This batch is all stories between 2,000 and 3,000 words.
Before I dig into the stories—
I’ve done word counts on a lot of different kinds of stories. Many of them are by writers I love, and you may not have heard of them. In some cases, they’re pretty new to me also. But I also put a bunch of obvious canon classics into the hopper, and five of those popped up in this batch.
More famous canon stories show up in this 2-3k length than in the other lengths I’ve surveyed. I suspect this is significant, and my conclusion is this: a story at this length can hook people and keep ‘em til the end, because sustaining a tone is easier with fewer words. But 2-3k is also long enough to give you some elbow room if you want to have a little bit of the passage of time, or you want to include a fair amount of rich prose along with character and dialogue. It feels like a sweet spot that gives you a lot of options as a writer but is also manageable length for the typical reader.
I’m pretty sure more extensive research wouldn’t change my conclusions, but it’s true that this survey is by no means scientific:
my tastes are broad but there are many gaps; my idea of the canon is a half century out of date; my survey method is biased toward shorter work, because kindle only allows me to copy and paste a finite amount from each book. This means that I was not able to do word counts on a lot of good stories because they were too long to copy.
But all of that aside, this length is a boon to both readers and writers. It certainly eases the job of re-reading and analyzing a story.
(24 stories)
Ramsey Campbell, A Street Was Chosen 2031
Ramsey is an interesting case; he’s a “horror” writer, and he wears this mantle without protest. But opinion in that world is divided between people that put him at or near the top of the genre, and people who dismiss him.
Usually the dismissers are mad because Ramsey doesn’t give them a big splattery payoff at the end, while his fans point to his consistent ability to maintain an unsettling tone in story after story. (Sometimes this subtle approach to horror gets separated out by connoisseurs as “weird fiction.”)
This particular item is a gimmick story, but it’s fiendishly effective. It’s not one of his more celebrated tales, but it’s one of my top faves by any horror writer.
James Thurber, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty 2081
Classic story. If you haven’t read it, and you’re interested in American short stories, you should read it today.
A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. “The new anesthetizer is giving way!” shouted an interne. “There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!” said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. “Give me a fountain pen!” he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. “That will hold for ten minutes,” he said. “Get on with the operation.”
O. Henry, The Gift Of The Magi 2088
See previous entry. Essential American short story, memorably parodied by Steve Martin in his Cruel Shoes collection of short pieces.
Julio Cortazar, House Taken Over 2129
This one is a staple for fans of the surreal. My understanding is that Cortazar moved away from this style later, but his first collection is filled with such offbeat gems.
Julio Cortazar, Axolotl 2176
This is my favorite by him. One of the best “twist” endings in fiction.
It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me.
ADD Haruki Murakami, Crabs 2188
Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell Tale Heart 2220
Another familiar classic. Poe has three famous stories in this batch, and this one is hard to beat as a classic example of the horror genre.
I undid the lantern cautiously — oh, so cautiously — cautiously (for the hinges creaked) — I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights — every night just at midnight — but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.
Dino Buzzati, The Collapse Of The Baliverna 2242
Italian writer Buzzati’s work hasn’t been translated enough into English, but this item is in a great translated collection of his short stories. I think of him as weird fiction, but I’ve seen his work described as existentialism, fantasy, and other things too.
I may say that the hideous building’s state of repair had impressed me the first time I saw it. Its decrepitude could be seen in the very color of its bricks, in the rough repairs, the various beams acting as supports. The back wall was particularly horrifying, blankly bare, with a few small irregular openings more like loopholes than real windows; for this reason it looked higher than the façade, which was lightened by rows of windows. “Don’t you think that that wall’s leaning at an angle?” I remember asking my brother-in-law one day. He laughed. “Let’s hope so. But it’s just your imagination. High walls always give that impression.”
James Joyce, Araby 2328
Some people say this is the greatest short story in English. A big claim, but it’s a masterpiece for sure. Joyce packs an awful lot of prose into a small amount of words here; that wasn’t his usual M.O., but it worked beautifully this time.
Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. “O, I never said such a thing!” “O, but you did!” “O, but I didn’t!” “Didn’t she say that?” “Yes. I heard her.” “O, there’s a... fib!” Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured: “No, thank you.”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask Of Amontillado 2347
A truly horrifying tale; the title is less well known than some others of his but it’s one of his very best.
Ramsey Campbell, End Of A Summer’s Day 2356
This one is more typical Campbell, but I’m warning you— if you’re a person who likes to know exactly what’s going on, run past this one and don’t slow down. Ramsey compared this story to Last Year At Marienbad, a film that most people hate because it doesn’t make any sense at all. It starts to irritate you during the credits. I love that film and this story, both haunting and unsettling classics.
ADD Hebe Uhart, Homeowners Association Meeting 2356
John Collier, Wet Saturday 2360
Okay, we’re back on solid ground with this one. I don’t think Collier wrote any bad stories, and “one of his best” seems banal. This story is one of many Collier stories adapted for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series, and it’s one of the episodes Hitch directed himself.
The TV version changed almost nothing from the original. This is a perverse thing to say, but if some nut argued it was the definitive or quintessential Hitchcock item, I’d be willing to hold hands with them when the inevitable army of naysayers started hyperventilating.
No story in this batch is more fun than this one, as long as you have a perverse idea of what fun is. Saki’s entry is another contender; it’s coming up in a moment.
Edgar Allan Poe, Masque Of The Red Death 2437
Another archetypal Poe classic. I’m heartily sick of the word “iconic,” but it certainly applies to this story.
This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
ADD James Alan McPherson, On Trains 2441
ADD Shirley Jackson, The Dummy 2450
Amy Hempel, Three Popes Walk Into A Bar 2473
Amy is one of those writers who had a huge collection out and I bought it grudgingly. I didn’t see how she could possibly live up to her rep. She does, though.
What to say about her? I don’t know. As good as Raymond Carver, and maybe even better? Gordon Lish edited both of them; my guess is that he didn’t have to elbow his way into Amy’s stories the way he did with Carver.
If you like short stories to have tons of great sentences, Amy’s got you covered. She’s one of those women artists who had to be better than the men so she could get noticed; others in this group include Emily Dickinson, Flannery O’Connor, and Joni Mitchell.
But I don’t really consider any of that praise to be high enough. Her stories read like water, but they’re dense. (Lish may have helped her with this; she’s better at it now than he ever has been in his own writing.) She puts in jokes that are funny and sad. I don’t mean they’re shaped like comedy, I mean they are actually funny. They make me laugh. They also make me sad. Try pulling that off— most writers cannot pull it off.
Eve offered me the first sip of her Tab so that it would be me who would get the one calorie.
ADD Arthur C. Clarke, Nine Billion Names Of God 2510
Ambrose Bierce, Curried Cow 2513
If you read this one without knowing the author, you’d probably guess it was Twain. Not as dark and disturbing as most of Bierce’s best fiction, but don’t hold that against it. And good luck finding a better last line.
When it transpired that my Aunt Patience intended wedlock there was intense popular excitement. Every adult single male became at once a marrying man. The criminal statistics of Badger county show that in that single year more marriages occurred than in any decade before or since. But none of them was my aunt’s. Men married their cooks, their laundresses, their deceased wives’ mothers, their enemies’ sisters — married whomsoever would wed; and any man who, by fair means or courtship, could not obtain a wife went before a justice of the peace and made an affidavit that he had some wives in Indiana. Such was the fear of being married alive by my Aunt Patience.
Thom Jones, The Roadrunner 2531
A writer friend of mine whose fiction tastes run to the hardboiled and manly gave me my first Thom Jones book. Now I own all his stuff, and I sit around saying it’s a damn shame he’s apparently not writing any more.
I’m not especially a fan of this red-blooded he-man type writing, but Jones’s much-praised Vietnam War stories are terrific, and if you start to go beneath the surface with him, it becomes obvious that he’s not trying to celebrate all that bullshit.
This one is about his Marine characters, indulging themselves with sick behavior on R&R just before they ship out to the jungle. It’s the right length for this preamble to his series of stories that are roomier, and much more packed with disturbing details than this one.
If you’re wondering whether Thom is for you— he’s probably not. But for readers that like to drink straight from the bottle, as it were, Thom is a far better writer than any clown out there who’s pandering to knuckledraggers.
Not only was I broke, I did not have my wallet nor my military I.D. What I had was a short afternoon to get back to Camp Pendleton. I took a quick shower, then guzzled cold water from the tap, and when I looked up in the mirror I saw a red and blue USMC bulldog tattooed on my left deltoid. Above the bulldog was the name “Shab.” To this day I have no idea what it means. It’s right up there with Stonehenge and Easter Island in the mystery department.
ADD Hebe Uhart, Events Organization 2671
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes The Memorious 2681
Borges manages here to blend academic abstraction with a yarn worthy of Stevenson or Kipling. This is probably as entertaining as it gets for a master writer that makes most readers feel either smart or dumb.
A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.
Saki, Tobermory 2719
Saki’s stuff is usually in the 1-2k length, but I believe he felt that the premise of this story rated a few more pages than usual. Tobermory is a cat that is taught to speak English.
“What do you think of human intelligence?” asked Mavis Pellington lamely. “Of whose intelligence in particular?” asked Tobermory coldly. “Oh, well, mine for instance,” said Mavis, with a feeble laugh. “You put me in an embarrassing position,” said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. “When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car.
Grace Paley, A Subject Of Childhood 2766
Awfully good. This story was recommended by Gordon Lish to students in his writing workshops; he understood that you can’t really talk about the American short story without bringing up Grace Paley. Her writing was a kind of seismic shift in American letters, which a lot of people still haven’t noticed. But it feels good to notice her, even belatedly.
As Grace put it in an introduction to her collected works— “two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers.”
It has been my perversity to do this alone, except for the one year their father was living in Chicago with Claudia Lowenstill and she was horrified that he only sent bicycles on the fifth birthday. A whole year of gas and electricity, rent and phone payments followed. One day she caught him in the swiveling light of truth, a grand figure who took a strong stand on a barrel of soapsuds and went down clean. He is now on the gold coast of another continent, enchanted by the survival of clandestine civilizations. Courts of kitchen drama cannot touch him.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library Of Babel 2767
For me, this is THE Borges story. It’s somewhere between an essay and a fever dream. If you’ve found yourself struggling with any of his academic puzzle stories, try this one; it’s intellectual, but also exhilarating for its prose and its ideas.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once dead, there will not lack pious hands to hurl me over the banister; my sepulchre shall be the unfathomable air: my body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, which is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable.
Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant 2777
One master pays tribute to another. I’m sure I’m not the only writer to stare and stare at this excerpt where Babel gives us a hint about how to write. Or, how to rewrite, which is the same thing.
I took the manuscript home with me, and there, in Kazantsev’s attic – among the sleepers – cut clearings in someone else’s translation. This is not such unpleasant work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world good and bad at the same time. The secret rests in a barely perceptible turn. The lever must lie in one’s hand and get warm. It must be turned once, and no more.
Jorge Luis Borges, Man On Pink Corner 2806
His first story; it’s straightforward and traditional, and he grew to hate it after he’d made his stylistic breakthroughs. A lot of people still like this one, though!
It’s probably not a coincidence that stories by Poe and Borges cluster in this 2-3k length. I’ve never seen Borges talking about story length, but I know he knew his Poe and I suspect he noticed the master’s use of manageable length as a way to keep readers around while you shower them with outré stylistic effects.
O. Henry, A Retrieved Reformation 2831
Henry is one of those writers who get undervalued today by academics because his work is old-fashioned, but also (I suspect) because it’s enjoyable.
Jon Padgett, Escape To Thin Mountain 2851
Padgett is one of many weird fiction writers who came under the spell of Thomas Ligotti, but he stands out because Ligotti actually helped him find his footing by giving him advice and feedback that led to marvelous stories like this one. Important also to note that he’s influenced by Ligotti, but that’s like saying someone is influenced by Poe or Twain. Flaubert had a similarly direct in-person influence on De Maupassant, and this just meant more excellent writing was loosed into the world.
Jon’s voice is his own; he’s a very special writer.
Last time we took the train, oh, it was years back. We were traveling up to Nashville for Little Evie to become a star. We’d been telling everyone about her. That’s the place to go if you want to sing and make it stick. Now we didn’t do it to take advantage of Little Evie’s gift of voice, or to make profit from it. We just wanted to share her special gift with everyone like us, wanted to hear Little Evie singing on top of one of those great fingers of rock above so high and clean above the filth of the world below. Wanted to see Little Evie get her due. That’s the day we all first heard the name Thin Mountain, the day the man said it at the train station just before he threw himself in front of the Whippoorwill Express train, got cut in two but with that look of healing joy on his face.
ADD Guy De Maupassant, The Diamond Necklace 2858
Nicole Cushing, The Peculiar Salesgirl 2892
Everything I’ve read by Nicole is good, but this particular story really grabs me. Rereading it, I’m struck by how much sociology subtext she’s crammed into it without falling into the heavy-handed trap most writers can’t resist, when they’re trying to make a point about how fucked up our society is.
You get plenty here about how corporation capitalism and marketing intersect with bullying, conformity, misogyny, and racism, but none of that detracts from the sustained weird atmosphere. I suspect Nicole knows these teen girls well, and she’s perfectly calibrated the blend of social criticism and psychological insight. As exaggerated as the details are, the story and characters are totally believable.
This story ought to be taught in high school; it would probably be banned, and that might get more young people reading.
Most of the times I’ve had an encounter with the peculiar salesgirl, it ends right there. She leaves, disappointed, and I get the hell out of there. But not today. Today I start to leave and she scurries—almost jogging— to the back room. She comes back with three skins wrapped over her forearm. She is tall enough that they don’t drag on the floor. There’s something wrong with them. They look jaundiced. They’re dotted by scars, sores, or growths of undetermined origin. There’s a liquid seeping from the skins, dampening the peculiar salesgirl’s pantsuit. It reminds me of the way my grandmother’s bed sore weeped when she was dying of lung cancer. One of the skins looks charred. Another looks as though it boasts an unnatural plethora of appendages.
Amy Hempel, In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried 2981
Her first story. She wrote it when she was in one of Lish’s workshops, and it’s hard to believe anyone could turn out this kind of winner right off the bat. Lish presumably helped her chip away everything that didn’t sound like Amy Hempel.
I dig all the Lish school writers, but Amy gets that light touch/heavy material paradox onto the page in a way that gets closer to Raynond Carver than most of the others do. Sometimes the Lish acolytes make me feel like they’re working really hard; Amy works until the work doesn’t show. (I’m hammering out a piece about Lish and Carver and editing, but it’s a giant subject and I’m taking my sweet time with it.)
The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death. I mean, he died.
Stay tuned for Part Three, with stories by Joan Aiken, Delmore Schwartz, Shirley Jackson, Frank O’Connor, Faulkner, Poe, and more.
Last Year At Marienbad... what a great film! heh heh. I will have to check out the Ramsey Campbell story for sure now... and thank you for these lists. It's good food for doing the Bradbury thing of "one short story, one essay, one poem" before bed. Oh, and if you haven't heard it, check out the Nurse With Wound album Echo Poeme Sequence No. 2. It was inspired by the film.
https://nursewithwound1.bandcamp.com/album/echo-poeme-sequence-no-2
Recent stories for me have been "Farewell, My Brother" and "The Enormous Radio" by John Cheever.
Borges, O. Henry and Saki are all authors who have influenced my fiction writing.