I often write posts about books I’ve read and loved but I’ve never made a collection of short stories I love, which are equally important, but don’t get the attention novels and memoirs do, for some reason I can’t explain. I don’t know why everyone isn’t reading short story collections. Short stories are condensed versions of entire books! There is still plot and character and an epiphany (often more pronounced). Or sometimes its just a scene without a plot but you get to sit there, in that moment, with the character and live with them.
A writer friend asked for my list of my favorite short stories, so I made one. And then I figured I would share it. Because short stories are the tits and there is no excuse not to read them. They’re short! You can read one while your kids are bouncing on giant pillows at the Pumpkin Patch. You can read three while the rice cooks.
In no particular order:
1. “The Yellow Wallpaper”
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
If you want to feel a character, read this. You get to crawl around in this post-partum, maybe crazy, maybe gaslit, woman’s skin. It’ll make you want to peel wallpaper off in giant sheets, scratch through the wall until you have sheet rock under your fingernails.
2. “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”
by Roald Dahl
Lame title but incredible story. Probably my favorite. It is a long short story, but that’s because it’s a story within a story within a story. And all of them are incredible. Dahl somehow can give us minute details of a moment and the overarching summary of years all in this same piece. He is a master, making us believe what might or might not be possible because of how he tells it.
3. “Rape Fantasies”
by Margaret Atwood
Possibly my favorite title ever. Long before The Handmaid’s Tale swept the Emmys, Margaret Atwood was writing incredibly funny stories like this one. She is a chameleon, an artist, the very best kind of writer.
4. “A Small Good Thing”
by Raymond Carver
I know when people think of Carver, they think of “Cathedral,” but it was this story that I liked the best. I constantly think back to the epiphany of this story, remind myself of small good things in my own life when I need.
5. “How to be the Other Woman”
by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore was the one who made me first fall in love with short stories. She is so funny and writes in her own way, damn everyone else. Second person? Hell yeah. Why doesn’t anyone else use it? If they could like Moore does, they would. She twists conventions into something all of her own.
6. “The Man who Invented the Calendar”
by B.J. Novak
Confession: I have a think for B.J. Novak. How could I not? He’s a self-deprecating, funny writer who is also smart and thoughtful. His whole collection is smart and fun, but I found this story particularly inventive.
7. “Sparks”
by Susan Minot
Minot is a master of using language as more than words. Watch what she does to make you feel the crazy of her character with punctuation, scene changes, word repetition, tense vacillation, well-placed images. #aspirations
8. Parker’s Back
by Flannery O’Connor
I’m probably not that literary because I’m not a big O’Connor fan. But this story is special. She created a whole story based on an image and I think of that image often, Parker’s back, covered in tattoos he can’t see.
9. “Deep Kiss”
by Tobias Wolff
Wolff packs so much to think about into such a small story. His writing is nice and tight. He even makes me consider writing in third person, because he does it so well, makes it look effortless.
10. “Where are you Going, Where have you Been?”
by Joyce Carol Oates
I love the tension Oates writes into both her characters and her story’s action. She writes ominously, so the reader just knows shit’s about to go down. She was inspired to write this story by an actual news story, proving writers are inspired by real life, but not necessarily their real life.
holly pelesky 
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