Can someone please point this brainlet in the direction of some good short stories and short story authors...

Can someone please point this brainlet in the direction of some good short stories and short story authors? Bonus points if they're existential or depressing.

You can't go wrong with Kafka. Give Metamorphosis a try.

Kafka

Thanks, pals. What of his would you most recommend?

Breece D'J Pancake. Good writer, an hero. Pretty depressing stuff -- but they're good stories. He didn't write a lot. 'Trilobites' is a good sample.

bruno schulz

The Vulture and The Bridge -- very short, very good.

In the Penal Colony is a good longer story. Metamorphosis is probably his best story, however.

notes of a dirty old man

God bless you all. I'm gonna look into these tonight.

Bartleby by Melville might be up your alley

A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor

>No Borges
G. L. Borges is a critically acclaimed Argentinian short story writer. The first of his that I read was titled "The Dead Man", a recounting of a knife fight that occurs in a bar. He wrote another, "The Library of Babel", that could be considered existential I guess. So could his "Circular Ruins" story.

Fellow short story lover. Will post more as they come to mind.

>Breece D'J Pancake
So what was his real name?

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Alice Munro
Dear Life

The Dover Thrift World's Greatest Short Stories is pretty legit. We had a weekly discussion thread using it here on Veeky Forums a ways back.

my favourites are
mishima
fitzgerald
hemingway
chekhov

Yes. There's a brief remark about the "D'J" part, if memory serves, in either the foreword or the afterword of this edition:

Thought you said "that," not "what."

That was his name.

i have a simple site at www.lowproduction.com where i post short stories and artwork. some of them might depress you but most are satire or parable.

Correction. Here's the story:
>The unusual middle name "D'J" originated when The Atlantic Monthly misprinted his middle initials (D.J., for Dexter John) in the byline of Trilobites, a short story the magazine published in 1977. Pancake decided not to correct it.

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Have you tried fanfiction.net?

John Cheever.

>existential or depressing
Hm, maybe Tolstoy's short stories/novellas fit in to these categories. I read Ivan Ilych, Father Sergius, The Devil and The Kreutzer Sonata; they're all more or less depressing and deal with the MC's existential crisis.

Anton Chekov

Thomas Ligotti, a lot of his stories are momentarily depressing. I would rec The Bungalow House if you want to see his most depressing story.