Short stories are underrated. People don’t buy short story collections by writers and would rather buy novels. But I often get to see a writer’s skill in his/her short stories, or how s/he wrote in her early work before he attempted something longer. But some writers are just short story writers, and that doesn’t make their work any less important. We often fail to appreciate how compact and well written some short stories can be. Here are my favourite short story writers.
You know my policy on spoilers. The following featured writers and their works are below the cut just in case you hate being spoiled.
- Paul Jennings
When parents tell me that their sons don’t like reading, I often recommend Paul Jennings. He isn’t afraid to write about the weird, rude and just plain disgusting bits that children like. All of his stories have twists, and while some of them are predictable, he still delivers and the ending is satisfying. You will never be let down my a Paul Jennings short story. One of my favourites is about a boy’s tongue being stuck to an ice sculpture of a beautiful girl because he fell in love with it. As to whether he’s released from his tongue being stuck to the sculpture, you have to get the story and read it.
- Jorge Luis Borges
I don’t think he ever wrote a novel, because he once said that all he ever had to say were in his short stories. He is a true storytelling master because I am in love with the Garden of Forking Paths. It’s a story I’ve been thinking about lately, one in which a Chinese man gives up his scholarly career to create this mythical garden, which has never been found. I also like the one in which the universe is compared to a library. Anything that Borges writes has the following themes — that there is no real self, and what we consider reality should be questioned.
- Neil Gaiman
Skip Gaiman’s Trigger Warning, which I don’t think is his best, and focus on Fragile Things. My favourite short story of his has got to be the one about the Sunbird, in which a band of gastronomers try and find the eponymous bird in Egypt, only… things don’t go quite as planned. There’s also another, more famous and popular story titled, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, in which a young man goes to a party and realises that the girls there really are out of this world.
- Italo Calvino
I have read lots of science fiction, but I was not prepared for and pleasantly surprised by Calvino’s Cosmicomics. It’s not space travel and shooting lasers, but rather, we follow Qwfwfq a lot of the time, whose uncle refuses to evolve and would rather remain in the oceans, or being the person to scoop cheese from the moon. I also enjoyed Numbers in the Dark, which is another short story collection that really doesn’t fit in the genre of science fiction, but I got a kick out of The Man Who Shouted Teresa. In it, the man in the story simply felt like shouting for Teresa. I also enjoyed the story in which an honest man tries to survive in a village full of thieves, as every night, everyone would rob one another’s houses.
- A.S. Byatt
I read her stories a long time ago, and like Gaiman, I am in love with the way she adapts her stories. There was one story that shines the spotlight on the eldest of three daughters going off to seek her own fortune, as well as a woman buying a lamp in Istanbul only to realise that she has bought a genie. If I’m not wrong, these short stories can be found in Elementals and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
Looking back on the list, I am utterly ashamed that it does not have more female writers, LGBTQIA writers, and writers of other races. I’m going to be on the lookout for more of these writers, and I’m pretty sure that their work is just as good, too. Writers do need to broaden their horizons, after all.
However, I’m also going to give a shout out to Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho, whose stories are very Southeast Asian in flavour and are, for most part, well-written. My personal favourite was the one about a pontianak who develops a crush on her classmate. It’s called, The House of Aunts, I believe.