Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet...
Today is the feast of Epiphany, the last day of the traditional Christmas season; the day also when the Misses Morkan held that grand affair, their annual dance, in James Joyce's
"The Dead." [more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jan 6, 2012 -
71 comments
What with
Borders going belly-up and
no new books being written ever, avid readers fear that their chief means of edification and entertainment may no longer be viable. Fear not, and look backwards. Over at
The Guardian,
Chris Power has spent the last few years telling giving us A Brief Survey Of The Short Story.
A
lot of my favourites are there, and I am discovering others I am keen to try. What about you?
posted by tumid dahlia
on Jul 18, 2011 -
23 comments
Though Roald Dahl is better known in this day as the author of stories for children, he had a parallel career as the author of
short stories with more adult, macabre sensibilities. Some of those stories became part of a short-run series to fill the slot of to not
one but
two ill-fated Jackie Gleason shows. But instead of another game show or talk show, CBS wanted something to pair with the Twilight Zone. That show was
Way Out, though it didn't rate well and only ran for
14 episodes (and
5 episodes are on Archive.org). 18 years later, Dahl returned to TV with his sinister stories, but this time it was in the UK, where
Tales of the Unexpected lasted 9 seasons,
112 episodes in total. You can view
23 or so episodes online, split into parts (YT Playlist).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 22, 2011 -
27 comments
Ted Chiang is perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied.
A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished
Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only twelve short stories in the last twenty years, one dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light.
Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio recordings where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his nonfiction essays, and a few other related sites and articles.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 27, 2010 -
116 comments
‘We feel that the stories in this book are such that if your nerves are not of the strongest, then it is wise to read them in daylight.' For a certain time, in every second-hand bookshop in the UK you would always be able to find a musty and dog-eared copy of one or more of the
Pan Books Of Horror Stories edited by the splendidly named Herbert Van Thal. Now the first is
being re-printed.
[more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on Sep 8, 2010 -
21 comments
Part short story forum, part attempt to reach out to isolated teens struggling with their sexuality.
I'm from Driftwood; true stories by gay people all over.
posted by piratebowling
on Apr 1, 2009 -
19 comments
A guide to Storyreading. "For over ten years now, various friends and I have been getting together on occasion to read stories aloud to each other. This activity—graced with the unlovely but utilitarian name "story reading"—can be a great deal of fun, but can also be rife with pitfalls of various sorts. This guide is an attempt to help others to run story readings. Note that reading stories is different from—and, generally, much easier than—
telling stories; while people do occasionally tell stories at these gatherings (and it usually goes over well), that's not the primary emphasis...The origins of our approach to story readings are lost in the mists of antiquity. The idea may have sprung fully-fledged from a conversation I had with DH about
a Delany essay called "On Pure Storytelling"; or it may've been derived from MK's reading
The Princess Bride aloud, which in turn may've been inspired by
folks at Yale who were doing much the same thing. Whatever the history, it's clear that other groups—notably one in Boston—have been having similar sorts of readings for at least as long as we have."
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 13, 2009 -
19 comments
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library offers gripping tales of scientific adventures in matrimony, mysterious Appalachian woodsmen, macabre travels in the ether, exotic travels in distant lands, itinerant prospectors, and cunning detectives who pose as genteel dressmakers. Assorted amusements are offered in the form of downloadable PDF booklets, perfect leisure literature for "the distinguished reader or the particularly wealthy dunder-head".
posted by sarabeth
on Jan 23, 2009 -
8 comments
New Yorker fiction 2008. Annotated list of short fiction from the past year. "As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the
New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike."
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 5, 2009 -
24 comments
Like
others before him
Benjamin Rosenbaum is making his debut short story collection,
The Ant King And Other Stories, available from his publishers,
Small Beer, as a
free download. More than this though, he is holding a
competition to find the best derivative work inspired by it. These include "translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like."
[more inside]
posted by ninebelow
on Sep 19, 2008 -
19 comments
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 by Kattullus
on Feb 17, 2008 -
31 comments
"“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.
[more inside]
posted by sock it to me monkey
on Oct 17, 2007 -
25 comments
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 by Kattullus
on Apr 26, 2007 -
27 comments
"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 by anjamu
on Jul 24, 2006 -
19 comments
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 by hoverboards don't work on water
on Feb 14, 2006 -
8 comments
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 by darsh
on Feb 10, 2005 -
6 comments
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 by pwb503
on Jan 18, 2005 -
19 comments
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 by joaquim
on Sep 2, 2004 -
6 comments
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 by tenseone
on Jan 12, 2004 -
18 comments
