Do you like short stories, Veeky Forums?

Do you like short stories, Veeky Forums?

What's your favorite one?

Have you ever written any yourself?

Yes

Something by Tolstoy, Borges or Kafka

Nothing good, but I enjoy writing them

Yes. And I think its one of the forms that really shows if a writer knows his craft.

Library of Babel is a fun one.

Plenty. Only some I really like though.

fantastic night by zweig

My favourite short story writers:

Anton Chekhov
Flannery O'Connor
Franz Kafka
Alice Munro

I think it is a shame a lot of writers view the short story as a stepping stone to writing a novel.

The obsession with writing a 'great novel' is nauseating. It has bred hundreds of overly-ambitious 600+ page novels.

Borges was right when he said novels were a ridiculous and cumbersome format..

Although I'm still writing one, I'm definitely in the league of writing one creeps and tightly crafted novel instead of shitting all over myself for 800 pages or churning out never-ending 6+ book series. Very few stories, if any, is worth that much.


Novellas are the endgame

crisp and tightly crafted*

if you still want to write a novel besides all that all you have to do is make the structure of the novel accomodative to one-off episodic vignettes

many of the great novels already do this

of course you still need to tie them together but that shouldn't be too difficult

Yep, I finished Laurus recently and it had that episodic structure that carried itself pretty well. It's something I've been experimenting with in my recent works too.

Yes.

I couldn't possibly pick one, but I always go back to Augusto Monterroso's stories (or, rather, fables).

Yes, but it's in Spanish. It's a brief retelling of the Fall of Man from the perspective of the snake.

Yes
Borges, Barth, Chekov, Gass and Kafka wrote some splendid ones. I pick Night-sea Journey as my favorite for now. It's constantly changing though.

I filled a notebook up full of them. I hope I can finish a notebook of my novel.

who /maupassant/ here

also wtf i started reading mishima's stories, they don't quite as great as his books yet

Yes
Either A Country Doctor by Kafka or The Library of Babel by Borges
I have. I can't write anything long because it feels like I would be bloating something that could also be a short story.

Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz are two of my favourites that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread.

I read one Maupassant story and loved it

Lydia Davis

Are there any other short story writers like Borges?

I prefer them to novels desu

The Bungalow House

Tons of them, likely all trash

>Do you like short stories, Veeky Forums?
Yes.

>What's your favorite one?
"The Dead"

>Have you ever written any yourself?
I have written many and published most of these professionally.

>Do you like short stories, Veeky Forums?
Yes, very much

>What's your favorite one?
'The Library of Babel' by Borges

>Have you ever written any yourself?
You are not getting your filthy hands on my ideas. Go to hell. And take this site with you.

Not really, but here's some
Danilo Kiš
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Julio Cortázar

I love Somerset Maugham's short stories.

Also, Silvina Ocampo.

I'm always surprised Veeky Forums doesn't talk about Cheever much. "The Swimmer" and "The Five-Forty-Eight" are excellent, but the rest of his stories are definitely worth checking out.

Yes
For Esmé—with Love and Squalor
No, I'm not a writer.

If he a lot like Carver? I've always lumped them together, probably because of the similarity in the names.

>tfw had a few short stories published
>tfw have more out for submission
>tfw have found a handful of agents who actually accept short story collections, so have begun to gather the stories up and query

Wish me luck, Veeky Forums.

Good luck Señor gato!

viel Glück, Herr Katze

Of course. and as made a point of, it's generally a marker that someone knows what they're doing and can do it in a more refined way.

Probably The Dead or The Forged Coupon. But in terms of dedicated short story writers, I'm in love with Tolstoy, Borges, Walser, even Barth.

I have written a few, the most striking in my mind being the few I wrote a few years ago when I was especially into Barth. It was about how the Barrelman of a ship becomes sort of an analogue to Atlas, forced to bear the burden of the rest of his world. I thought it was clever at the time, maybe it is, maybe it's not.

Good luck user.

>I have written a few, the most striking in my mind being the few I wrote a few years ago when I was especially into Barth. It was about how the Barrelman of a ship becomes sort of an analogue to Atlas, forced to bear the burden of the rest of his world. I thought it was clever at the time, maybe it is, maybe it's not.

That's actually a pretty interesting conceit. Did you ever try to get it published?

>ctrl+F "The Overcoat"
>zero results

You might be interested in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Does this count? It reads like one even though it's technically an essay.

It's a great read, but not a short story. It's punched up some in terms of factual veracity, but it's presented as a (non-fictional) work of longform journalism

verpiss dich, Herr Reddit

Nah, I've gotten poetry published in academic magazines before but I've never really considered myself a writer, so I don't actively seek it out.

The modern 'novel' is a pretty cancerous thing. That the longer it is the better it is, or that you somehow "get more value for money" from a longer novel.

I think it's simply that they don't get to the point. It's strange to think about the length of The Lord of the Rings and compare it to the books it inspired which are about 10x as long but say 1/10th as much.

The Judgment by Kafka
A ridiculous Man by Dostoshitsky
Good Old Neon by DFW

What is it about rows of small-capacity motorcycles that looks so comfy?

guy is a master. i have an early edition of his shorts on my bedstack with some thurber collections and a nice lil edition of gide's journals.

the nose was better m8. book one of dead souls was great too.

Italo Calvino