Selected Stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
posted on Jun 2, 2008 - View this thread

Paulo in London asks musicians to write him a story on an index card.
posted on Apr 15, 2008 - View this thread

Here are the essays and short stories originally published in The New Yorker that were later collected in Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” anthology series (1915-present).
posted on Feb 20, 2008 - View this thread

Over 2000 classic short stories from American Literature as well as an option to sign up for a short story of the day rss feed. Among the authors on offer are Kate Chopin, Saki, O. Henry, Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack London, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Herman Hesse, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Honoré de Balzac, Edith Warton, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and I could keep going for a while. The point is, there's over 2000 short stories in there.
posted on Feb 17, 2008 - View this thread

7 short stories by Roberto Bolaño Gómez Palacio, The Insufferable Gaucho, Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey, Phone Calls, Dance Card. From Nazi Literature in the Americas: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, Luz Mendiluce Thompson & Ernesto Pérez Masón and The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys. If you know the fiction of Roberto Bolaño you know what you're in for. If you don't, any of these stories is a good place to start, though the first three are perhaps the most natural starting points.
posted on Jan 30, 2008 - View this thread

Would you like to read classic science fiction short story A Pail of Air? Or would you prefer to listen?
posted on Nov 15, 2007 - View this thread

John Updike (yt) discusses A&P.
posted on Nov 15, 2007 - View this thread

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov translated by Constance Garnett presented in order of Russian publication.
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

"The Great God Pan," by Arthur Machen. "The Beckoning Fair One," by Oliver Onions. "Green Tea," by J. Sheridan LeFanu. "The Boarded Window," by Ambrose Bierce. "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant.
posted on Oct 31, 2007 - View this thread

"“If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.” The New York Times reported today that Raymond Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, is pushing to republish the stories in Carver's acclaimed 1981 breakout collection, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," in their original, unedited form.
posted on Oct 17, 2007 - View this thread

Here are four classic short stories by John Collier in four different forms: the original text of his famous "Thus I Refute Beelzy"; a 1947 radio script for "Evening Primrose"; a radio version of "Back for Christmas", starring Peter Lorre; and Patton Oswalt's interpretation of "The Chaser."
posted on Aug 26, 2007 - View this thread

You should read these three stories by Amy Hempel. (Oh, and maybe listen to her read, here.) While you're at it, read some of these idiosyncratic but beautifully-written stories by grammarian Gary Lutz.
posted on Jul 30, 2007 - View this thread

Classic Short Stories — "Fewer and fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate—so few will ever experience the joy that reading such fine work can give. The goal of this site is to give a nice cross section of short stories in the hope that these short stories will excite these people into rediscovering this excellent source of entertainment." Authors represented include Saki, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Marquez, H. G. Wells, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, William Carlos Williams and Katherine Mansfield.
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - View this thread

Five Chapters. Weekly, serialized short fiction edited by David Daley, the man behind McSweeney's 20-Minute Stories Contest. Some contributors so far: Vendela Vida, Arthur Phillips, Sam Lipsyte, Anthony Swofford, Jess Walter, Stewart O'Nan.
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

SF writers only use six words. A collection of six word epics from the cream of contemporary SF writers. Can Mefi do better? I reckon!
posted on Oct 24, 2006 - View this thread

"Excuse me," Schwartzman said to the Home Depot man, "can you tell me where to find tar?" "Tar?" asked the Home Depot man. "What're you using tar for?" "I'm building an ark," said Schwartzman. If there was anything that two years of completing God's preposterous homework assignments had taught Schwartzman it was that there was absolutely nothing you could tell Home Depot Man you were building that would surprise him, that would get any reaction from him at all, for that matter, aside from the usual skepticism about your choice of building materials.

Shalom Auslander recasts Jewish history in short story form. Start with the aforementioned "Prophet's Dilemma," and work your way backwards to "Plagued." [more inside]
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

ShortStoryFilter. Submit, link and vote for short stories. A lot of it may be a bit sub-McSweeney's at the moment, but with a bit of luck, The Lit List might scratch a readerly itch or two.
posted on Mar 3, 2006 - View this thread

2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers.
posted on Feb 14, 2006 - View this thread

BLIT ,
a short story by David Langford.
posted on Aug 7, 2005 - View this thread

School stories (long out of print in English) of Frigyes Karinthy. Short, funny, and occasionally bittersweet; favorites include The Good Student and The Bad Student Tested, and Hanging From the Apparatus.
posted on Mar 1, 2005 - View this thread

Flash Fiction is a site which publishes short stories (under 1000 words). While the format (3 columns, not evenly filled) is a little annoying, the concept is interesting. My favorite story so far is 'A leaf falls', in the first column scroll halfway down the page. The site is maintained by a writer/ artist/musician, whose eventual aim is to print the stories on coffee mugs. Morning reading anyone?
posted on Feb 10, 2005 - View this thread

Everyone is talking about Clint Eastwood's new movie, Million Dollar Baby (trailer). What you may not know however is that the movie was based on a short story in a book by the name of Rope Burns: Stories From The Corner by the late F.X. Toole (aka Jerry Boyd). The book by the way was called, "...the best boxing short fiction ever written," by James Ellroy of L.A. Confidential fame. Back in 2000 Toole gave an amazing interview on Fresh Air about spending the last 20 years of his life as a cut man and the last 40 years of writing while trying to overcome his fear of rejection before getting his first book published at age 70.
posted on Jan 18, 2005 - View this thread

Stories by Joe R. Lansdale If you're a fan of Joe Lansdale (or wonder who came up with the idea for Bubba Ho-Tep), this site's for you. A different short story is posted every Thursday. Most of the stories are from his early years.
posted on Sep 2, 2004 - View this thread

Spiritual Cockroaches the life and work of K. Ungeheuer

Ungeheuer wrote short stories. Very short stories. Some are no more than a couple of sentences. The longest of them barely fills a half dozen pages. Ungeheuer explained his penchant for short short fiction in an interview with Jared Green in 1970:

"There's something enigmatic about the economy of these short pieces. Something about the lack of context that forces the reader to fill in the larger picture. I don't care about plotting a story, characterization or setting. I'm looking for a feeling, an instant in time. An uncomfortable floating instant, with no sense of anything that may have come to pass before it."

posted on Jan 12, 2004 - View this thread

The September issue of Harper's features (alas, subway portable version only) some of the "Spare and haunting, whimsical and contemplative snapshot-stories" of Oz Shelach, Israeli journalist and author of the book "Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments," published by San Francisco's City Lights. [more inside]
posted on Aug 21, 2003 - View this thread

54 Word Stories.
posted on May 10, 2003 - View this thread

It was winter -- that is, about the second week in November --and great gusts were rattling at the windows... So begins Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas, one of the good, meaty reads proposed by your friendly Litrix editor. Ah books... [More inside]
posted on Mar 14, 2003 - View this thread

Online SF Short Fiction. It's good and it's free. Sci-Fiction is the biggest name in the online field, publishing many big name authors (This week's story is by Octavia E. Butler for instance) and winning several awards. (Also check out Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction while you're there). But there are more sources for good online SF: The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons and Infinity Plus (reprints) for instance. And let's not forget that all the print magazines have put their Nebula nominees online (though Analog's stories are coming up as 404s). Let the reading commence!
posted on Jan 25, 2003 - View this thread

Professor Barnhardts Journal could become one of my favorite ezines. This week they have a short story from MST3000's Mike Nelson, and last week they had essays from Roger Ebert and T. Coraghasen Boyle. Bored with McSweeneys? Still bummed that Feed is gone? This zine looks like fun.
posted on Oct 9, 2002 - View this thread

Tom Perrotta may be one of the best novelists working today, yet not that many folks know his name. His books and short stories portray prosaic suburbia accurately and without condescension, and he has uncanny insight into the mind of the terminally adolescent. Not to mention an uproarious sense of humor. If the films of Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater, the music of Weezer, or Pete Bagge's comics resonate with you, you may want to check out their literary equivalent. As an added treat, here's an audio link of Perrota reading his work. For my money, this guy is one of our best American writers right now, although you wouldn't know it.
posted on Mar 2, 2002 - View this thread

George Saunders imagines the future of advertising: "But Teddy of course did not see Gene Kelly, Gene Kelly not being one of his Preferences, but instead saw his hero Babar, swinging a small monkey on his trunk while saying that his data indicated that Teddy did not yet own a Nintendo." Hilarious Vonnegut-like short fiction.
posted on Jan 25, 2002 - View this thread

The Works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft Unabridged texts of most of his short stories, poems, and essays, as well as biographies, photos, and even wallpaper. Cthulhu fhtagn, dude.
posted on Nov 20, 2001 - View this thread

third times a charm. after three different deadlines, two different formats, and a partidge in a pear tree, i'm still not sure if my entry got through. it's true, writers get no respect
posted on Nov 30, 2000 - View this thread