Mine for yours: My 10 favorite short stories (in no order and off the top of my head, for Chilly Jay Chill)

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James Joyce 'The Dead'
I used to think this was the greatest thing ever written in the English language. I don't know if I feel that way anymore, but I did, and I read and studied this story heavily when I was younger. Things I read never make me cry for some reason. But this story always does. Even John Huston's film based on it makes me cry so intensely that I have to watch it when I'm alone. If you haven't read this story, I don't know what you'll think, but you can read it for free online if you want here, although I have to say I think it's most effectively read in a book, pages turning, nice typeface, no tech around, etc.

Benjamin Weissman 'Expressionism'
I've been a huge fan of Benjamin Weissman's stories since I first met him when he was a Cal Arts student in the late 70s. In addition to being a brilliant stylist, he's by far the funniest writer I've ever read. When I was working on the more overtly comedic short fiction that's in my forthcoming collection, his voice and work were heavy models for me. I think Weissman is easily among the most underrated of the great contemporary American writers. This story might be my favorite of his. It's in his book Dear Dead Person (High Risk/Serpents Tail). This short tale of a murderer turned visual artist in prison is a pretty offbeat choice among his stories, most of which are meatier, more ambitious, and almost surely greater, but this little thing just totally knocks my head off.

Paul Bowles 'A Distant Episode' 

This is such a predictable choice, I guess, both because the subject matter is blatantly up my alley and because it's generally considered to be one of Bowles's very best short stories by just about everybody. The prose so extremely precise and unbelievably cold and cruel without being sadistic. How he got that effect is pretty magical. I can't figure it out, and I've read it a lot over the years. As celebrated and famous as Bowles' work is, I still say it's a lot better and more important and a lot less quirky than most people with loud voices seem to think.

Kathy Acker 'New York City in 1979'
This relatively early short work by Acker is my favorite thing she ever wrote. Its greatness makes me wish she'd done a lot more work in short fiction. I have this feeling it was her most natural form. As amazing as her novels are, they can kind of meander at times, and I came to the conclusion while co-editing The Kathy Acker Reader that many of the chapters in her novels would completely stand alone as brilliant short stories, and, in some cases, be even stronger without their neighbors. This piece, which was originally put out as chapbook, is in the aforementioned Reader, and it includes one of my favorite sentences in all literature, which I'll paraphrase since I don't have the book here with me: 'I want everything above this to be the sun.'

William Gass 'The Pederson Kid'
I noticed while I was putting together this list that most of the writers on it are Americans, which is only strange to me since my lists of favorite novels tends to be all but bereft of works by my countrymen. Maybe I think Americans are better at the short story form than they are at the novel, to generalize wildly. Maybe because short fiction has less historical baggage and formal expectations, Americans experiment more when they write short. Maybe not. William Gass has always experimented whatever he's written, and I admire him for that, but I don't think he ever nailed whatever it is he wants to do better than in this dark and poetic and crazily, beautifully written story.

Peter Handke 'The Slow Return Home'
This is a strange one to include because I don't remember what it's about. I just remember that I was blown away by it. I'm not much interested at all in Handke's post-70s work apart from his gorgeous screenplay for Wenders' Wings of Desire, but he had something really going on in the 60s and 70s, some German thing operating on a par with the things of other Germanic gods like Bernhart and Herzog and Fassbinder, and I guess this story must be an excellent example of whatever that was.

Eudora Welty 'The Hitch-Hikers'
Welty's amazing. Everybody knows that. It's such a no brainer. I particularly like this story about a man who picks up two violent, talkative, folk song singing hitchhikers because it has all the weird gothic sentiment and brutality that characterizes her work in general, but it tries to be ghost story at the same time, and the mixture is a little strange and not completely effective maybe, but the stretch she takes here and the strain it puts on her writing was very, very interesting to me when I read it.

Flannery O'Connor 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'
Just about everybody seems to agree this is maybe the best American short story ever written. I hadn't read it in at least twenty years until I started doing this list and happened to find it posted online, but just thinking about it has always gotten me excited. And I just read it again about an hour ago, and it's even more incredible than I remembered. You've probably already read it, it being such a classic and all that, but, if not, here it is.


Ishmael Reed 'Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon'
Ishmael Reed has gotten kind of grumpy and cranky over the last few decades, and I'm not even sure if he writes fiction anymore, but his first few books from the early 70s, especially Mumbo Jumbo and The Freelance Pallbearers, are really stellar works in the then-hip and now much missed (by me) psychedelic/ surrealist style most popularly represented by the early books of Tom Wolfe, Tom McGuane, Terry Southern, Hunter Thompson and a few others. I think the young Reed might have been the best of them all, and I don't know why his early work has been largely forgotten. This story, which is one of the interlinked stories that comprise the almost-novel Mumbo Jumbo is a great example of his giddy, cutting, wildly imaginative prose.

Thomas Mann 'Death in Venice'
I had completely forgotten that 'Death in Venice' is a short story and not a novel until I looked it up online. That's some kind of testament to its something or other. Do I really need to explain this choice? I love Mann's work in general, but this story is so definitive and inescapable if you're interested in a certain kind of impossible and riveting and irreconcilable romanticism of youthful beauty like I am.

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