My Top 25 Short Stories

I love short stories. Like most lovers of the artform, I have my favorites. Most people have them, the ‘oh, you’ve got to read this one!’ list. Lists like these are irrelevant, as one likes in short story vary as much as any art form - might as well make a list of ‘my favorite paintings’ and expect people to be equally transported. There’s no accounting for taste.

I doubt I could explain why I love these 25; I know they hit home.

At the End of the Mechanical Age – Donald Barthelmy

A Christmas Memory – Tobias Wolfe

The Conversion of the Jews – Phillip Roth

The Dead – James Joyce

The Duchess and the Jeweler – Virginia Woolf

Everything that Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor

The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield

The Grave by the Hand-post – Thomas Hardy

Gryphon –Charles Baxter

How Wang Fo was Saved – Marguerite Youcenar

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs – Tobias Wolfe

In the Land of Men – Antonya Nelson

The Jewbird – Bernard Malamud

A Life of Crime – Diane Leslie

The Little Match Girl – Hans Christian Anderson

The Magic Barrel – Bernard Malamud

Menagerie; A Child’s Fable – Charles Johnson

The Ones who walk away from Omelas – Ursula K. LeGuin

A Painful Case – James Joyce

Pie Dance – Molly Giles

Revelation – Flannery O’Connor

Roman Fever – Edith Wharton

Signs and Symbols – Vladimir Nabokov

Sleeping Arrangements – Laurie Cunningham

A View from Riverview Cemetery – Jane Moffet