Here are 100 books that The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway fans have personally recommended if you like
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
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I grew up on a trail mix-style melange of 80’s action movies, Stephen King and The Lord of the Rings (with a special melancholy fondness also for The Once and Future King). High and low brow and everything in between that turned into a fascination for science fiction crossed with military adventure and doomed–or at least long-suffering–heroes. War is getting increasingly technological, detached, and even surreal, with drones, satellites, and hackers now increasingly on the front. But even as tactics and weapons change, the carnage doesn’t. From The Iliad to today, wars and the people who fight and die in them make for stories worth telling.
I read this collection of loosely connected short stories about Tim O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War when I was in high school, only a little younger than O’Brien was when he was drafted into the Army. The hazy line between memory and fiction in the book leaves you feeling like you’re strolling through someone else’s dream.
“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in particular has stuck with me throughout my life, the seemingly impossible yet terrifying realistic narrative of how a young girl who has no business being in a war zone falls in love with combat then with the primordial earth itself and eventually disappears into the heart of darkness. Did it really happen? Was it a tall tale? Memory is such a slippery thing.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
In addition to writing novels, I’m also a playwright. Whatever form I work in, I’m drawn to character, drama, and emotion. I aspire to write literary page-turners that feel as rich and complicated as real life. Also, I want the endings of my books to slay readers and break their hearts. Of course, when I say that, I’m not necessarily speaking of sorrow; sometimes your heart breaks from expanding, from a surfeit of feeling. Your heart breaks only to grow larger.
This literary rendering of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century comprises fifteen stories. Whenever I read them, I can feel Joyce’s adoration for this city—and the last story, "The Dead," is glorious.
The final line always slays me: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from…
I have picked these books because I have a passion for good reading material. All the books I have chosen have become reading classics in their own way. They are well written and have plots that go well beyond normal literature in a sense that they unveil the 'human condition' into the realm of the protagonist being up against all odds, where in the end, truth reveals all!
Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.
In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo — magical, absurd, and humorous.
The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad…
I love a good short story that can convey character, emotion, and complexity. While a novel allows the writer (and the reader) to delve into the chaotic complexity of a single set of characters, a good short story collection can explore a range of humanity and a diversity of moods or feelings. This was my motivation in writing my book. I believe a good short story collection on a well-grounded theme (such as the contributions to this list by Doerr, Kundera, and Munro) can often reveal more about human nature than an excellent novel.
Who hasn’t felt the urge to run away and start over at some point? And who hasn’t been devastated that the world we finally return to has been irrevocably altered?
In this book, Munro paints portraits of relatable, believable women who are dissatisfied with life and love and yearn for the better. Three stories focus on the same character, Juliet, who finds real life never matches her repressed expectations. She does a wonderful job of making us feel the frustrations, disappointments, and monumental significance of the mundane in our bones.
This acclaimed, bestselling collection also contains the celebrated stories that inspired the Pedro Almodóvar film Julieta. Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as…
I have no expertise on anything, but I do feel like I have had a lot of experience being around families and observing complex family dynamics. It’s funny because I would say I have never actually had the “family” experience myself. I grew up with just a mother and a younger sister. That’s it. I barely knew my father, barely knew my grandfather, sort of knew my grandmother. Barely knew my uncles. I found myself looking at other families with awe. Not with envy, but more with curiosity. And as someone who has had his own issues with my sole sibling, I am forever intrigued by that dynamic as well.
Nine Stories, along with Franny and Zooey provides a wonderful glimpse into the lives of several members, mostly siblings, of the Glass Family. It is the first collection of short stories I ever read (I was in high school) and I devoured it in one weekend. I remember being so impressed with how each story had its own distinct emotion and personality. It wholly inspired me and was a great influence on my current novel. It taught me something that my favorite TV shows like The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show couldn’t—that no family is absolutely perfect. That often times there is a simmering tension beneath the skin of every family and that tension can lead to profound sadness and sometimes tragedy.
The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family. Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories:
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut
Just Before the War with the Eskimos
The Laughing…
Hello. My name is Mike Russell. I write books (novels, short story collections and novellas) and make visual art (mostly paintings, occasionally sculptures). I love art and books that are surreal and magical because that is the way life seems to me, and I love art and books that are mind-expanding because we need to expand our minds to perceive just how surreal and magical life is. My books have been described as strange fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, magic realism, fantasy fiction… but I just like to call them Strange Books.
I love stories that are many things at the same time. They can open a person up to a wider perspective, a greater awareness; that’s the kind of story I love to write. Kafka’s stories can be considered as absurd allegory, as surreal evocations of mystery and magic, as psychological study, as satire, as dark comedy… as all of these and more at once. Many of Kafka’s stories were considered by the author to be unfinished but to me they seem complete. Kafka famously tried to ‘finish’ all of his stories once and for all by instructing his friend to destroy them after his death. Thankfully, he was prevented from adding that final full stop.
This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…
My childhood, very much shaped by World War II, led me the study of international relations and political psychology. I have written numerous books on conflict management and prevention, and also on ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and the elusive nature of knowledge. In recent years I have begun to explore these themes in fiction. This shift has been exhilarating and liberating and provides me the opportunity to present the tragic understanding of life and politics to a larger audience.
Chekhov is a master storyteller who conveys important insights into human nature with remarkable parsimony. Chekhov also provides contemporary readers with a certain detachment as he wrote in the nineteenth century and in Russia. Ancient Greek playwrights understood that distant settings provided analytical clarity to contemporary problems and also made people understand their universal nature. Chekhov also serves these aims.
With an Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University.
Anton Chekhov is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories. He constructs stories where action and drama are implied rather than described openly, and which leave much to the reader's imagination.
This collection contains some of the most important of his earliest and shortest comic sketches, as well as examples of his great, mature works. Throughout, the doctor-turned-writer displays compassion for human suffering and misfortune, but is always able to see the comical, even farcical aspects of the human condition.
My childhood, very much shaped by World War II, led me the study of international relations and political psychology. I have written numerous books on conflict management and prevention, and also on ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and the elusive nature of knowledge. In recent years I have begun to explore these themes in fiction. This shift has been exhilarating and liberating and provides me the opportunity to present the tragic understanding of life and politics to a larger audience.
Mansfield is another pioneering, modernist
writer, whose psychologically driven characters have sudden epiphanies.
Insights of this kind are extremely difficult to make credible in stories yet
she invariably succeeds. Understanding how she pulls this off enriched my
understanding of how plots work and how personalities are depicted. I might
also add that I am married to a New Zealand and some time in that country, so
nice to have a local, so to speak, author.
This was Katherine Mansfield's last collection of short stories to be published during her lifetime. They are The Garden Party, A Dill Pickle, Her First Ball, The Doll's House, The Daughters of the Late Colonel and A Cup of Tea. The stories vary in length and tone, yet all are sensitive revelations of human behaviour that reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.
It’s kind of depressing that I’m so fascinated with these big “God and death and war” themes that are always banging around in my head. I think it’s because I like the gravity of even the smallest decisions in heightened crisis situations. It makes things so prominent and visceral. This gravity also makes the beauty in these moments of crisis more beautiful and love that much stronger. Ultimately, I’ve spent the last thirteen years trying to square with my time overseas and chase some version of that heightened meaning in civilian life. The contrast between being a school teacher and soldier really makes all of that clear.
Orwell captures the dilemma of empire so well that every time I read it, my nerves get raw. It’s a trap. Everyone is dehumanized, the oppressors and the oppressed. The sneering townspeople, the trips on the football pitch, the clear-sighted way the crowd intuits the relationship between themselves and the young policeman all ring true. The villagers can control him because they understand the expectations he has as an official of the crown. They use his strength against him to get what they want. He doesn’t want to kill the elephant, but it’s expected of him, so he gruesomely shoots into the elephant's mouth till, like the British empire, it finally dies. The villagers pillage the carcass for meat. For Orwell, empire itself is brutal suicide.
'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as 'My Country Right or Left', 'How the Poor Die' and 'Such, Such were the Joys', his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys' weeklies and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative and hugely entertaining, all show Orwell's unique ability to get to…
I love a good short story that can convey character, emotion, and complexity. While a novel allows the writer (and the reader) to delve into the chaotic complexity of a single set of characters, a good short story collection can explore a range of humanity and a diversity of moods or feelings. This was my motivation in writing my book. I believe a good short story collection on a well-grounded theme (such as the contributions to this list by Doerr, Kundera, and Munro) can often reveal more about human nature than an excellent novel.
This book is a great short story collection focused on a theme, as I try to do in my book. For Doerr, it’s memory and impermanence–what will be left of us, of all that we’ve experienced, all that we’ve struggled to achieve, all that we’ve loved after the passage of time?
Through six exceptionally creative, unforgettable stories (pun intended), Doerr explores the melancholy ephemerality of human existence. I love how the settings, from Cape Town, South Africa, to a soon-to-be submerged Chinese village, are integral, tangible parts of his stories. This is a truly wonderful book!
Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new collection of stories is about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In 'The River Nemunas', a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. 'Village 113' is about the building of the Three…
