A Short List of Short Stories

I’ve read “The Bog Girl” by Karen Russell over and over. It has so many things great short stories have: humour, tenderness, quiet spectacle, strangeness, specificity of time and place, vibrant characters, and a boy in love with a 2000-year-old redhead. It’s a truly fabulous read, entertaining and moving in equal parts, and it absolutely has something to say about love. "The Bog Girl" was first published first in The New Yorker in 2016, then in Russell's collection Orange World (2019). Better yet: listen to Karen Russell herself read it to you.

“Going Ashore” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Unaccustomed Earth exhibits all the elements of an exquisite short story, but also knows how to break the rules. With an exceptional first line “Again she’d lied about what had brought her to Rome”, this story draws the reader into a tale of love, distance, tragedy and longing. “Going Ashore” has one of the greatest closing paragraphs I have ever read and expertly shows how easily a complex story, in this case one that includes many continents and a tsunami, can be tied up with just a few lines. Some people think short stories need to end with a twist or some cliff-hanging moment. Here, Lahiri demonstrates how you can tie up loose ends, but still deliver the reader a final shot of longing, or hope… “we had been careful, and you had left nothing behind”.

Susan Glaspell’s “Jury of Her Peers” is one of my favourite stories because its subtext is amazing. It isn’t what the characters say, it’s what they don’t say. It changed my writing by making me trust my readers to be able to infer what is going on, letting the scenes and characters do the talking for themselves. I also think it is a poignant story on what is left unsaid about violence against women, showing that silence can be the most terrifying. The last line is chilling and stays in your mind long after you have finished reading it.

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is the first short story Amy Hempel ever wrote (!), and one I always come back to when I'm feeling stuck with my writing. I love how she plays with triviality and detail, distance and intimacy, humour and grief. Every time I read it, I'm reminded of just how much you can achieve with a limited word count—this story is under 3000 words! Read it here.