The 5,000-6,000 length is perfect for a story with a lot of character, a lot of dialogue, and a lot of dust kicked up; many of the stories collected here do all that and then trip you up near the end.
This batch of 21 stories has a few literary classics, and a lot of highly entertaining material you probably haven’t seen before. It’s mostly dark, but there are also a few great humorous pieces here.
Stephen King, Big Wheels: A Tale Of The Laundry Game (Milkman #2) 5101
A companion piece to the shorter milkman story from an earlier batch, this is one of King’s lesser-known gems. I’m in the camp that prefers King’s short work, mostly, even though I’m partial to a few of his best novels and novellas. This tale features some very believable drunken bozos; King did a lot of research in this area in the years before he sobered up, and it really paid off in this nifty short. I love this excerpt, with its insight into how alcohol works on our brains.
Rocky had reached that stage of drunkenness where every part of himself seemed gone except for a tiny, glowing coal of sobriety somewhere deep in the middle of his mind.
For what it’s worth, I think King is wildly overrated by his hardcore fans. But he’s also underrated, by snobs who can’t see that his best stuff is pretty damn good. I re-read these two milkman stories every few years, and I enjoy them every time.
Thomas Ligotti, The Town Manager 5206
Ligotti writes in a few different modes, and this is the type of Ligotti story that reminds me of some of Millhauser’s work. They probably both read a lot of the same people, I would guess, in the Bruno Schulz/Kafka/Thomas Bernhard diaspora.
In the past, no town manager had ever been found, either alive or dead, once he had gone missing and the light in his office had been turned off. Our only concern was to act in such a way that would allow us to report to the new town manager, when he appeared, that we had made an effort to discover the whereabouts of his predecessor. Yet this ritual seemed to matter less and less to each successive town manager, the most recent of whom barely acknowledged our attempts to locate the dead or living body of the previous administrator. ‘What?’ he said after he finally emerged from dozing behind the desk in his office. ‘We did the best we could,’ repeated one of us who had led the search, which on that occasion had taken place in early spring. ‘It stormed the entire time,’ said another. After hearing our report, the town manager merely replied, ‘Oh, I see. Yes, well done.’ Then he dismissed us and returned to his nap. ‘Why do we even bother?’ said Leeman the barber when we were outside the town manager’s office. ‘We never find anything.’ I referred him and the others to the section of the town charter, a brief document to be sure, that required ‘a fair search of the town and its environs’ whenever a town manager went missing. This was part of an arrangement that had been made by the founders and that had been upheld throughout succeeding generations. Unfortunately, nothing in the records that had come to be stored in the new opera house, and were subsequently lost to the same fire that destroyed this shoddily constructed building some years before, had ever overtly stated with whom this arrangement had been made. (The town charter itself was now only a few poorly phrased notes assembled from recollections and lore, although the specifics of this rudimentary document were seldom disputed.)
Gerald Kersh, The Brighton Monster 5211
Kersh is an interesting writer, retaining a little bit of old-fashioned storytelling style but blending it with the hip man-of-the-world personality of the modern journalist. This is one of his gems, but I haven’t read a bad Kersh story yet. Don’t miss; I don’t have the energy to keep explaining why Kersh is great, but read this one and you won’t need me to.
Mark Samuels, Mannequins In Aspects Of Terror 5212
Mark is one of a generous handful of top-notch weird fiction writers haunting the small presses. Very creepy, but not trashy. Trashy’s not a dealbreaker for me, but he’s hunting on higher ground, and every Samuels story I’ve seen delivers the goods. He’s far better, I think, than a lot of his better-known colleagues.
Elmore Leonard, Three-Ten To Yuma 5239
Leonard is much better known today for his crime novels, but he sold a lot of strong Western short stories to magazines, and Hollywood made some good films from them.
This is pulp writing, but it’s solid. Anyone writing ANY sort of genre stuff would be wise to read stories like this, and get a sense of how this kind of story can be told. The plot is similar to the film “High Noon,” but I like this story better.
In an interview on Criterion, Leonard says the Argosy editor told him to add a little description. He turned in a 4500 word story and was told to describe a train a little bit. So he did. That’s some mighty trim prose you got there, pardner.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown 5256
The Scarlet Letter gets all the attention, partly because it’s damn good, and partly because you can’t miss the themes and allegories and metaphors and social criticism and all that nonsense even if you’re a block away from the book, and you whip by it in a rocket sled. English teachers love to yammer about all that crap. But Hawthorne’s short stories— those are an essential part of the uncut dark American fiction, to me.
Hawthorne is perhaps not as great as Poe and Melville, but his many disturbing stories like this one are awfully good. Both of those writers nitpicked about Hawthorne’s arguable weaknesses, but Poe praised his style and tone highly, and Hawthorne ultimately got deep under Melville’s skin. I love what Emerson said about Hawthorne: “His writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This line was a rollicking knee-slapper, by Emerson’s standards.
Ray Bradbury, The Whole Town’s Sleeping 5309
Bradbury worked this small town America/pulp horror blend better than anybody. He wrote a lot in this vein, but it’s been largely overshadowed by his science fiction and fantasy stories. I love that stuff, like everybody else, but some of us can’t get enough of his darker material.
Bentley Little, The Washingtonians 5216
Bentley is messed up, I’d say. Normally I wouldn’t just give you the premise and then skip away, but I’ll do it this one time. “Our founding fathers, it turns out, were cannibals.”
William Hazlett Upson, I’m A Natural Born Salesman 5369
I’m a sucker for first person stories with narrators who don’t seem aware of their own faults. A writer who understands this kind of story can spin comedy gold, and Upson wrote an insane amount of stories about Alexander Botts, tractor salesman. I’ve got an immense stockpile of these Botts tales, and they’re not all equally good. But this is one of the great ones, and anyone interested in writing or reading humorous fiction ought to read it.
Steven Millhauser, The Disappearance Of Elaine Coleman 5385
This is one of Millhauser’s stories where you feel like you’re reading genre fiction, and you gradually realize it’s an uncategorizable mixing bowl of existentialism, humanism, and impeccable prose. For many readers, Millhauser’s work is baffling, to the point where they feel they’ve been had. Not me. I fantasize about having lunch with the man, and pretending that I don’t want him to talk about his writing, and then waiting for him to stare off into the middle distance so I can slip some sodium Pentothal into his unsweetened iced tea. I’m pretty sure he would get up and try to make a break for it. He’s the only short story writer I know of where his introduction to his career collection is basically him saying he would prefer not to discuss it. Even authors who say that will often then give you 5000 words about how much they don’t want to get into it. But Millhauser really means it.
Thomas Ligotti, The Frolic 5425
Ligotti uses this length perfectly; the whole story is gradually leading you to the fucked-up ending, but the misdirection is masterful. I love to re-read this one to see again how well he holds the payoff behind his back. I won’t argue that horror writing can’t be as good if the horrors are explicit, but this story makes a great case for that position.
Walter Mosley, Pet Fly 5452
Mosley is good at many things, but writers take note: he’s particularly good at telling you who a character is with one or two sentences. I tend to find my characters in dialogue, so when I want to get better at this, Mosley is one writer I’ll be studying.
I’m always excited when I find a crime writer whose work is so close to “serious literature” that only a tool would care about the difference. They made a movie out of one of his novels featuring his fascinating Black amateur private eye Easy Rawlins; I guess it wasn’t successful enough for Hollywood to make more, but maybe that will change. An Easy Rawlins TV series— I would watch that. i suspect a lot of people would.
Thom Jones, A Run Through The Jungle 5497
Another of Jones’s powerful Vietnam War stories. With this length, he’s got plenty of room for gory detail, but it’s also a tight little story. When I read it the first time, the believable dialogue and war film atmosphere kept me from realizing just how sharp this tale is. Jones was one of our best American writers. He’s got so much style and so much substance that you don’t have to worry about where one ends and the other begins; you just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Ben Hecht, Some Slightly Crazy People 5600
Hecht is mostly remembered as having been perhaps the greatest Hollywood screenwriter. I think “His Girl Friday,” one of three movie versions of his great play about reporters (co-written with Charles MacArthur) is almost enough to make that case. Hecht’s short fiction is mostly forgotten now, and is mostly available only in mildewy used hardbacks. I check in on amazon once in a while to see if he’s finally been reissued. Get on it, NYRB!
Steven Millhauser, Cat ‘n’ Mouse 5603
Millhauser isn’t exactly known for his sense of humor, but an oft-overlooked element of comedy is restraint, and no author has more restraint than Millhauser. He’s one of our living masters of prose; how he managed to acrobatically keep this absurd premise at this level of deadpan dry for this many words, I do not know. It’s another story I recalled as being two or three pages; turns out it’s fairly long. This kind of joke pops up in the New Yorker from time to time; I’ve never seen it done this well.
Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbal, Orbis Tertius 5671
This is one of those Borges stories where he packs it with ersatz scholarship. Some might see it as science fiction, because of all the planets and alternate universe business, but I think it’s correctly seen as fantasy. It was included in the collection of fantasy stories from around the world that Borges, Casares, and Campos put together, and it fits there like an ornate glove.
I didn’t immediately love Borges, and stories like this didn’t grab me at first. But they’re catnip for me now. Interestingly, in his later years, Borges moved away from this approach, and the trend is to see that later more straightforward material as inferior. I’m not yet qualified to weigh in on this, but stay tuned.
Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. From the far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have something grotesque about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.
Roberto Bolaño, Detectives 5758
Bolaño gives us an all-dialogue story here; he has two police detectives chatting about a prisoner they dealt with during the authoritarian period in Chile. This is a fictionalized version of the author’s actual experience, when he was arrested and two policemen in the jail turned out to be former high school classmates of his. It’s an amusing speculation on the psychology of cops who take their shifting job description under authoritarian rule very much in stride.
It’s also an example of the effective technique of having characters talk about various things before they eventually get into the meat of a story.
More evidence that a story of this length can zip along if the writer does their job.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel The Fool 5764
This is one of Singer’s beloved classics. If you read the following excerpt and don’t care where this story is going, I won’t judge you. Even though there is obviously something seriously wrong with you.
I AM Gimpel the fool. I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in. They said, “Gimpel, you know the rabbi’s wife has been brought to childbed?” So I skipped school. Well, it turned out to be a lie. How was I supposed to know? She hadn’t had a big belly. But I never looked at her belly. Was that really so foolish? The gang laughed and hee-hawed, stomped and danced and chanted a good-night prayer. And instead of the raisins they give when a woman’s lying in, they stuffed my hand full of goat turds. I was no weakling. If I slapped someone he’d see all the way to Cracow. But I’m really not a slugger by nature. I think to myself: Let it pass. So they take advantage of me.
Christine Sneed, Beach Vacation 5792
Christine is on substack, giving us stellar writing advice. I’ve said this before, but she writes realistic contemporary fiction— which is not my favorite thing these days— and nails it so well that I’m a fan.
This particular story gives us a look at how easy it is to start thinking your teenager may in fact be evil. If you have one or two of these teens at your house, you probably know what I mean. You don’t have to admit it out loud.
Christine really ought to be better known. She told me she’s influenced by Updike, and I’d say that everything I like about Updike is in her work too. I sometimes check in with current books everybody claims are great. If these writers aren’t as good as Christine, forget it. I’m out.
Bohumil Hrabal, A Schizophrenic Gospel 5825
This is one of the pieces that shows most directly how Hrabal’s prose was influenced by an uncle who was given to surreal raving.
It’s a vivid burlesque of the life of young Jesus, and readers who prefer to avoid sacrilege ought to plan accordingly. It reminds me of Bosch, and Dali, but also Flann O’Brien and even Spike Milligan.
I was working on some fiction the other day, and I could feel some Hrabal creeping into it. I quickly stifled the impulse, as it didn’t fit the piece I was writing, but I was encouraged and filed the idea away for future use.
On the length of this story: it feels long. But that’s due to the density of the imagery, and the many satirical felicities Hrabal created with his absurd juxtapositions. Time is relative; a minute spent waiting for your spouse to grind coffee beans can feel quite long, if you were in the middle of an anecdote when the grinding began.
Ray Bradbury, Jack In The Box 5830
This is my favorite Bradbury story— beating out a lot of stiff competition— because the premise is so weird. I don’t want to tell you what it is.
“Do you want to see the Beasts that run down paths and crush people like strawberries?” Yes, he thought, I’d like to see the Beasts, horrible as they are. “Do you want to go out there,” she cried, “like your father did before you were born, and be killed as he was killed, struck down by one of those Terrors on the road, would you like that?” “No…” “Isn’t it enough they murdered your father? Why should you even think of those Beasts?” She motioned toward the forest. “Well, if you really want to die that much, go ahead!” She quieted, but her fingers kept opening and closing on the tablecloth. “Edwin, Edwin, your father built every part of this World, it was beautiful for him, it should be for you. There’s nothing, nothing, beyond those trees but death; I won’t have you near it! This is the World. There’s no other worth bothering with.” He nodded miserably. “Smile now, and finish your toast,” she said.
Charles Beaumont, The Howling Man 5833
This story was turned into one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. I’m always a sucker for a tale where the Devil shows up on Earth, and this one is not the typical Faust formula.
Sometimes the source material for a good movie or TV episode is better plot than prose, and you have to hack through the undergrowth to read it. That’s not the case here; Beaumont was a good writer, and this tale is fleshed out on the page with a classy Kiplingesque style.
When I first heard about Charles Beaumont, his stories mostly existed in out of print paperbacks, but now he’s made it into a Penguin Classics edition. And even that book doesn’t have all his good stuff in it— the interesting Valancourt imprint has reissued some more of his work. (Back when people read more, a lot of genre writing was pretty good, but it was easier to get published than it was to stick around and reach new generations. The people at Valancourt have been hunting down forgotten writers and resurrecting them. Notable examples: Beaumont, Fredric Brown, and Gerald Kersh, Lisa Tuttle. Maybe I should write a piece about Valancourt.)
Ramsey Campbell, Cold Print 5846
This story may be the best blend of Campbell’s dirty and nasty British “local color” and Lovecraft’s outré monsters. This minor classic is a good example of how this length gives you plenty of words to lead the reader down a primrose path before you rip off the band-aid. Or the face.
Rudyard Kipling, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi 5863
This Kipling masterpiece has great sentimental value for me; it was the first time I read my son anything that invited speculation that I was a bad influence on him. “Are you sure that’s not too scary for him?” It is, in fact, pretty scary.
I read him this story once from a dilapidated old hardback while he was taking a bath. I think it scared me more than it scared him.
Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny 5876
Bora is up to no good, that much is clear. I think she was yet another writer recommended to me by the tireless reader/writer/recommender Felix Purat. But she’s one of those many current writers in the weird fiction box who can really jolt me, not just because of the story jolts, but because her style is something I’ve never seen. This and the few other stories I’ve read have a folk tale vibe, but she’s also apparently influenced by Bruno Schulz.
“It’s late,” he says, “you’ve got to sleep early if you want to go to school tomorrow.” I am well past school-attending age. No one in this house goes to school anymore. But I always answer the same way. “Yes, Grandfather. Good night.” Then, on impulse, I give his wrinkled cheek a light peck. There was a time when I wondered if I should ask how he died, what happened to his body, or where his grave is. I’ve thought about it several times. But now I firmly suppress the desire to ask whenever it threatens to get a hold of me. If Grandfather ever remembers how he died, he might stop coming.
Bora Chung looks adorable in this picture, but don’t be fooled. She’s pure evil.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Great Sermon Handicap 5942
Wodehouse is, I believe, the funniest comic fiction writer. There are very funny masters who are arguably greater artists (Twain, etc.), but none who got more laughs onto the page without descending into utter nonsense. At his best, he just can’t be beat, and he was at his best for many years.
This story is about a bunch of people betting on which one of a field of rural English priests will preach the longest sermon on a specific Sunday. It’s a hilarious premise, with the usual glorious perfection you find in any story or novel featuring Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, but it’s in this survey because it seems short even though it’s not. Amusingly, it’s the longest one in this batch.
I slid into the vacant chair, and found that I was sitting next to old Wickhammersley’s youngest daughter, Cynthia. ‘Oh, hallo, old thing,’ I said. Great pals we’ve always been. In fact, there was a time when I had an idea I was in love with Cynthia. However, it blew over. A dashed pretty and lively and attractive girl, mind you, but full of ideals and all that. I may be wronging her, but I have an idea that she’s the sort of girl who would want a fellow to carve out a career and what not. I know I’ve heard her speak favourably of Napoleon.
This rules and I opened 5 new tabs to search for 5 of these. Posts like these are always so nourishing for the literary ecosystem in the best and broadest possible sense!
Ahoy, Karl! It's yer 'ol pal, Mark (formerly of Whiteis-) Helm. I'm so glad I popped in to see what was cookin' on the hotplate. I'm teaching a short fiction course this summer (at the TN Prison for Women. Fantastic students, awful place), am I've been casting about for some fresh stories. Already have some Bradbury on the syllabus, natch ("The Veldt" and "A Sound of Thunder"), but I think I'm gonna switch out "Thunder" for "The Whole Town Is Sleeping." The story has some of Bradbury's most gorgeous descriptive prose. I love the passage: "How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists ... baseball bat and balls lay upon unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn white-chalk game of hop-scotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk." No one ever got so much out of the humble hyphen. I'd be willing to bet, too, that he invented the construction "unfootprinted" on the spot. And, as there often is in Bradbury, so much music. Wow. Thanks for reminding me of that one; I probably haven't read it in 30 years.
Whenever I come across your story recommendation posts, I wonder where you find all the fucking time to read all this stuff, Karl. Seriously, man, I'm jealous. If I'm lucky, I get in maybe 6-8 novels a year, tops, and 15-20 new stories (more, I guess, if you count the Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Pseudopod, etc. stories I listen to in the car every day to and from campus. It's hard to find time to read and write (he said, neither reading nor writing). Anyway, I look forward to checking out Bora Chung and hunting down some of Ben Hecht's short fiction (Oh, and re-watching "Angels Over Broadway'!).
A story I'm especially looking forward to re-reading and teaching this summer is one I'm sure you've read, but in the off-chance you haven't, you're in for an enormous treat: Stanley Elkin's "A Poetics for Bullies." And, ya know, because one good turn and all, here's a few stories you might not know--but, hell, you probably do. Still, I'll give it a shot: "Every Body Depicted is Exploited," by Elise LeSage (creepy as fuck and wilidly original piece about how art often exploits the bodies it claims to celebrate, name-checking Archibald Motley and calling to mind countless others); "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz (read the story when Slate published it back in 2018 and it's still up. An interesting meditation on the nature of friendship, language, and the brighter side of AI); "Our Side of the Door" by Kodiak Julian (a truly lovely piece of portal fiction: A father trying to capture the wonder of childhood for his young son like lightning bugs in a mason jar); and couple you've probably read but I'll mention it anyway, “The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (made me break down in tears at the end when I first read it to students, even though I'd already read it a half-dozen times), and "The Third Bear" by Jeff Van Der Meer (Bloody frightening, literally. And relentless).
Hope this finds you well, Karl. Looking forward to digging into a post I missed: "24 Stories Between 2,000 and 3,000 Words." I laughed when I read the intro bit about your idea of the canon being a half-century out of date. Mine, too. Whattya know?! I also tend to go for shorter pieces, not because of a Kindle limitation, but because it's rare for me to get my students to dig into longer pieces. Recent exceptions have been "A Poetics for Bullies," Neil Gaiman's "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains," and Willa Cather's haunting and lovely "Paul's Case."
Thanks again for all the recommendations and your always engaging, erudite, and funny posts. You should send me a couple of your stories or point me in the direction of places I can find them. I'd love to read some!