These are some of my favourite short stories. It’s quite a long list but I love short stories – I think the form is a unique art, different from the novel, not just shorter. To me the following are all beautiful, full of pathos and emotional resonance. They are unforgettable, and I will return to them again and again throughout my life:
Miss Brill, by Katherine Mansfield; American Horse, by Louise Erdritch; If you Sing Like that for Me, by Akhil Harma; A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett; To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing; House Opposite, by R K Narayan; I Stand Here Ironing, by Tillie Olsen; The Chrysanthemums, by John Steinbeck; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy; Everyday Use, by Alice Walker; Disappearing, by Monica Wood; The Rocking Horse by D.H. Lawrence; About Love, and The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogal; He’s at the Office, by Allan Gurganus; Everything Stuck to Him, by Raymond Carver.
I have many more favourites by the above authors. I also enjoy Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King.