io9: 18 Perfect Short Stories That Pack More Of A Punch Than Most Novels

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William Haskins

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blacbird

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What a great list. I actually have only read a couple of these, and those were some years ago. Now I go looking. Muchas gracias, Guillermo.

caw
 
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maxmordon

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No sabía que pajaronego hablara español.

I've just read the article and came here to find it posted it. I really enjoyed the list and, seeing the old and the new sharing ranks, made me hopeful.
 

maxmordon

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¡Nada mal!

I took two years of Latin in high school and the only good it did to me was appreciate a certain Monty Python joke even.
 

Sara K.

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Cool, these all look pretty good. I have a quite few of the short story collections they belong to, but have yet to get around to - and I've now added more to my wish list. The few I have read from this list are absolute crackers.

Although, as everyone always does when lists like this come up, I have one person I was disappointed not to see a story from: Kij Johnson. To me, that woman is a master at the short story art.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I suspect we all have our own lists. I love ten of the stories on that list, don't care at all for the others. Any list I made would have to be a lot longer, and even if I listed a hundred, I doubt more than seven of the stories on that list would be there. There are simply too many wonderful short stories for most on this list to make teh top one hundred. Maybe the top five hundred. But that's just my reading taste.

As for why many of the best movies come from short stories, they really don't. But short stories are easier to turn into movies because you need to omit very little, and you need to change less. The screenwriter and director can use more imagination.

If you film a novel exactly as it is, you'd get a miniseries, not a movie.

This aside, hundreds, maybe thousands, of very good movies have been made from novels.
 

maxmordon

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Which are everyone's Top 10 short stories? In no particular order, mine are:

* "The Big Question" by Isaac Asimov
* "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway
* "Pegujal" by Rómulo Gallegos
* "The Background Artist" by Saki
* "The Glory of Mamporal" by Andrés Eloy Blanco
* "Death and The Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges
* "I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke
* "Other People" by Neil Gaiman
* "Big Mama's Funeral" by Gabriel García Marquez
* "The Decapitated Chicken" by Horacio Quiroga
 

Kolta

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Which are everyone's Top 10 short stories?

The Drawstring Detective - Nik Houser
The Mussel Eater - Octavia Cade
October in the Chair - Neil Gaiman
Rib - Yukimi Ogawa
Little Knife - Leigh Bardugo
Suteta Mono de wa Nai (Not Easily Thrown Away) - Juliette Wade
State Change - Ken Liu
You Have to Follow the Rules - Ada Hoffman
Soul of Soup Bones - Crystal Lynn Hilbert
Headwater LLC - Sequoia Nagamatsu

It will probably look completely different only a week from now, but there's my current top 10.
 

blacbird

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I suspect we all have our own lists. I love ten of the stories on that list, don't care at all for the others. . . . But that's just my reading taste.

Yeah, but it's still a highly interesting list.

As for why many of the best movies come from short stories, they really don't.

Agreed. It's not hard to find a lot of great movies derived from novels. All depends on the skill of the screenplay writer, producer, director and actors. Sometimes really fine movies get made from novels that really aren't that great. For me, as viewer, the list of great movies produced from novels would include:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Gone With the Wind
(movie better than novel)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (likewise)
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (haven't read the novel, but the movie is excellent)
The Ox-Bow Incident (made around 1940, with Henry Fonda)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (classic Sherlock Holmes, with Basil Rathbone)
The Invisible Man (classic H.G. Wells, with Claude Rains)
Cannery Row
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Life of Pi
(again, haven't read the novel, but the movie is way good)
Love in the Timo of Cholera (novel by Gabriel García Marquez, film starring Javier Bardem, both good)
Lord Jim (Conrad's great novel, with Peter O'Toole and James Mason in the great movie)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo's classic, filmed multiple times, my fave being the 1950s version with Anthony Quinn)

For me, the best movie I've ever seen adapted from a short story is "The Man Who Would Be King", from Kipling's classic story, film starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer. A big sumptuous swashbuckling adventure of the kind nobody makes anymore.

caw
 
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dondomat

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Top 10 films from novels:
Dune (there seems to be a consensus that it's a bad film. I think it's terrific)
Blade Runner
Goldfinger
A Clockwork Orange
The Glass Key
Double Indemnity
Psycho
The Shining
Hard to be a God
Solaris

And the four best films based on short stories are to me

The Thing
Total Recall
Screamers
A.I.Artificial Intelligence
 
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CL_Hilbert

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The Drawstring Detective - Nik Houser
The Mussel Eater - Octavia Cade
October in the Chair - Neil Gaiman
Rib - Yukimi Ogawa
Little Knife - Leigh Bardugo
Suteta Mono de wa Nai (Not Easily Thrown Away) - Juliette Wade
State Change - Ken Liu
You Have to Follow the Rules - Ada Hoffman
Soul of Soup Bones - Crystal Lynn Hilbert
Headwater LLC - Sequoia Nagamatsu

It will probably look completely different only a week from now, but there's my current top 10.

Wow! I'm honored to have made your list. Thank you! :D
 

Jamesaritchie

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I couldn't begin to list my top ten favorite stories. If I listed my top five hundred, they wouldn't be in any sort of order. I will say that for extremely personal reasons, one of my favorite stories is Ray Bradbury's "A Miracle of Rare Device". Bradbury wrote many stories that I think were better than this one, but Miracle came to me exactly when I needed it, and said exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.

I could put Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River in the same category, though in this case, I think it is Hemingway's best story.
 

guttersquid

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I'd like to give a shout out to "Fire in the Hole" by Elmore Leonard. Not only is it a great story with great characters, it indirectly changed my life as a writer and, as such, changed my life. When I say "indirectly" . . . well, it happened this way:

My favorite TV series is Justified. I read in the opening credits that the show was based on "Fire in the Hole." I could not find the short story, but I found Leonard's novel "Raylan," which was spawned by the success of the TV series and contains many of the same characters.

Never having read Leonard, I bought the book to see what the author was about, to see if his writing lived up to the show. I was not disappointed. Not only is it one of my favorite books for the story content, Leonard's writing style gave birth to my own. Until I read Leonard, I had been cursed by my efforts to be "writerly," to make my writing sound the way I thought writing should sound, and this was defeating my natural voice. But Leonard's free and easy style taught me that I didn't have to sound like anyone but myself.

Eventually, I found "Fire in the Hole" in a Leonard book titled When the Women Come Out to Dance, read it, and was enthralled.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I had been cursed by my efforts to be "writerly," to make my writing sound the way I thought writing should sound, and this was defeating my natural voice. But Leonard's free and easy style taught me that I didn't have to sound like anyone but myself.

When I first started writing, Elmore Leonard had been around along while, so I read a lot of his material. I've never been that impressed with his style, but no one writes better dialogue, or develops better characters.

I have always wondered why so many new writers try to sound "writerly"? From the moment I started writing, I wrote teh same way my favorite writers wrote. None sound "writerly".

I can't even really name any published writers, including classic writers, that I think sound "writerly", at least in the way many new writers try to write, so it makes me wonder why so many new writers take on such a style?

At any rate, reading such writers as Elmore Leonard, and letting their style influence you, is a sure cure.
 

Barbara R.

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Thanks for sharing this! The George Saunders short is available to read on line. I sort of wish the piece had considered non-s.f. shorts, too, but this list has lots of great leads.
 
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