Top Ten Tuesday: My Favorite Short Stories Of All Time

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is my favorite short stories ever. Read that sentence again. My favorite short stories ever. How am I supposed to choose! I’ve read approximately three gazillion short stories. When I saw this topic, I immediately thought of a hundred favorites, and my brain overheated, and I melted into an angsty puddle on the floor. This list was agonizing, but I managed to narrow it down to ten.

My Favorite Short Stories Of All Time

10. “Ice Age” by Alexander Weinstein

This is a bite-sized dystopia. A community of igloo-dwelling humans is struggling through a future ice age. The community is tight-knit until a wealthy neighbor melts the ice and rediscovers material possessions. Maybe some things should be left in the past.

“The way I figure it: the Paulson kids have plenty. My kids, what have they got? Snowballs and a little fox I whittled out of an oak stub.”

9. “The End of Something” by Ernest Hemingway 

Hemingway was a master of the short story. He somehow manages to pack so much meaning into quiet, everyday moments. In this story, a teenage couple goes fishing and decides to end their relationship. The author captures the complete devastation of a breakup while skillfully avoiding eye-roll-inducing melodrama.

“She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. ‘It isn’t fun anymore. Not any of it.’”

8. “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe 

You could probably argue that this isn’t Poe’s best story, but it’s the first one I read, so it’s “best” to me. I think I was 13 when I read it. I still remember the nightmarish cell where the narrator is condemned to die. He can either stay still and be sliced to death by a razor-sharp pendulum, or roll to the middle of his jail cell and fall into a bottomless pit. That's a decision that I hope I never have to make.

“My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.”

7. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor 

This was my introduction to Southern Gothic literature. (And Southern Gothic racism.) A family’s summer vacation goes terribly wrong when their car flips over and ends up in a ditch. The strangers who stop to rescue them may be more dangerous than the car accident. As a reader, I’ve never gone from laughing to shocked horror so quickly.

“Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”

6. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger

If you want to be a writer, you need to read J.D. Salinger’s short stories. This is how you develop characters, people! In this story, a mentally unstable man is vacationing in Florida with his wife. Several people in the hotel notice signs of serious mental illness in the man, but none of them do anything to help. They’re all too caught up in their own vacations. This is another story where I went from laughing to stunned silence within a few pages.

“She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.”

5. “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien

I’m usually too critical to get emotionally invested in fiction, but I was invested in this story. In this semi-autobiographical tale, a young man is drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. The man is paralyzed with fear. He doesn’t know if he should give in to pressure and go to war, or follow his instincts and escape to Canada. This story made me anxious! I remember reading it in the commons at my college. When I put the book down, I couldn’t believe that I was freaking out while everybody around me was studying, or eating, or sleeping. I felt like everybody should be freaking out.

“All the eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn't risk the embarrassment.”

4. “Apt Pupil” by Stephen King

Putting this story on the list might be cheating. I don’t know the exact word count, but it might be a novella and not a short story. Whatever. It’s an underrated Stephen King thing. A teenager discovers that his neighbor is an ex-Nazi who’s wanted for war crimes. The boy and the old man spend the next four years slowly torturing and blackmailing each other. I love how King keeps raising the stakes and heightening the tension in this story. You don’t know which character will end up killing the other.

“‘No,’ he said. ‘I don't think anyone dies happy . . . but you could die well.’”

3. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

If you love dystopias, and you haven’t read “The Lottery,” what are you doing with your life? This tale about a mysterious lottery in a remote village helped launch the dystopian genre. Now that dystopias are everywhere, the end of this story probably isn’t shocking, but it's still an entertaining story.

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

2. “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell

Karen Russell is probably my favorite contemporary short story writer. Her stories are weird and magical and make you think about the world in new ways. St. Lucy’s Home is a school where nuns try to turn wild wolf-girls into proper young ladies. As you’d expect, the nuns have varying levels of success with taming wolves.

“I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen.”

1. “Some of Us had been Threatening Our Friend Colby” by Donald Barthelme

If you’ve read this blog before, then you might know that I love gallows humor. This story is literally gallows humor. Colby’s friends are irritated at him for “going too far.” They decide to make an example of him by hanging him in front of the whole town. The friends plan Colby’s execution like normal people would plan a party. It’s delightfully morbid.

“Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him.”

What is your favorite short story?