best stories of all time
The Best 10 Short Random short stories
The best 10 short random stories
best stories of all time
10. “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship” by Rebecca Makkai (Ploughshares)
This humorous, deceptive story, loosely descended from Coleridge’s most
famous poem, follows an unreliable English professor as a single compound error
(mistaking a bird, then a student) births another and another, eventually
threatening her potential marriage, job, and fate. The best part, however, is
the turn at the very end, which reveals the entire story to perhaps have been
something different all along, a sneakily stunning mediation on the limits of
self-awareness, guilt, and penance. Originally published in Ploughshares, curious readers can find it in the pages of
the Best American Short Stories 2010 anthology.
9. “Inventing Wampanoag, 1672”
by Ben Shattuck (FiveChapters)
While this very short, very tricky story purports to be about the birth of
the tribal language used to print the first Bible in the Americas, it is really
about the death of it, and the way history itself is a colonizing narrative.
Shattuck’s facility with prose makes this a funny, winning story, even as it is
a bitter and sad one: a clever and unique creation that will stay with you long
after you’re done reading.
8. “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law
& Order SVU” by Carmen Maria Machado (The American Reader)
By turns funny, disturbing, canny, and inventive, this novella takes the
form of fictional episode summaries of the famous show (but if the show, as one
reader puts it, were directed by David Lynch). Machado, another new voice in
American fiction, manages to create an engaging, strange, and wholly original
story that draws into conversation sexual violence, popular culture, and our
own weird-feeling relationships therein.
7. “Spring in Fialta” by
Vladimir Nabokov
“Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull,” begins this amusing and
heartbreaking story, perhaps the most underappreciated narrative Nabokov ever
wrote. Waiting behind Nabokov’s admittedly long and wry sentences is the
plainly moving story of a love affair pursued through the years. Every detail
works together here to render Nabokov’s testament to the illusiveness of love
and memory, and a reader’s patience is richly rewarded. Those interested can
find it online, or in the excellent anthology of love stories, My Mistress’ Sparrow Is Dead.
6. “City Lovers” by Nadine
Gordimer (The New Yorker)
Also published in 1975, sixteen years before she would be awarded the Nobel
Prize, this is Gordimer’s story of the relationship between Austrian geologist
Dr. Franz-Josef Von Leinsdorf and a mixed-race Johannesburg shop girl, an
affair that is illegal in apartheid-era South Africa. One of the most
overlooked pieces of Gordimer’s writing, this is also one of the quietest, and
most effective. The uneasy dynamics of race, class, and power (especially when
it comes to love and sex) are nimbly explored here, and build to a devastating
end. It was similarly saved from obscurity, this time by author Tessa Hadley,
for The New Yorker‘s fiction podcast.
5. “Some Other, Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg (The Yale Review)
It’s difficult to say exactly why this story—the reflections of
intelligent, grumpy Otto about his aging partner William, his own aging, his
uneasy relationship with his family, the sanity of his troubled sister,
loneliness, and the new baby of his upstairs renter—is as wonderful as it very
much is. The story is, in the end, a testament to the power of a whole
person—caustic, funny, articulate, alone, lost and found, cruel and
loving—given life on the page. Originally published in The Yale Review, eager readers can find it in The Best American Short Stories 2004 anthology.
4. “Bluebell Meadow” by
Benedict Kiely (The New Yorker)
Published in 1975 at the peak of The Troubles in Ireland, Kiely’s unlikely
story of a small country park and the two young people who spend a few
afternoons together in it is sly, funny, and tremendously affecting. A lesson
simultaneously in understatement and heart, this story is really about the near
misses of the lives we almost live, as well as what time does to the things
that could’ve been. Long forgotten by most, author Colum McCann miraculously
resurrected it for The New Yorker‘s
fiction podcast, and it is best experienced in his wonderful voice.
3. “Lorry Raja” by Madhuri
Vijay (Narrative
Magazine)
One of the newest voices on this list, Vijay tells the story of Indian
children mining the ore used to construct Olympic stadiums in China with
remarkable poise and vision. While the inherently political nature of the story
is certainly important and the writing is ruthless in its detail, to approach
“Lorry Raja” in only that way is to miss the quiet power of Vijay’s prose, as
well as its ability to look honestly into the subtleties of family and the
scales of desire without denying beauty where it lurks.
2. “A Tiny Feast” by Chris
Adrian (The New Yorker)
Titania and Oberon, the immortal Queen and King of the Fairies, live under
a hill in a modern city park. To save their marriage, they adopt a mortal
toddler and begin to raise him, only to discover he has developed terminal
leukemia. What follows, set in a fairy den and an oncology ward, is one of the
best (and, somehow, realest) short stories ever written, a haunting exploration
of love and death that has followed this reader, at least, into marriage,
parenthood, and nearly every subsequent day spent on this earth.
1. “The Zero Meter Diving Team”
by Jim Shepard (BOMB Magazine)
This curious, masterful story is about a set of brothers who work as
managing engineers overseeing the Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986,
but, as with most of Shepard’s work, it’s also about the invisible planets of
loss that our personal lives orbit. It is both an education and an elegy.
Shepard’s forthcoming novel of the Warsaw Ghetto, Aaron Only
Thinks of Himself, promises more of the same.
best stories of all time