#ps if yoiu need a jolt to restore your faith in humanity and you wanna cry but in the happy overwhel

[restekova]

my short story recommendations masterlist (with links to read!!)

last updated 4/26/18

@farmerbf @yugiohlesbian @mariannevibritannia @11thprince & everyone who said they’d be interested & everyone looking for something to read—

hello, my name is Amelia Kester and this is a list of some of my very very favorite short stories. the title of each one links to wherever you can read it online legally for free! because so many short stories are available to read online legally for free, through the digital archives of the magazines they were published in, the personal website of the author, or so on, i decided to theme this recommendation post to only include such accessible stories, so that even if you’re flat broke or just don’t regularly have money to spend on books, you can still read some great literature! also, the stories are largely contemporary. with the exception of the borges stories which i included because i just had to, almost all all of these written from at least 1990 onward, many published just last year or the year before, because i wanted to introduce contemporary stories rather than just old classics that everyone in a mainstream audience already knows about. 

this list is a very personal list and is limited to stories that are personal favorites of mine, and especially ones that i consider to have personally influenced my writing or the way i see the world a lot. so it’s a very personal list of recs, as in, these are just my favorites. but i believe most of these are pretty damn good stories overall no matter what, so if you’re looking for something to read and see something interesting, give it a shot!

i included trigger warnings to the best of my ability. also, it’s really hard to write summaries of these stories and do them justice, so in place of a traditional summary of each one, i just copy an excerpt from the first few sentences of each story to serve as a summary. if one makes you want to keep reading, click on it!

Victory Lap (George Saunders) personal rating: ★★★★★ (this may be my single favorite short story of all time) tw: attempted kidnapping, attempted rape

Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned. Where was {special one}? Approaching now, bowing slightly, he exclaimed, How can so much grace be contained in one small package? Oops. Had he said small package? And just stood there? Broad princelike face totally bland of expression? Poor thing! Sorry, no way, down he went, he was definitely not {special one}.

Tenth of December (George Saunders) personal rating: ★★★★★ tw: cancer, attempted suicide

Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small but, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them loops. He knew that. And revelled it. He would turn, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement?

Blam!

70 SENTENCES THAT DUOLINGO.COM BELIEVES I WILL NEED TO KNOW IN SPANISH (Caitlin Horrocks) personal rating: ★★★★★

I am going to tell you everything: I have a house in every country. I have a dog in each one of my houses. The houses do not have roofs. What are they, exactly? 

Hog For Sorrow (Leopoldine Core) personal rating: ★★★★★ tw: sex work, prostitution

Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion. Her hair was long and lionlike with a slight wave to it, gold with yellowy shades around her face. Kit couldn’t look at her for very long. She cringed and recoiled, as if faced with a bright light. Lucy was too radiant.

Caiman (Bret Antony Johnston) personal rating: ★★★★★

Your mother wouldn’t let me bring the ice chest into the house, so I left it in the garage. Earlier, I’d knifed four holes into the styrofoam lid. One of them looked like half a star, which I remember liking. This was years ago, a windswept Sunday. This was Texas.

Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot (Robert Olen Butler) personal rating: ★★★★

I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife. 

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Jorge Luis Borges) perosnal rating: ★★★★

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. 

Funes the Memorious (Jorge Luis Borges) personal rating: ★★★★★ (this story literally changed the way i think about the world, particularly the fallibility of memory, and helped me when i was really struggling)

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. 

Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx) personal rating: ★★★★★

They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road, leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school.