The Quest to Find Perfect Short Stories
I’ve decided to find the perfect short story and/or authors of short stories. I found a few lists of “best short story writers” and I’ve combined them below. I realize that many of these authors have also written novels. I’m going to keep any links on this page related to short stories or novellas. This list includes both “to be read” and my “recently read,” with links to any reviews on Rebecca Reads. If the author is the link, that means I read a representation of their stories. If I read just one collection of stories, I link to that.
NOTE: This list will not be updated anymore. Click on the “Short Stories” subcategory to see all the short stories I’ve discussion on this site.
Note that I tend to avoid modern writers, and there are a lot on the list. I’ll try some and see how it goes.
Have I missed your favorite short story author? Please tell me, and I’ll add him or her to the list.
- Akutagawa, Ryunosuke
- Alcott, Louisa May
- Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
- Aleichem, Sholom
- Anderson, Sherwood
- Anonymous, Arabian Nights (trans. Husain Haddawy)
- Asimov, Isaac
- Atwood, Margaret
- Baker, Clive
- Balzac, Honore
- Bambara, Toni Cade
- Bank, Melissa
- Barker, Clive
- Barthelme, Donald
- Benet, Stephen Vincent
- Bierce, Ambrose
- Blackwood, Algernon
- Boll, Heinrich
- Borges, Jorge Luis Fictions
- Borowski, Tadeusz
- Bowen, Elizabeth
- Bowles, Paul
- Boyle, T.C.
- Bradbury, Ray
- Brown, Larry
- Brush, Katherine
- Budnitz, Judy
- Bunin, Ivan
- Butler, Octavia
- Butler, Robert Olin A Good Scent from Strange Mountain
- Byatt, A.S. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,
- Cabell, James Branch
- Cable , George Washington
- Caldwell, Erskine
- Calvino, Italo Invisible Cities
- Camus, Albert
- Canfield, Dorothy
- Capote, Truman
- Carter, Angela
- Carver, Raymond
- Cather, Willa
- Cervantes, Miguel
- Cheever, John The John Cheever Audio Collection
- Chekhov, Anton
- Cherryh, C.J.
- Chesnutt, Charles
- Chesterton, G.K. Father Brown
- Child, Lydia Maria
- Chopin, Kate
- Cisneros, Sandra The House on Mango Street
- Collins, Wilkie
- Conrad, Joseph
- Cooke, Rose Terry
- Cooper, James Fenimore
- Coppard, A.E.
- Cortazar, Julio
- Craddock, Charles Egbert [Mary Noailles Murfree]
- Crane, Stephen
- Dahl, Roald
- D’Arcy, Ella
- Daudet, Alphonse
- Davis, Lydia
- Davis, Rebecca Harding
- Davis, Richard Harding
- Dick, Philip K.
- Dickens, Charles A Christmas Carol; The Chimes; The Cricket on the Hearth; The Battle of Life; The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
- Dinesen, Isak [Baroness Karen Blixen]
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor
- Doyle, Arthur Conan
- Dreiser, Theodore
- Dumas, Alexandre
- Dunbar, Paul Laurence
- Dunbar-Nelson, Alice
- Eastman, Charles A.
- Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von
- Edwards, Amelia B.
- Egerton, George [Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright]
- Eliot, George [Mary Anne Evans]
- Ellison, Ralph
- Faulkner, William
- Ferber, Edna
- Fink, Ida
- Finney, Jack
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Flaubert, Gustave
- Foer, Jonathon Safran
- Foote, Mary Hallock
- Forster, E.M.
- France, Anatole
- Frederic, Harold
- Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins
- Garland, Hamlin
- Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
- Gass, William
- Gay, William
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
- Gissing, George
- Glasgow, Ellen
- Glaspell, Susan
- Gorky, Maxim
- Greene, Graham
- Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm
- Hammett, Dashiell
- Hardy, Thomas
- Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
- Harris, Joel Chandler
- Harte, Bret
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel
- Heinlein, Robert A.
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Hempel, Amy Reasons to Live
- Hesse, Hermann
- Hodgson, William Hope
- Holmes, Amy
- Howells, William Dean
- Hudson, W. H.
- Hughes, Langston
- Hugo, Victor
- Hurston, Zora Neale
- Huxley, Aldous
- Irving, Washington
- Jackson, Shirley
- Jacobs, W. W.
- James, Henry
- James, M. R.
- Jewett, Sarah Orne
- Johnson, Dorothy M.
- Joyce, James
- Kafka, Franz
- Kawabata, Yasunari
- King, Grace
- King, Stephen
- Kipling, Rudyard Just So Stories, The Jungle Book(s), Other Stories
- L’Amour, Louis
- l’Isle-Adam, Villiers de
- Lahiri, Jhumpa Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth
- Landolfi, Tommaso
- Lardner, Ring
- Larsen, Nella
- Lawrence, D.H.
- Lawson, Henry
- Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
- Le Guin, Ursula
- Lermontov, Mikhail
- Lewis, Henry Clay
- Lewis, Sinclair
- London, Jack
- MacDonald, George “The Day Boy and the Night Girl“,
- Mahfouz, Naguib
- Malamud, Bernard
- Mann, Thomas
- Mansfield, Katherine
- Maugham, W. Somerset
- Maupassant, Guy de (also, see Introductory Thoughts)
- Mauriac, François
- McCullers, Carson
- Melville, Herman
- Minot, Susan
- Mishima, Yukio
- Moody, Rick
- Moore, Laurie
- Mphahlele, Es’Kia
- Munro, Alice
- Murikami, Haruki
- Nabokov, Vladimir
- Nagibin, Yuri Markovich
- Narayan, R. K.
- Ndebele, Niabulo
- Nicol, Abioseh
- Norris, Frank
- O. Henry [William Sydney Porter]
- O’Brien, Tim
- O’Connor, Flannery
- O’Brien, Fitz-James
- O’Connor, Frank
- O’Faolain, Sean
- O’Flaherty, Liam
- Olsen, Tillie
- Orringer, Julie
- Paley, Grace
- Papini, Giovanni
- Parker, Dorothy
- Paterson, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’
- Paz, Octavio
- Perrault, Charles
- Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart
- Pirandello, Luigi
- Poe, Edgar Allan
- Pohl, Frederick
- Polidori, John
- Porter, Katherine Anne
- Pritchett, V. S.
- Proulx, Annie
- Quiller-Couch, Arthur
- Quiroga, Horacio
- Richardson, Henry Handel [Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson]
- Runyon, Damon
- Sabatini, Rafael
- Saki [Hector H. Munro]
- Salinger, J.D.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul
- Schwartz, Delmore
- Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
- Shelley, Mary
- Singer, Isaac Bashevis
- Spofford, Harriet Prescott
- Stein, Gertrude
- Steinbeck, John
- Stevenson, Robert Louis
- Stockton, Frank
- Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew
- Stoker, Bram
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher
- Thorpe, Thomas Bangs
- Thurber, James
- Tolstoy, Leo
- Toomer, Jean
- Trevor, William
- Turgenev, Ivan
- Twain, Mark
- Uchida, Yoshiko
- Varley, John
- Verga, Giovanni
- Vonnegut, Kurt
- Wells, H. G.
- Welty, Eudora
- Wharton, Edith
- Wilde, Oscar
- Williams, William Carlos
- Wodehouse, P. G.
- Wolfe, Thomas
- Wolfe, Gene
- Wolff, Tobias
- Woolf, Virginia
- Woolson, Constance Fenimore
- Zelazny, Roger
- Zola, Emile