My Top 20 Favorite Short Stories

I’ve always maintained that if you really want to learn how to write fiction, you gotta start with short stories. You only have a couple of pages to grab a reader’s attention and establish the basics before your audience completely loses their patience and stops reading. It’s the first litmus test of whether or not you’re truly mastering your craft as a writer. If a particular writer has decent short stories, chances are you’ll eventually read their novel. 

My first writing experiences when I began writing at age 7 were short stories: fanciful little numbers that were inspired mostly by the 80s movies I grew up watching (“The Goonies,” “The Never Ending Story,” etc). Later on in my literature classes in school a whole new world was opened (Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, etc) and they never left my heart. As a teacher I always used them in my instruction to engage students. Today I came across an article on Buzzfeed entitled “23 Short Stories You’ll Want to Read Over and Over Again” and some of my MAJOR faves got left out, so I made my own list. Enjoy!

Now some of these are already on Buzzfeed’s list, but because they’re my faves too, they’re listed again. In no particular order:

1. “Thank You, Ma’am” – Langston Hughes
2. “The Story of an Hour” – Kate Chopin
3. “The Lottery” – Shirley Jackson
4. “The Tell Tale Heart” – Edgar Allan Poe
5. “All Summer in a Day” – Ray Bradbury
6. “Patriotism” – Yukio Mishima
7. “A Rose for Emily” – William Faulkner
8. “Young Goodman Brown” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. “The Necklace” – Guy de Maupaussant
10. “The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
11. “Sweat” – Zora Neale Hurston
12. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” – Flannery O’Connor
13. “Raymond’s Run” – Toni Cade Bambara
14. “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” – Haruki Murakami
15. “Eyes of Zapata” – Sandra Cisneros
16. “Everyday Use” – Alice Walker
17. “The Pit and the Pendulum” – Edgar Allan Poe 
18. “Wild Child” – T.C. Boyle
19. “Cora, Unashamed” – Langston Hughes
20. “Graveyard Shift” – Stephen King