“When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”
– George Saunders
Why read short stories?
As the late, great literary critic Harold Bloom so elegantly put it:
“Short stories favor the tacit; they compel the reader to be active, and to discern explanations that the writer avoids. The reader, as I have said before, must slow down, quite deliberately, and start listening with the inner ear.
Such listening overhears the characters, as well as hearing them; think of them as your characters, and wonder at what is implied, rather than told about them.
Unlike most figures in novels, their foregrounding and postgrounding are largely up to you, utilizing the hints subtly provided by the writer.”
Raymond Carver once wrote: "It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."
Andre Dubus loved short stories because he believed “they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.”
Below are a few of my favorite collections from some of the best short story writers to ever do it. I hope you enjoy it.