Five Short Stories You Can Read Right Now

29th May, 2009 No Comments

Marcelo is posting here on Stacked regularly.  We’re working on getting a sig. attached so that you’ll know when he’s posting without my having to leave you all a little note. -c

With all the talk about novels, we can often forget that some of the best pieces of writing around are short stories.  Haruki Murakami, who appears first on this list, once said, “I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.  If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”  I love the way the best short stories can illuminate profound truths in such poignant and brief ways.  I also love the freedom short stories give to writers, allowing them to explore single ideas without having to commit to the intricate plotting and more involved themes of a novel.  Some authors, like Mansfield and Barthelme, are remembered more for their short stories than their novels, which have faded over time.

The stories in this group are not only five of my favorite shorts, but they’re also available for you to read online right now for free.  The links lead to the full text of each story.

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami – This story features most of Murakami’s hallmark themes–the importance of memory in forming the self, characters operating between instinct and reason, and a surreal, slightly spiritual universe where curses can appear unnamed and be banished by specific acts.  What sets this story apart from the others he has written is the way Murakami interweaves those common themes with the main character’s search for newness and vitality as his life approaches a permanent change.  But more than anything it’s a fun and playful read with a great deal of heart, and it’s a great introduction to Murakami’s work at large.

Modern Love by T. C. Boyle – Fun fact:  for a very brief time I was friends with T. C. Boyle’s daughter–we shared a class together at USC and we even had lunch together after class a few times.  This was before I had ever made the connection between her and her father, who was a creative writing prof at USC at the same time.  I saw a short story collection by Boyle in the bookstore at USC and picked it up, and the first story in the collection was this one.  It’s a brilliant tale of love in the age of microorganisms, but more importantly it’s a telling metaphor for the way modern relationships avoid real intimacy and closeness.  By the time the story ends it’s about something completely different than what it was when you started reading it.

The Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield – I encountered this gem in an English literature class where just about everything else was stuffy and dull (that’s not really true, but it feels true compared to this story).  The plot is simple–two women whose father has just passed away spend their time figuring out what to do with his estate and with themselves.  Written in 1921 at the height of the women’s movement, the story is a scathing and sad look at two women who are unable to define themselves outside of the father who watched over them and upon his passing find their lives empty and without meaning.  It’s a warning to women everywhere that they should never depend on a man for their identity or their survival.

At the End of the Mechanical Age by Donald Barthelme – This is my all-time favorite short story, and Barthelme’s avant-garde syntax and postmodern sensibility work well with the short story format.  He considered himself a collagist and the fragments and single ideas in each story contribute to the overall whole of his work.  This story appeared at the end of a collection called Amateurs, where it capped off a dozen stories of modern alienation and self-awareness with a beautiful and poetic elegy to a dying era in which God’s will is channeled through electric currents and the love between two people and their knowledge of their destinies lying elsewhere create a story ultimately about hope, about moving on when one phase of your life ends and another begins.

After the Siege by Cory Doctorow – This story comes from a collection called Overclocked, which features several great stories about everything from MMORPG’s and gold farming to the real world implications of an Asimovian universe where robot technology was locked down and owned by only one company.  In “After the Siege,” Doctorow combines his ideas about how  intellectual property laws ruin third world countries who need cheap ways to produce medicine with a very personal retelling of his grandmother’s survival in Stalingrad during WWII.  The result is a coming-of-age story with more humanity than most science fiction, real implications about the world we’re in today, and how tales like these might not be far off.

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