What are the best short stories? I'm looking for something a bit on the darker, heavier, intellectual side of things...

What are the best short stories? I'm looking for something a bit on the darker, heavier, intellectual side of things. I've had my eye on Kafka's short stories, idk if it's worth it.

kafka's good. try the illustrated man by bradbury too. if you're snooty about genre you could read nabokov's shorts which tend to be dark too

A Perfect Day For Bananafish - J. D Salinger

Good Old Neon - David Foster Wallace

Signs and Symbols - Vladimir Nabokov

Boule De Suif - Guy De Maupassant

A Report To An Academy - Franz Kafka

On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Jorge Luis Borges

Love of a Good Woman - Alice Munro

Flowers - Alice Walker

A Temporary Matter - Jhumpa Lahiri

Any of these in book collections worth buying?

Those are specific stories, but

Salinger is worth it
Kafka is worth it
Borges is worth it (It is all good, however he reuses the same couple of stories over and over so it may be better to read what are considered his best and come back to the rest only now and then over the course of a year. I read the whole thing in a few days and it was disappointing by the end, not because the last stories are bad, but because they are not new)

>Signs and Symbols - Vladimir Nabokov
Not him, but this is in a collection called Cloud Castle Lake, and the title story is much darker and kafkaesque. Usually sells pretty cheap too, and I'd recommend getting it

How could it not be 'worth it'? You could read all of them in like 2 days

oh, and the Salinger story he mentioned is in a collection called Nine Stories, which also has darker stories in it, just user seems to have given you his personal faves. For Esme is my favourite one in that. Worth getting

I buy books, I don't read on my tablet unless I'm out of town.

The Death of Ivan Illyich
The Dead
The Snows of Killimanjaro

Bradbury has a lot of good dark stories

Tommasso Landolfi - Gogols Wife and other stories

Picked this up today and the praise on the back cover describes him as the Italian Kafka and says his stories are comparable to those of Borges. Judging by how this thread is going I figured it would be a good fit.

>The Death of Ivan Illyich
>short story

>>smugger than thou
>>still fucking wrong

Any story by Poe
Good Country People; Revelation; A Good Man is Hard to Find - O'Connor (really anything by her)
A.V. Laider - Beerbohm
Lost Phoebe - Dreiser
Silent Snow, Secret Snow - Aiken
How Beautiful with Shoes - Steele
Ugliest Pilgrim - Bettes
Bartleby the Scrivener - Melville
The Lottery - Jackson
The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles - Wilson

Hawthorne, Wharton, and Thurber write magnificent short stories, but I don't know that's what you're looking for. John Collier's stories are also both dark and clever.

Richard Wright's Big Boy Leaves Home is also tremendous, but not necessarily what you're looking for either.

Speaking of Alice Munro, "Something I've been Meaning to Tell You" is pretty unnerving. And you're in for something depressing of hers, "Dance of the Happy Shades" is pretty sad.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream written by Harlan Ellison.
Very short and very dark. I read it on a train ride to vienna.

Liars in Love and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

The Aurelian by Nabokov fits the bill

Gelee Royale by Roald Dahl

Not really on the "intellectual side of things", but I've been reading Stefan Zweig short stories lately, and they are worth checking. I recommend "Amok" and "Letter from an unkown woman".

Agree.

A lot of Kafka's shorts are really really short, so if by worth it you mean worth the time it'll take to read them, then yeah, it's worth it. His complete stories collection is about as long as an average novel.

Raymond Carver is one of the greatest short story writers IMO. People might argue he isn't "intellectual" because wrote in a short, terse, no bullshit style, but there is a lot going on in there. "Tell the Women We're Going" comes to mind as one of his darkest.

Fifty Great Short Stories by Milton Crane (ed.). Amazing anthology.

The Pedersen Kid by Billiam Gass.

Related question. Any short story collection written by an american that is not 'slice of life' style? Something dark, weird, twisted, not just silly broken marriage stories.

I'm thinking of something like this, any more collections like this one?

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

The Library of Babel by Borges is probably my favorite. What a mind fuck.

also Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson

>American

Great stories though.