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/lit/ - Literature

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6631194 No.6631194 [Reply] [Original]

Favorite short stories.

>> No.6631231

A Good Man is Hard to Find is GOAT tier. That Evening Sun by Faulkner is great. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? as well.

>> No.6632944

Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

DFW - Oblivion

Stephen Leacock - Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

>> No.6632950
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6632950

anything from Parables and Paradoxes is pretty gud

>> No.6632951
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6632951

The Judgement is nice too.

>> No.6632954

>>6631194
Anything from Dubliners.

>> No.6633223

In the Penal Colony and A Country Doctor

>> No.6633235
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6633235

>>6633223
>In the Penal Colony
I've never understood this story of his. Is it about the enjoyment in sadism?? and our ingnobity in trying to be "noble" in it?

>> No.6633328

>>6633223
The former is my favorite work from Kafka

>> No.6633363

Thanks OP, you just reminded me how much I miss my unfinished O'Connor story collection.

Hurry up finals. I need some time alone with Flannery.

>> No.6633471

>>6632951
That was barely a story. It was just a punchline, like most of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
The best were the one with the father in his deathbed confessing his hatred of his son, the one with the hippie telling her rape story to a guy and the one with the guy telling his father he remembers being molested as a child.

>> No.6633668

>>6633235
That oppression and suffering are universal, and will perpetuate in cycles due to human tendency toward apathy and self-involvement

>> No.6633697

>>6633235
Consider the three classes of people discussed in the story. The prisoner/bar patrons seem unaware of the source of their punishment or the reason, and at the end of the story the bar is built on top of the tomb of the old commandant, showing both how civilization is grounded in the values of the old regime, and also that the public do not have the wherewithal to grasp the evils of the past and are doomed to repeat it.

Then you have the upper ranks of power, the commandants and the operator of the machine, who seem to be self-defeating and not even in true control of their motives and methods for punishment. The new regime replaces the old, substituting one form of oppression for another, just suiting the new ideology.

Finally you have the tourist/observer individual from a foreign land. He is not the punished nor is he involved in the subjection himself, but his apathy and lack of conviction tacitly involve him as a disinterested party that is equally impotent at supplanting the structure of power itself. Notice he leaves the prisoner behind and leaves in his boat at the end of the story despite the prisoner and soldier wanting to go with him

>> No.6633708

Anything Borges.

>> No.6633739

The Swimmer by John Cheever
Miracle Polish by Steven Milhauser
Vanka and The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art Upon the Gnoles by Lord Dunsaney
The H Street Sledding Record by Ron Carlson

>> No.6633767

>>6633668
>>6633697
Thank you.

>> No.6633787
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6633787

Sun
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41wo/chapter3.html

Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the Sun!

The Fox
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41f/

>> No.6633801

The Bishop by Chekov
The bar sinister / Richard Harding Davis
The lady or the tiger? / Frank R. Stockton
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge / Ambrose Bierce
The other wise man / Henry Van Dyke (if you read anything on this list read this)
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

>> No.6634268

>>6633235
>in the penal colony

I thought it was a story about how we sometimes put ideals before reason.

the guy believes in the torture machine. puts himself on it rather than quit using it on others.

we do that sometimes. sometimes in spite. sometimes revenge. little things where we've intellectualized some notion of how something is supposed to work, but we'd rather torture ourselves than see it changed because we love being right all the time.

>> No.6634274

>>6631194
flannery O'Connor and Raymond carver are tied for favorite short story writers.

but as for best single story it's "prize stock" aka "the catch" by kenzaburo oe.

>> No.6634312

>>6634268
That is also not a bad interpretation

>> No.6634456

>>6634268
>because we love being right all the time.

either that or because whatever idealistic notion is romanticized beyond reason.