November 2nd, 2007

10 Short Stories Meme

Everybody’s doing it, first the Guardian, then Kerry Clare, then The Shakespearian Rag then me. You should tpo–your ten favourite short stories. As distinguished from the ten *best* short stories, because what a lunatic proposition that would be. I think in fact these are just the ten that are most in my mind lately, and this list would be completely different if I’d written it last year or, indeed, yesterday. And it’s not in any order, natch.

1. Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
2. The Dead by James Joyce (hmm, those two in common with Mr. Beattie)
3. The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpra Lahiri (in common with Ms. Clare)
4. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now by Andrew Pyper
5. Full by Lorrie Moore
6. Cosmic Gnomes (or possibly A Short Meditation on Tenth Grade Love) by Sharon English
7. Sleep by Haruki Murikami
8. A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger
9. Here Come the Maples by John Updike
10. Mama Tuddi Tried by Leon Rooke

And I’m already frustrated, having just written this list and still able to change it, at not being able to include any of Grimm’s Tales, or by David Sedaris, because those aren’t generically correct, and not Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily” because the story itself is actually annoying to me, it’s just *how* it’s done that’s so cool. And I also suspect myself of liking the Hemingway story where he is dying of gangrene even better than “White Elephants,” only I don’t know the title and am too lazy to look it up. So we see that lists are imperfect things. But if you do one of these, I’d love to see it.

The hardest part of this is leaving you
RR