Short Stories
I am working my way through a list of the 60 must-read American short story authors from a professor I once had. I am about halfway through it, and it has proven very interesting. I would have never read some of them, and it has changed the way I look at writing.
Who is your go-to short story writer and what is their must-read story?
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You can't tease us with a "list of the 60 must-read American short story authors from a professor I once had" and not share the list haha
Short Story Reading List. I am on 29
1. Washington Irving
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. Catherine Maria Sedgwick
4. Edgar Allen Poe
5. Herman Melville
6. Louisa May Alcott
7. Harriet Beecher Stowe
8. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
9. Frances E. W. Harper
10. Bret Harte
11. Kate Chopin
12. Henry James
13. Mark Twain
14. Stephen Crane
15. Charles Chestnutt
16. Jack London
17. Edith Wharton
18. Willa Cather
19. Sherwood Anderson
20. F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. Katherine Anne Porter
22. William Faulkner
23. Eudora Welty
24. Ernest Hemingway
25. Zora Neale Hurston
26. Richard Wright
27. Langston Hughes
28. James Baldwin
29. Flannery O'Connor
30. James Thurber
31. Carson McCullers
32. Philip Roth
33. John Updike
34. Tillie Olsen
35. Kurt Vonnegut
36. Tobias Wolf
37. Ursula K. Let Guin
38. Donald Bethelme
39. Toni Cade Bambara
40. Alice Walker
41. Toni Morrison
42. Raymond Carver
43. Joyce Carol Oates
44. Ann Beattie
45. Jamaica Kincaid
46. Ha Jim
47. Tim I'm Brien
48. Charles Baxter
49. Jhumpa Lahiri
50. ZZ Packer
51. Lorrie Moore
52. Sandra Cisneros
53. Annie Proulx
54. Leslie Marmon Silko
55. Edward P. Jones
56. Sherman Alexie
57. Lee K. Abbott
58. Jane Smiley
59. Kent Haruf
Looks like only 59!
I have read and loved all of those, except Bujold. I need to check her out. Or I should check her work out. My wife may have something to say otherwise!
Well, I usually aim for books that are a series to get myself something to have fun with long term. My favorites are Eoin Volfer and the Artimis Fowl series. And John Flanagan with the Rangers Apprentice series. But for shorter stories, if your into a bit of comedy and dark fantasy, I’d recommend the Ciaphas Cain books series by Sandy Mitchell. 😊
Ciaphas Cain sounds interesting. I will check that out. Have you read the Kingslayer series by Patrick Rothfuss? Two of three are out now. A very interesting and different take on magic and worlds set in medieval times. The Name of the Wind is the first one, A Wise Man's Fear is next. It's been a bit of a George R. R. Martin thing with it being 10 years' worth of delays for the final book to be released.
I haven’t read her work.
