Low iq here and want to read short stories. what authors my friends

Steinbeck would be okay I guess, just don’t start with ‘Of Mice and Men’. It’s fine, but definitely memed up by the school system and not his very best work

Here's a good introduction:

Hans Christian Anderson, Fairy Tales
Poe, Complete Stories
Melville, any selection that includes "Bartleby" and the majority of Piazza Tales
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Kipling, Plain Views of the Hills
Wilde, Collected Short Fiction
A selection of Maupassant from a big press like Oxford or Penguin.
Chekhov, Forty Stories
The Selected Short Stories of Saki by Graham Greene
Joseph Conrad, Collected Stories
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg Ohio
Hemingway, Collected Stories
Faulkner, Collected Stories
Joyce, Dubliners
Gogol, Dead Souls
Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories
Woolf, Complete Stories
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Complete Stories
Kafka, Complete Stories
O'Hara, Selected Stories
Cheever, Collected Stories
J.D Salinger, Nine Tales
Barthelme, Forty Stories
Carver, Selected Stories

Should also add some Bradbury and some Asimov near the end, and some Lovecraft near the beginning to cover the genre bases.

Lovecraft, Selected Stories (the Joyce Carol Oates one is good.)
Bradbury, Collected Stories
Asimov The Complete Robot

flowers for algernon, a story about a literal brainlet

Jorge Bucay - Let Me Tell You a Story

Of the authors not mentioned so far, anything by Hawthorne and Hoffman
>Gogol, Dead Souls
lolwut? Dead Souls is a novel.

"Slow Learner" by Thomas Pynchon

he knows how you feel

Philip K Dick, Ralph Ellison, Hemingway, Steinbeck (Tortilla Flats reads like one), oh, and read Sand Kings by George RR Martin

Can someone explain the appeal of contemporary short stories to me?

Professors and students at my university consider Updike's A&P and Saunders' The End of FIRPO in the World to be masterpieces of the highest order and I have no idea why.

Can you imagine having that island to yourself and impregnating that titty demon? God, I would be in heaven.

they require considerably more elan, imagination and talent to compress, explicate and unfold themselves than novels do. In 40-100 pages if you manage to give the reader beautiful prose with a powerful plot and strong characters you've accomplished the same task most authors require hundreds of pages to do. They tend to stay with the reader for longer, do better justice to the authors' styles since they're less inclined to make shit up, repeat themselves, pretend to have more to say than they do etc

Try Ursula le Guin. You can find Flyers of Gy online

Nice list. My concern is that some of the authors you've mentioned might be a bit advanced for a professed brainlet.

*sniff* dis da firs time I seen muh boi Akutagawa acknowledged on dis board.

Borges

Can you imagine how fat your offspring would be? Pretty sure a scenario like the one you've described is what led to the creation of the people that populate the Samoas

thanks friends much appreciated

>pic related hasn't been brought up yet
disgraceful. Carver is one of the GOAT

check my quints, nerds

Nope

reroll

stop

no you stop

...

Tolstoy

What should I feed my gf with so that she has nice boobs like that?

Who was it?