that slow hard pounding in the breast." -[from One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty]

#3  Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)

"...we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” [Franz Kafka]


#4  Flannery O'Connor
(1925-1964)

"From my own experience in trying to make stories 'work,' I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace."  [Flannery O'Connor]

#5  Frank O'Connor
(1903-1966)

Q: Why do you prefer the short story for your medium?
Frank O'Connor: "Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry—I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and the nearest thing to that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has."   [The Paris Review, Autumn-Winter 1957]

#6  G.K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)

"I like detective stories; I read them, I write them; but I do not believe them. The bones and structure of a good detective story are so old and well known that it may seem banal to state them even in outline. A policeman, stupid but sweet-tempered, and always weakly erring on the side of mercy, walks along the street; and in the course of his ordinary business finds a man in Bulgarian uniform killed with an Australian boomerang in a Brompton milk-shop. Having set free all the most suspicious persons in the story, he then appeals to the bull-dog professional detective, who appeals to the hawk-like amateur detective. The latter finds near the corpse a boot-lace, a button-boot, a French newspaper, and a return ticket from the Hebrides; and so, relentlessly, link by link, brings the crime home to the Archbishop of Canterbury.”  [G.K.Chesterton as quoted in Illustrated London News, May 6, 1911]


#7  Grace Paley
(1922-2007)

Q: How do stories begin for you?
Grace Paley:  A lot of them begin with a sentence—they all begin with language. It sounds dopey to say that, but it’s true. Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant. A story can begin with someone speaking. “I was popular in certain circles,” for example; an aunt of mine said that, and it hung around in my head for a long time. Eventually I wrote a story, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” that began with that line, though it had nothing to do with my aunt. Another example: “There were two husbands disappointed by eggs,” which is the first sentence of “The Used-Boy Raisers.” I was at the house of a friend of mine, thirty-five years ago, and there were her two husbands complaining about the eggs. It was just right—so I went home and began the story, though I didn’t finish it for months.  ...The sound of the story comes first."  [The Paris Review, Fall 1992]


#8  Guy de Maupassant
(1850-1893)

"A man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock — this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!"  [from Maupassant's The Question of Latin]


#9  H.H. Munro (Saki)
(1870-1916)
"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.
He classified the Princess with that distinct type of woman that looks as if it habitually went out to feed hens in the rain.  Her name was Olga; she kept what she hoped and believed to be a fox- terrier, and professed what she thought were Socialist opinions. It is not necessary to be called Olga if you are a Russian Princess; in fact, Reginald knew quite a number who were called Vera; but the fox-terrier and the Socialism are essential."  [from Munro's Reginald in Russia]

"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."  Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing." [from Munro's The Open Window]


#10  H.P. Lovecraft
(1890-1937)

"I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet."  [from Lovecraft's The White Ship]

Like the endless floor-to-ceiling over-stocked shelves at Costco, my friend Joe Savino keeps his friends and family well stocked with Lists, articles about Lists, articles for Lists, and articles against Lists, Lists of Lists, missing Lists, and the Lists nobody knows about.

Often these Lists are hierarchical, and are cause for argument and suspicion, hilarity and the woeful shaking of one's head, and usually they drive us crazy; they drive HIM crazy, and that's why he shares them with us.  "Can you believe they said that book was the best?"  "Can you believe they said that movie, or that politician, or that historical figure,...?"

Now here, for your benefit, Reader, is a list, not my list, not The List, but a List, a vertical touchstone, a reminder of some very good, memorable, outstanding, collections of Short Stories that perhaps you might have read, wanted to read, or didn't know about.  Who's to say?

Certainly, many other writers have written short stories, a collection or two has been published, but I'm leaving out writers who were known more for their longer forms, like Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell.  The people listed below, at least in my mind, not only raised the bar of the short story, but raised the bar of literature, of culture, intelligence, empowerment, enlightenment, and entertainment.

I know you'll say, but J.D. Salinger's body of work?  Only the Nine Stories volume and a few uncollected ones?  That qualifies?  Yes, it does. What Salinger did for us with that one volume was to set us on fire.  Nevertheless, I highly recommend them all.  They are Titans.

So as not to overwhelm our eyes and cognitive skills, I'm posting the list in groups of ten per post:

I.  Algernon Blackwood, Conrad Aiken, Ambrose Bierce, Bernard Malamud, Doris Lessing, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Barry Hannah, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov

II.  Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, Franz Kafka, G.K. Chesterton, Grace Paley, Guy de Maupassant, H.H. Munro (Saki), H.P. Lovecraft

III.  Henry James, Irwin Shaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ivan Bunin, Jack London, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Joseph Mitchell, Katherine Ann Porter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

IV.  O. Henry, P.G. Wodehouse, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Shirley Jackson, Stephan Crane, W. Somerset Maugham, William Faulkner, William Trevor

I.

#1

Algernon Blackwood
( 1869-1951)
  "...one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre." [Wikipedia]


#2 Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

 

"Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness." [from Silent Snow, Secret Snow.  Below is a YouTube link to a dramatized version of this great story, courtesy of Jasper Simon]




Conrad Aiken was also largely responsible for establishing Emily Dickinson's reputation as a major American poet.  Malcolm Cowley referred to Aiken as "the Sleeping Giant of American Letters." 

#3
Ambrose Bierce
(1842-1914)

 He is most known for the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. 

#4
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) "Life is a tragedy full of joy."

"Malamud is renowned for his short stories, often oblique allegories set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews. Of Malamud the short story writer, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself." He published his first stories in 1943, "Benefit Performance" in Threshold and "The Place Is Different Now" in American Preface. In the early 1950s, his stories began appearing in Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, and Commentary.
The Magic Barrel was his first published collection of short stories (1958) and his first winner of his first National Book Award for Fiction^[6] Most of the stories depict the search for hope and meaning within the bleak enclosures of poor urban settings."

[Citation courtesy of Wikipedia]

#5
Barry Hannah (1942-2010)  “The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.”

 

Hannah produced five collections of short stories from 1978 to 2010.  "[His] lines invigorate and intoxicate, his language delivering us into an American version of what Rilke called “a more powerful reality — rising and circling, poised but wild.” Hannah was a storyteller, an enchanter with a refined eye for the outrageous and an ecstatic worldliness worthy of Rabelais. “Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories” is a triumph: nearly faultless, every page a raging pleasure." [Justin Taylor, The New York Times Book Review]

#6 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Aside from creating and popularizing the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was also a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, nonfiction, and historical novels. 

#7  Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

  Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. (from Wikipedia)

I especially liked "Roman Fever."

#8  Anthon Chekhov (1860-1904) "is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Chekhov with Tolstoy

#9 Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

is "best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

#10 Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

 "...Mrs. Lessing's knowledge of women's anger and aggression, even more than of their sexuality, took people by surprise and categorized her. ...Her short fiction (except her African stories) should repair any misunderstanding of her timelessness, the breadth of her sympathy and range of her interests and, above all, the pleasures of reading her. Rereading [her] stories is like returning to a Victorian novel one loves, and affords the same delightful feeling of self-indulgence combined with self- improvement." [Diane Johnson, The New York Times]

(next post, 10 more)