The art of the short story

The short story is not a shortened novel: it assumes that one enters late, leaves early, and that a single event is enough. It long lived off magazines and newspapers, which paid by the line, and that explains its density. Maupassant made it a machine for reversals, Borges housed infinite libraries in it, Babel told war in a few dry pages, Munro fitted whole lives of Canadian women into it. It is the most international of forms: every literature has its masters of the brief narrative.

works 10

• Short storiesThe HorlaLe HorlaGuy de Maupassant · 1887A solitary man records, day after day, the signs of a presence he cannot see.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeThe Nose鼻Ryūnosuke Akutagawa · 1916A short narrative from 1916 drawn from a thirteenth-century collection of tales, about a monk wholly preoccupied by the length of his nose.Literature
• Short storiesTales of Love, Madness and DeathCuentos de amor de locura y de muerteHoracio Quiroga · 1917Stories of forest, river and brothel, in which passion and illness lead to death.Literature
• Short storiesDiary of a Madman狂人日記Lu Xun · 1918A short story of 1918, the first signed by Lu Xun, which makes cannibalism the figure of the Confucian tradition.Literature
• Short storiesThe Garden Party and Other StoriesKatherine Mansfield · 1922Fifteen stories published in 1922, several of which take the author, then living in Europe, back to the New Zealand of her childhood.Literature
• Short storiesRed CavalryКонарміяIsaac Babel · 1926A collection of 1926 drawn from the campaign of 1920, which its author followed on horseback in the Red cavalry as a correspondent, under a false name.Literature
• Short storiesFictionsFiccionesJorge Luis Borges · 1944Short tales in which a library, an encyclopaedia or a memory that forgets nothing become vertigos.Literature
• Short storiesConfabulario and Other InventionsConfabularioJuan José Arreola · 1952Fables and stories a few pages long, in which absurdity and irony target science, advertising and progress.Literature
• Short storiesLas armas secretasJulio Cortázar · 1959not translated into EnglishFive stories, most of them in Paris, in which a letter, a photograph or an appointment opens onto something else.Literature
• Short storiesDance of the Happy ShadesAlice Munro · 1968Ordinary women and girls of southwestern Ontario, caught at the moment that matters.Literature