Short Stories

[Anonymous No.4791804]

What's your favorite short story(or stories) and who do you think is the master of the form.

Mine would be a clash between Death and the Compass, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and the Lady and the Dog

I think Chekhov is still the master though as Borges is only good at writing one kind of style.

[Anonymous No.4791813]

>>4791804
>Borges
Read the first story of Piccones (or whatever).

Wasn't impressed. Never read anything by him ever again.

Chekhov on the other hand *kisses fingers Italian style* *mtswaaah*!

[Anonymous No.4791823]

Katherine Ann Porter - Noon Wine
Flannery O'Connor - Revelations
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I think? Could be some other Spanish writer) - A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Faulkner - Barn Burning

[Anonymous No.4791826]

>>4791813
Ew. Everything you've said about Borges disqualifies you from ever having an opinion about literature again. Go back to /tv/ and never return until you've read some more.

[Anonymous No.4791830]

>>4791813
Assuming you mean 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', it's kind of a shame that that is the first story in that book. Definitely not the easiest Borges to try to comprehend.
Then again, you didn't recognize the title Ficciones is a cognate of the word 'fictions'...

[Anonymous No.4791836]

>>4791813
There are so many things wrong about this post that it's incredible.

[Anonymous No.4791839]

>>4791813
You didn't like Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? Try his less 'academic' stories like The Library of Babel or The Circular Ruins. Borges is sui generis and untouchable; no one else can write like him and no one else would want to write like him either.

[Anonymous No.4791843]

>>4791804
>Death and the Compass,
reads like a thriller from the 1980s.
>The Snows of Kilimanjaro
that is fine. i liked the idea of the writer as a boy toy.
>Lady and the Dog
it's a short novel if anything and it features lots of suffering over nothing. i mean ... they fugged. and she had a dog. and then they met again. whatfor all the anguish?

[Anonymous No.4791844]

As far as short stories go, one of the best ive ever read is "the nine billion names of god" by arthur c clarke.. ya boy clarke could write some great short fiction...

[Anonymous No.4791850]

>>4791839
>The Library of Babel or The Circular Ruins.
each an essay dressed up as a story.
he did have some decent stories too, about the argentine cowboys, for instance. or about revenge.

[Anonymous No.4791852]

>>4791830
>Definitely not the easiest Borges to try to comprehend.
What's there to comprehend? Douche bag guy has a convo with his douchebag friends.

Douchebag guy says something about a place. Douchebag friends doubt the existence of said place. Douchebags look up a map from a book. Douchebag place doesn't exist in that book. Douchebag guy won't let it go though, so he goes to a random book store and scours all the fucken editions of that book. Eventually he stumbles upon an edition that maps out the place that he was talking about. Turns out that the specific edition of a book are not all the same.

Morals/themes of the story:
-Knowledge can be predicated on the editions of books
-The existence of a remote village in the andes mountains can exist or not exist based on what edition of a book you have
-The self-insert character of Borges is very keen on his memory, so never doubt it for a second.

He's like a South-American Nabokov.

Mordernist can be such whiny ragging faggots.

[Anonymous No.4791858]

>>4791804
My favorite has to be Sredni Vashtar by Saki.

[Anonymous No.4791868]

>>4791843
>a thriller from the 1980s

That's exactly why I like it, Borges just having fun but being unbelievably Borges at the same time. It's entertaining yet it fits with his notion on chance, fate and probability etc...

>suffering over nothing
That's what makes Chekhov so enduring as a writer. He doesn't have to deal in big things but merely records states of ennui and human discontent. That's why my favorite play is also The Seagull, which is basically a play where nothing happens and people are discontent for no reason other than being human. He was a writer who was able to capture that tragic yet comic condition within humans.

[Anonymous No.4791888]

>>4791852
Being this retard

[Anonymous No.4791895]

>>4791888
Ignore it and it will go away.

[Anonymous No.4791896]

>>4791888
lol rekt

[Anonymous No.4791899]

Death of Ivan Illych

Tolstoy for best Russian

[Anonymous No.4791900]

>>4791852
Did you enjoy the amazing, vivid, imaginative descriptions on the different perceptions this other world had?

[Anonymous No.4791911]

>>4791900
fuck you blabbering about?

As far as writer's craft is concerned, and using that first story of Fickones as a piece to evaluate, Borges is like a boring stool--serves a purpose mundanely, but just barely.

[Anonymous No.4791918]

>>4791911
What's your favourite short story and writer?

[Anonymous No.4791929]

Best short stories writers:

Chekhov
Akutagawa
Lu Xun
Maupassant
Borges
Kawabata

[Anonymous No.4791930]

>>4791899
That's not even a short story.

[Anonymous No.4791939]

>>4791929
We have a winner. Haven't read Lu Xun, but on the account of the rest of your list I'll assumer he's really good.

Only writer I would add is Cortazar, even though his stories are not that short and he is very much hit and miss.

[Anonymous No.4791951]

>>4791930
The distinctions are a bit blurry. The work appeared in some collection of Tolstoy's 'shorter fiction' so I count it as one.

[Anonymous No.4791952]

>>4791852

Oh shit. Holy fucking shit. People like this actually frequent /lit/? People like this actually read books?

Why? I mean, that's an honest question. You are so unbelievably bad at reading critically, I cannot fathom what enjoyment you could ever get out of something over a 7th grade reading level. Do you just read for "patrician" status? Do you somehow think that intelligence will osmose from the author to you?

These are honest questions. I just can't even. Wow.

[Anonymous No.4791956]

>>4791952
>replying to obvious trolls

[Anonymous No.4791970]

>>4791952
Are you jelly or...what are you trying to say?

Why don't you attack the things I said instead of making an elaborate ad homeinem questioning my motives for reading.

Lol twerp.

[Anonymous No.4791984]

>>4791956
How do you know that he isn't meta-trolling. And that you are indeed not being trolled right now

[Anonymous No.4791988]

>>4791970
What's your favorite short story(or stories) and who do you think is the master of the form.

[Anonymous No.4791993]

I really like Harlan Ellison's The Beast that Shouted Love at the Center of the World. His story names are unforgettable

[Anonymous No.4791995]

>ctrl-f
>No Dubliners

[Anonymous No.4791997]

>>4791988
Pray tell, how does that have anything to do with my critique of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'?

Whatever I say, you'll guffaw like a dumb jerkoff.

[Anonymous No.4792006]

>>4791997
Why refuse to answer OP's question?

[Anonymous No.4792004]

>>4791997
What's your favorite short story(or stories) and who do you think is the master of the form.

[Anonymous No.4792007]

>>4791939

Penguins complete fictions of lu xun, get it bro!

[Anonymous No.4792011]

>>4792004

[Anonymous No.4792019]

based Arthur Conan Doyle

No collection has given me so much enjoyment over the years other than his.

[Anonymous No.4792024]

>>4791995
Muh paralysis! Muh betafaggotry! Muh soul stifled by muh shitty boring Dublin!

What a load of dull tripe. Hopefully Ulysses will be better. I will admit that that line about the snow falling softly and everything was pretty good.

I mean, I'll appreciate the fact that Joyce wrote such a clearly ordered progression of stories about Dubliners, with such a wide range of tragicomically boring characters falling under one theme, with clear and sometimes even pretty prose the whole way out, and with a slightly wider range of psychological insight than most authors show, and the occasional wit ... but no, on the whole, a lot of dull and pessimistic hogwash.

Joyce himself, the damned motherfucker, was as dull as all the characters he criticized, is why I don't like Dubliners much. Too damn depressing and modernist, the only shred of hope is that Michael Fury (?) in The Dead, and that guy who travels the world and everything in A Little Cloud, but even then, they're just sort of tangential to the main characters.

Joyce meant to show that Dublin and modern life was boring as fuck. And he did it was a boring as fuck group of short stories.

[Anonymous No.4792028]

>>4792024
I'd piss on Joyce's grave if an Irishmen wouldn't kill me for it afterward.

[Anonymous No.4792039]

>>4792024
To me Joyce and Chekhov are the holy duo of naturalistic story telling. Every word placed in Dubliners (except maybe Ivy Day, which is too damn Irish) is full of the correct associations and movements. Two Gallants and After the Race have that feeling of youthful endeavor at the correct moments. Araby is the ultimate unrequited love story. There's not a flow out of place.

[Anonymous No.4792041]

>>4792028
I'd feel the same way if you were just judging by Dubliners and Portrait. Portrait, I read a long time ago, but I remember it as really really fucking tedious navel-gazing, with a sort of tone like "You don't know if I'm being ironic or not and whether Stephen's excessive romanticism and dramatic thoughts here are supposed to be epic or just retarded! G-good thing I'm not like that anymore, heh-heh," with occasional spurts of brilliantly flowery prose and amazing scenes like the sermon on hell.

But Ulysses and Finnegans Wake -- the concept even, you have to admit, is pretty ballsy. I haven't read those titans yet, but one day...

[Anonymous No.4792054]

>>4792039
Do not place Joyce anywhere near Chekhov. Joyce is a lower life form in comparison.

[Anonymous No.4792056]

>>4792024
someones on fire and that someone is you111

[Anonymous No.4792064]

>>4792041
>But Ulysses and Finnegans Wake -- the concept even, you have to admit, is pretty ballsy. I haven't read those titans yet, but one day...
Don't speak like an idiot.

I remember I thoroughly whipped /lit/s ass by directly quoting and critiquing lines from Ulysses. Not only did I prove that most didn't read the book, I proved that they liked it for superficial reasons, and that they were defending it not based the actual content under consideration, but because they appealed to authority ("every university teaches joyce, every one of my profs loved him, so you must be the moron").

Christ, people are such dumb unthinking clucks.

[Anonymous No.4792067]

>>4792064
Joyce is the Duchamp of literature.

[Anonymous No.4792071]

>>4792039
I understand that it's probably the epitome of naturalism, but naturalism... it's just goddamn dull.

Chekhov I can appreciate, Chekhov was, well, a damn genius. Not an intellectual genius like Joyce, but a literary genius. His short stories are absolutely perfect, because they have the naturalism of Joyce (THIS is real life... THIS is how THESE people act, and when THESE people interact with THOSE people, something like THIS invariably happens... such is life) with the comical spins and twists of Gogol and occasional careering into the romanticist and surrealist with his dream scenes and even a short story written from the viewpoint of a cat. You can't forget that art is, essentially, artifice.

Joyce was obsessed with both the impracticality of the artist and the dullness of modern society. These two ideas -- well, they turn James Joyce to James Joyless. The fellow couldn't just let go. Out of some misguided discipline, or perhaps overeducation, he made all his works so overly formulaic and slightly self-aware and self-mocking so they could be seen as "true art" instead of the embarrassing romanticist/over-indulgent tripe Stephen Dedalus, if I remember correctly, was guilty of.

But Chekhov: well, he just fucking created. He had a talent, and he didn't waste it, and he always kept his stories entertaining.

[Anonymous No.4792079]

>>4792071
>Joyce was obsessed with both the impracticality of the artist and the dullness of modern society. These two ideas -- well, they turn James Joyce to James Joyless. The fellow couldn't just let go. Out of some misguided discipline, or perhaps overeducation, he made all his works so overly formulaic and slightly self-aware and self-mocking so they could be seen as "true art" instead of the embarrassing romanticist/over-indulgent tripe Stephen Dedalus, if I remember correctly, was guilty of.

This made me rage...almost as much as when my stupid colleague "shared" an article on facebook from the New Yorker about how much of an "Intellectual Pillar DFW" was.

[Anonymous No.4792081]

>>4792064

RIP this thread
04/18/14(Fri)22:05 - 04/18/14(Fri)22:20 >>4791852
So young, so full of promise

Funeral 04/18/14(Fri)22:35 >>4791911
Graveside service 04/18/14(Fri)22:52 >>4791970
Tombstone desecrated 04/18/14(Fri)22:57 >>4791997
Corpse exhumed and desecrated...

[Anonymous No.4792082]

>>4792064
What? Nah man, I'm just talking about the obscenity trial Ulysses got for including a scene about masturbation, and about the incomprehensible multilingual babble of FW.

In Dubliners, if I remember correctly, Joyce was real subtle about this old guy masturbating in the second story, I believe, where those two kids try to play hooky for a day.

In Ulysses, that passage that was cause of so much controversy was actually quite beautiful. So ya know. If you think I'm just circlejerking because of public opinion, why do you think I would trash Dubliners so badly?

[Anonymous No.4792089]

>>4792082
>Guy wrote pervy passages
>Got public flack for it
>Such brave, much balls

Piss off.

[Anonymous No.4792091]

>>4792079
What? Have you actually even read Portrait and Dubliners?

I'd say Joyce's wishy-washy attitude against society and against his own artistic personality is far more infuriating.

[Anonymous No.4792096]

>>4792089
What's the last time you got involved in a landmark obscenity trial, nigger?

[Anonymous No.4792099]

>>4792079
By the way mate, if you had ever even skimmed through Ellman's biography of Joyce, you'd know James Joyless was one of Joyce's humorous nicknames for himself.

[Anonymous No.4792102]

>>4792082
>>4792089
Also, if you wanna see balls, Oscar Wilde had them.

>Paid a buncha men to fuck in the ass
>Was really unsubtle about it
>Gets called a homo by the Marquesse if Queensbury in public
>Sues Marquesse for libel (more stupid than brave actually)
>During the trial, he acts like the biggest wise ass ever, cracking jokes all the while and never loses composure
>Gets sent to hard labour for 2 years
>Gets spat on
>Writes De Profundus, which is actually a pretty insightful and wise memoir-like letter
>Gets out
>Poor as shit
>Dies while cracking another funny

What did Joyce ever do? Be a skinny loser who fucked his schizo daughter and had an obsession about farts?

WOW! Let's all admire this man for his amazing balls of steel:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAjily7rME

[Anonymous No.4792105]

>>4792102
Forgot to mention, Wilde had a chance to "flee the country" prior to his trial, an opportunity he refused to take.

Balls of steel.

[Anonymous No.4792106]

>>4792081
It really is a goner

[Anonymous No.4792112]

You guys like Alice Munro?

I was in my university bookstore with an hour to kill, and I saw one of her books. I remembered that she won the Nobel Prize, so I bought it on a whim. I've only read 4 or 5 of them so far, but the ones I have read are excellent

[Anonymous No.4792113]

I'm a big fan of Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rWrMYSKRn9EC&pg=PA21&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Anonymous No.4792123]

Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig is really good, but sad as fuck

http://web.archive.org/web/20060112100452/http://www.nightlightpress.com/fiction/letter.htm

[Anonymous No.4792203]

>>4791804
Borges - Ficciones and/or Labyrinths (the collections share most of the same stories, as I recall them)
Joyce - Dubliners (mostly The Dead, really)
Mishima - Patriotism

Haven't read Chekhov, unfortunately.

Also, I'm interested in the lack of Kafka. I admire his writing but don't love it, but I'd expect at least a mention in a thread like this, since he's probably the most discussed of all writers in terms of short stories.

[Anonymous No.4793368]

>>4791930
>>4791951
It was also anthologized as a short story in the Fiction 100, among others.

[Anonymous No.4793439]

>>4791804
Far too many "best of Chekhov" selections omit "Sleepy" which is wrong. Varka's tragic significance to the Slavic tradition is equal to Nana's in the Gallic, and Ophelia's in the English. She rises to the level of emblematic of all Russian peasantry; abused, neglected, driven to the most wasteful destruction, and abandoned at the moment of greatest crisis.

Other archetypes of the form should include "To Build A Fire," "The Lottery."

If Flannery O'Connor, then also Dorothy Parker, if only for "Big Blonde" which is necessary.

"Big Two Hearted River" deserves to be re-evaluated through the screen of recent updates in trauma psychology, because I think it is the first portrait of combat PTSD which hits the mark of veracity.

Aware of /lit/'s disdain for the living, I would also nominate Tatiana Tolstaya and David Means as future anthology go-tos, especially Fire and Dust, and Lightning Man, respectively.

[Anonymous No.4793528]

>>4793368
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella.

[Anonymous No.4793644]

Kafka so far, maybe also lovecraft in his own way. Some rare gems by Neil Gaiman are very good, but most are bad.

Looking forward to read me some Chekhuv

[Anonymous No.4793841]

>>4793528
If this argument even had a right answer, the value of victory in reaching it is:

[Anonymous No.4793913]

>>4791850
How is The Circular Ruins an essay m8

Some other of his books are great as well. I don't remember if it's The Aleph or the Book of Sand that has a story called "The Writing of God" (?) which is just so perfect in every way.
I really love Borges, no homo.

Another really good one is "Sensini" by Bolaño. Fucking wonderful.

Eça de Queirós's short stories are pretty great as well, sort of like Maupassant but better