A Place for Short Stories

[SuperCooper]

I'm going to use this thread to ask for help. Can anyone recommend some nice collections of short horror stories?
Nothing with Lovecraft and Poe since I own most of their works.

Can you name some of your favorites?
Thanks in advance guys!

The Illustrated Man by the late, great, Ray Bradbury. Nice collection of psychologically stimulating tales. Nothing horror-horror per se, but I think there may be a few in there to sate your interests.

[jesse_custer]

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe is a must-have. There are not many stories that compare to The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Tell-Tale Heart.

You also gotta have The Complete Stories of Flannery O' Connor. Even the short stories that she wrote for her thesis (The Geranium, The Barber, etc.) are outstanding, not to mention that A Good Man Is Hard to Find is one of the most shocking and original stories of all time.

Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great read. He went through three stages with his short story writing, and it's fascinating going through them in order.

Big Bad Love by Larry Brown is superb. He's like an uncle who lives in the country and tells stories about his crazy friends. His writing recalls the simplicity of Hemingway. 92 Days is the story that closes the collection, and it's hilarious, honest, and evocative. Any struggling writer must read it.

Some other favorites:

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway)
Robot Dreams (Asimov)
The Lottery (Jackson)
The Dead (Joyce)
To Build A Fire (London)

[Ood Omega]

The other collection of short stories I own that contains Isaac Asimov's The Dead Past is called The Analog Anthology #1 with an introduction by Stanley Schmidt. It contains both short stories and articles that were previously featured in the magazine Analog: Science Fiction Science Fact and its earlier incarnation Astounding Science Fiction.

Short stories from this book I recommend are And He Built A Crooked House by Robert Heinlein, Stanley Schmidt's The Prophet, Poal Anderson's The Longest Voyage, Can these Bones Live? by Ted Reynolds, and Stanley Weinbaum's The Lotus Eaters. Stories by A.E. Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon among other authors are also featured.

There are also some interesting articles as well. Language For Time Travelers by L. Sprague de Camp talks about how the spoken language changes over time. No Copying Allowed by John W. Campbell is about how future technology that travels backwards in time would not be able to be reverse engineered. The Asking Of Questions by Poal Anderson is basically a dedication to John W Campbell's work as editor on the magazine and how they would move on after his death in 1971.

[berk]

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe is a must-have. There are not many stories that compare to The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Tell-Tale Heart.

You also gotta have The Complete Stories of Flannery O' Connor. Even the short stories that she wrote for her thesis (The Geranium, The Barber, etc.) are outstanding, not to mention that A Good Man Is Hard to Find is one of the most shocking and original stories of all time.

Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great read. He went through three stages with his short story writing, and it's fascinating going through them in order.

Big Bad Love by Larry Brown is superb. He's like an uncle who lives in the country and tells stories about his crazy friends. His writing recalls the simplicity of Hemingway. 92 Days is the story that closes the collection, and it's hilarious, honest, and evocative. Any struggling writer must read it.

Some other favorites:

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway)
Robot Dreams (Asimov)
The Lottery (Jackson)
The Dead (Joyce)
To Build A Fire (London)

The only one of those I've read is Joyce's The Dead but the rest are all on my to-read list. Well now they all are - didn't know about the London one before.

I re-read a lot of Poe last year and I think his stuff does stand up, especially when you look at it within the context of the era and milieu in which he was living and working. Have you ever read Baudelaire's intro to his translations of Poe's stories? You can probably find it on-line in English - it's really worth a look if you haven't seen it: you'll be able to tell from the first few lines if you'll want to continue.

Apart from Poe's, here are the short stories I remember making the biggest impression on me the last couple years or so:

Lenz - Georg Büchner (stylistically perhaps the most innovative in this short list, although one of the earliest)

Mateo Falcone
La Vénus d'Ille
Carmen
- all by Prosper Mérimée (even if you know Carmen from the opera, read this; the other two are equally indispensable)

Bartleby the Scrivener - Herman Melville (interesting to see Melville working in a more concentrated form in contrast to the very diffuse Moby Dick which I read shortly before this)

Song Without Words - Frank O'Connor (this guy never wrote a bad story, going by the ones I've read)

The False Burton Combs - Carroll John Daly (sometimes tagged as the very first example of the American hard-boiled genre; read it on-line - I can probably find the link again if anyone's interested)

[Ood Omega]

A collection I found entertaining is 3000 Years of Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by L. Sprague de Camp and his wife Catherine Crook de Camp. It has a foreward by Isaac Asimov and is composed of stories that show the progress that the science fiction and fantasy genres have made through out the millennia. It contains excerpts from Plato's Timaios and Homer's The Odyssey which are absolute classics I recommend everyone read them in full. I also enjoyed the stories A Journey To The Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac and The Cats of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft. My favorites are as follows:

H.G. Wells' The New Accelerator is about a scientist who invents a drug that basically gives the user super speed. What I like about this story is it seems like a fairly realistic depiction of what would happen to someone had they gained this power. Long before any Flash comics had brought up the idea.

Before Eden by Arthur C. Clarke is about astronauts on Venus who discover a form of alien intelligence that they are unable to communicate with. It also has a message about the effects that pollution and human carelessness pose on life.

Asimov's The Last Question is about two scientists who on a drunk bet basically ask a super intelligent computer how to prevent entropy. Of course the AI answers them "Insufficient Data For Meaningful Answer". Over millennia human beings evolve as does the AI and again and again the AI is asked the same question with the same results. I can't really answer the question without spoilers but it's a very satisfying ending.

[Rob Allen]

I posted this on the Classics board last week:

Sometimes you might find yourself sitting at a computer, wanting to read something. But you don't want something long. You're thinking, what about a short story, and possibly something in the fantasy or sci-fi realms? You're in luck! Here are some collections, for your reading pleasure:

Apex Magazine short fiction
Baen Ebooks Free Library, which includes some short story collections
Eclipse Online, from Nightshade Books
Strange Horizons fiction archive, including podcasts of many stories
io9 has a pick of 5 short stories from January, with synopses
AE, the Canadian Sci-Fi revue
short SF/Fantasy available at tor.com
Lightspeed Magazine offers a few stories for free, both in print and podcast form
365 Tomorrows is a great daily read for very short form ("Flash Fiction") sci-fi

[KingOfCups]

The most moving story in the entire collection Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes about a janitor of below average intelligence and a lab rat named Algernon who both undergo experiments to increase their intellect. I can't really say more than that without spoilers but this could be a tearjerker for some and I challenge everyone to read it and not be affected by it in some way. It is both beautifully crafted and highly entertaining.

This is a wonderful story, that I as well would highly recommend.

[jgiannantoni05]

The three Penguin Classics volumes of HP Lovecraft are must-owns. No better way to start (and even end, as these cover the best) a Lovecraft collection, they have corrected edited annotated texts by the premier Lovecraft scholar (ST Joshi).
1.The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (ISBN 0-14-118234-2)
2.The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (ISBN 0-14-218003-3)
3.The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (ISBN 0-14-243795-6)

Lovecraft serves up my favorite type of sci-fi, a gothic influenced Poe-ish kinda sci-fi.

[Ood Omega]

Is anyone familiar with the western short stories by Robert E. Howard? I am having trouble finding the other stories that feature the main character from the short story Meet Cap'n Kidd. It appears in the collection Swordsmen and Supermen along with stories by Jean D'Esme, Darrel Crombie and Arthur D. Howden Smith. My favorite is the last story called How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zaremm by Lin Carter.