MetaFilter posts tagged with shortstories

"Each animal reminds one terribly of certain men."

Iridic — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:54:42 -0800

Next to a beautiful, elegant woman, between the silky spirals of her train, on the back of a chair, in a dark angle in the background, he accurately painted, although almost invisible, the animal that recalled the face of the protagonist. He thus had a series of ladies and gentlemen from the squirrel, from the lizard, from the sea horse, etc.

From "The Real Face," by Guido Gozzano, "first and finest representative of the Crepuscolari, the poets of the Twilight." (The translators are Anna and Evan Connell. Evan Connell is himself a Neo-Decadent writer of no small accomplishment.)

The short sci-fi/fantasy/noir/b-movie stories of Richard Kadrey

filthy light thief — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:20:19 -0800

Richard Kadrey is not the most prolific novelist in the world. Still, every five, six years or so out comes another book like Metrophage, or Kamikaze L'Amour, dark, violent, intense works mostly set in and around Los Angeles with characters straight out of a good punk rock song. The self-confessing film nerd is probably best known for his Sandman Slim series, and if you're impatient for the forthcoming Dead Set novel, you can bide your time with a ton of short stories online. Most come from the extensive Infinite Matrix archives (previously), but a few can be found in various volumes of Flurb (previously, twice). At least one story has been pulled from Infinite Matrix, but you can still find it via the Internet Archive (the PDF link works). Speaking of offline, Kadrey's blog has been emptied, but Archive.org shows a dormant site as of May 17, 2011. Still, you can find the list of movies referenced in the first three Sandman Slim novels, which was linked from the Nerdist interview, linked above the break. And if you're interested in this whole Sandman Slim thing, I have good news for you -- the four volumes are available to preview through Google books (Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, Aloha from Hell, and Devil Said Bang), and you can preview excerpts from Harper Collins. As a random bonus, Kadrey wrote a short piece for Wired in 1998, called Carbon Copy: Meet the First Human Clone. It became a TV movie, No Ordinary Baby.

Central Station

homunculus — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:34:26 -0800

The Smell of Orange Groves. This short story by Lavie Tidhar (author of Osama: A Novel) is part of his Central Station story cycle, taking place in or around Tel Aviv’s Central Station neighborhood sometime in the future. Here are a few more free Central Station stories: Crabapple The Lord of Discarded Things Strigoi

Collections of sci-fi online

filthy light thief — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:57:39 -0800

Sometimes you might find yourself sitting at a computer, wanting to read something. But you don't want something long. You're thinking, what about a short story, and possibly something in the fantasy or sci-fi realms? You're in luck! Here are four collections, for your reading pleasure: Apex Magazine short fiction | Baen Ebooks Free Library, which includes some short story collections | Eclipse Online, from Nightshade Books | Strange Horizons fiction archive, including podcasts of many stories. If this is overwhelming, io9 has a pick of 5 short stories from January, with synopses. [Previously: Plane of the Ecliptic, on the Eclipse series | This isn't your grandfather's science fiction, where "Exhalation" is from the Eclipse series]

Like Lazarus with a triple bypass

Mezentian — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:08:49 -0800

Amazing Stories, "the World's First Science Fiction Magazine", founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926 and cancelled in 1995, and resurrected in 1998 and again in 2004 before being cancelled again by Paizo Publishing in 2006, is back -- again. Amazing is now a website, claiming to have "more than 50 bloggers covering the field from more than 50 different perspectives". The idea is to develop an online following and release a print version. Bonus cover galleries from the Golden Age

Add Some More Bourbon - One Day We'll All Be Dead

The Whelk — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:21:48 -0800

Saveur's utterly charming "Recipe Comix" features illustrated recipes/short stories by some of the web's best cartoonists covering a wide range of meals.

Short story podcast

shakespeherian — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:18:39 -0800

Authors choose their favourite short stories. For the next two weeks over the festive period we will be running a short story podcast each day. Our contributing authors introduce the stories they have chosen to read. Ford reads Carver. Gordimer reads Saramago. Selfs reads Borges. Postcasts are being posted here. [previously]

Machado de Assis

Iridic — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:25:33 -0800

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is the greatest of Brazilian writers, an ironist, realist, and fabulist in the leauge of Chekhov, Flaubert, and Borges. Here are Machado de Assis' complete works in Portuguese. And here a few pieces in English translation: -The first ten chapters from his novel Dom Casmurro, translated by Antonios Sarhanis. -The opening of his Tristram Shandy-esque The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: Epitaph of a Small Winner, translated by Gregory Rabassa. -Two chapters from his novella The Alienist, translated by Matt Rowe (with commentary). -"Dona Paula", translated by John Gledson. -"The Attendant's Confession," "The Fortune-Teller," and "Life;" all translated by Isaac Goldberg and collected with stories by José de Medeiros e Albuquerque, Coelho Netto, and Emília Bandeira de Melo as Brazilian Tales.

Please do not feel the necessity to send us more pieces under a clumsy pseudonym.

Horace Rumpole — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 06:41:59 -0800

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure: poignant tales of the justly obscure. The entry on Hans Kafka is a good starting point.

Life in the mist

smcg — Thu, 31 May 2012 07:25:46 -0800

Tove Jansson's short stories about artistic creation are often chillingly cold. The artists she portrays have become lost in their isolated solitude, their creativity, which shuts other people out. Portraits of such loneliness are drawn in three short stories in the collection Lyssnerskan ('The listener', 1971), 'Ekorren' ('The squirrel'), 'Svart & vitt' ('Black & white') and 'Vargen' ('The wolf’), which probably frightened many readers - particularly those who knew and loved her Moomin books - away from Jansson's work. In their cosmos, warmth is unknown; their landscapes are frozen, just like the people who seek expression for their artistic dreams. Tove Jansson didn't just write the Moomin books (previously). In her later career, she mostly wrote novels and short stories for adults, although these books are less popular in the English-speaking world. Art in nature and Writing letters are two of those stories, available alongside the article linked above. The daughter - published by Books from Finland, as well as the article and the first two stories - and Snow [PDF] - from the UK's Booktrust - are also available online.

It's a good life

escabeche — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:46:37 -0800

"It's a Good Life" is a 1953 story by Jerome Bixby, who also wrote It! The Terror From Beyond Space, said to be the inspiration for Alien, and the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" (the one with evil bearded Spock.) It was made into a famous Twilight Zone episode, and is generally considered among the greatest SF stories ever written. Is "It's a Good Life" about God? Communism? 1950s suburban conformity? Or just about the horror of the self-contained world it creates in its few pages and the terrible realization that it would be possible to survive inside it, for a while?

52 Songs 52 Stories

Sailormom — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:58:01 -0800

52 Songs 52 Stories It's a simple idea, really. Each week in 2012 I'm going to pick a song, usually at random. I'm going to write a very short story inspired by that song, and post a video for the song and a story here. From author Iain Rowan.

"The Dead"

Iridic — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:16:51 -0800

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." -An annotated version of the story from Wallace Gray's World Wide Dubliners. -The Dead (1987); John Huston's last film, starring his daughter Anjelica and a raft of Irish theatre veterans. -A series of podcasts from University College Dublin exploring the civic, cultural, and historical context of the story. -A recording of "The Dead" by Elizabeth Klett, the queen of Librivox. -Dubliners, in ebook and audiobook form. "A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again..."

The Festival

Artw — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:23:19 -0800

Since the time of Dickens there has been a long-standing tradition of telling spooky stories on Christmas Eve... Who better to be a guide to a selection of ghostly tales than faux-Edwardian and author of Supernatural Horror in Literature, Mr. Howard P Lovecraft? Scaretastic suggetions from some of his favourite authors within... From Ambrose Bierce: The Death of Halpin Frayser - "[A] permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing... a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood" From Edgar Allan Poe: Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher - "[The] very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident." From Algernon Blackwood: The Willows - "...the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note." The Wendigo - "we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship." From Matthew Phipps Shiel: The House of Sounds. This story ... deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. From Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan - "No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations." The White People - Mr. Machen’s narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle; introducing allusions to strange “nymphs”, “Dôls”, “voolas”, “White, Green, and Scarlet Ceremonies”, “Aklo letters”, “Chian language”, “Mao games”, and the like. From Walter de la Mare: The Listeners - "the Gothic shudder to modern verse." From M R James: Count Magnus - "There were hideous screams in the woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones." Less seriously, what would have happened if Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft all lived together in a grotty boarding house? Find out in The Spinechillers

Booksleuth provides further help finding "lost" books.

uans — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:36:55 -0800

I have just discovered ABE books "Booksleuth" forum, where people help each other remember that "lost" story or book.

Stories made from: microspores, fog maps, infected bass samples, mathematics, patterns of decay, broken machines, blood, code bugs…

Artw — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:14:37 -0800

Sparkletown, the twitter stories of Jeff Noon .

Life Starts Here

Sibrax — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:26:44 -0800

Life Starts Here is a collection of short stories about people either directly or indirectly involved in the video game industry. You may know the author, Duncan Fyfe, from his blog Hit Self-Destruct, which ran from 2007 to 2009. If you like these, there are more on Hit Self-Destruct: Cadmium, Domestic City, Over and Under, and Murder Charge, for starters. For some perspective on why Duncan's writing is noteworthy, Critical Distance published a series of responses from other game writers when the original blog ended.

The Atlantic: Fiction 2011

WalterMitty — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:54:39 -0800

The Atlantic has posted its Fiction 2011 issue online. Essays Brett Anthony Johnston - Don't Write What You Know. Why fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth. John Barth - Do I Repeat Myself? The problem of the "already said". Stories Ariel Dorfman - The Last Copy. As soon as his book was published, Antonio realized that the pure vision of him that only she harbored would be shattered— and that he would do anything to keep her from reading it. Wendell Berry - Sold. “I knew that all the things we’d gathered there so many years would be scattered and gone. All that had held it together would come apart and be gone as if it never was.” Stuart Dybek - Vigil. The old Bohemian hadn’t come to disturb the family on Holy Night, only to deliver an enormous, misshapen gift. Austin Bunn - How to Win an Unwinnable War. His parents were separating, but all Sam could think about was preparing for nuclear holocaust. Jerome Charyn - Little Sister. Marla had felt she’d never really had a sister, that she’d been visited by some strange goblin or ghost. But then she went into Daddy’s bank vault after he died.

A Brief Survey Of The Short Story

tumid dahlia — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:44:04 -0800

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?

Diamonds and Rust

fearfulsymmetry — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:07:31 -0800

'Herman Wouk Is Still Alive' a new short story by Stephen King. Interview where, among other things, King discusses the origins of the story, his creative process in general, the status of the short story today, and his liking for Judas Priest. I'm amusing this is the essay referred to in the interview

"I ought to warn you, if you haven't read any of my stories, that you may be a little disturbed by some of the things that happen."

filthy light thief — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:56:14 -0800

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). Random Bits and Pieces * The above linked YT playlist features clips uploaded by starman2110, who might have some clips not included in that playlist. * Like many of Dahl's macabre short stories, The Landlady found new life in various forms. First, it was first published in the New Yorker in 1959, then made into an Alfred Hitchcock Presents epsidode in 1961, and later as an episode (complete ep on YT) of Tales of the Unexpected in 1979, the show's first season. Oddly, the story is used as part of an English learning program, wherein you can read the whole short story in PDF or listen to someone read the story in 4 MP3 clips. You can also read the story in plain HTML, also part of an English learning course. * There were a couple of US openings for the show, beyond the original Roald Dahl opening from the first two seasons, and the opening featuring John Houseman as the new narrator when Dahl was no longer involved in story writing or introducing the show. * The Peter Cook & Co special on London Weekend Television (LWT) featured a segment called Tales Of The Much As We Expected, which spoofed the Tales of the Unexpected, and it's host, "Ronald Dahl." * Roald Dahl, previously

This isn't your grandfather's science fiction

Rhaomi — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 11:11:54 -0800

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. Short Stories "Tower of Babylon" (1990) - A Bronze Age laborer joins the construction of an impossibly high structure on a mission to breach the vaults of Heaven. Nebula Award (Best Novelette). "Division by Zero" (1991) - A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof. "Understand" (1991) [.mp3 1 2 3 4] - An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames. "Story of Your Life" (1998) - A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). "The Evolution of Human Science" (2000) - Scientists despond as their mentally-augmented descendants leave them in the dust. "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000) - In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society. "Hell is the Absence of God" (2001) [full .mp3] - An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (2002) - A documentary examines people's reactions to a technology that allows one to see others without bias or judgment. Chiang declined a Hugo nomination. "What's Expected of Us" (2006) [full .mp3] - A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences. "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007) [full .mp3] - An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). "Exhalation" (2009) [full .mp3] - A non-human scholar relates the dissection of his own brain, and the implications his discoveries hold for his curious clockwork universe. Locus, Hugo Awards (Best Short Story). "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010) - The relationship between people and their creations are explored in a near-future world of sentient AI. Essays Story Notes - discussing the background and inspiration for selected stories from the original print run of his book collection (contains some spoilers). "The Problem of the Traveling Salesman" (2008) and "The Big Idea" (2010), via Mefi's Own jscalzi Interviews: SF Site (2002) - Locus (2002) - Infinityplus (2002) - Fantastic Metropolis (2003) - Nebula Awards (2008) - IndieBound (2008) - StarShipSofa podcast (2009) - BoingBoing (2010), discussed previously Other "Future Imperfect" - A feature piece on Chiang's latest work by City Arts magazine. "Ted Chiang vs. Tor Publishing" - A companion piece on Chiang's creative struggle with Tor and his move to boutique publishing. Ted Chiang (ology) - A fan blog dedicated to documenting characters, defining terms, and cataloging statistical information from Chiang's stories.

The Dungeon Master short-story

stbalbach — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:14:07 -0800

"The Dungeon Master", a short-story about Dungeons and Dragons by Sam Lipsyte in this weeks New Yorker.

"Increasingly illiterate, disgusting and meritless."

fearfulsymmetry — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:06:39 -0800

‘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. Charlie Higson tips the hat, including them in his top ten horror books