Favorite Short Story

Probably not a very well known one here but mine at the moment has to be Sylvia Plath's 'Johny Panic and the Bible of Dreams' It's has such angsty pathos and is deeply imaginative, original and almost believable! I love it. Leon.

Mine is one called The Virus by Neil Gaiman. It's incredibly short (about 2 or 3 pages) but amazingly well constructed - if you're into the sci-fi/fantasy genre, check it out

a small good thing by raymond carver ...

I think mine would have to be Bay City Blues by Raymond Chandler, one of his well crafted short stories that were later cannibalised to create his Philip Marlowe novels. Angela

I recently finished a book of shorter-to-medium length stories by Alasdair Gray; "Unlikely Stories, Mostly". I found it a fantastic read. His tone tends to the ironical and cycnical, but with a very evident underlying wit and commentary on the wider social scale. I'd recommend his work to anyone who doesn't mind stepping into the shadows fopr a while.

Well as they are short stories perhaps I may be allowed more than one Elizabeth Bowen .... The Disinherited Elizabeth Taylor .... The Blush A.L. Kennedy ... on Having More Sense A.S. Byatt ... The July Ghost and one story which might be almost a novella ... David Leavitt ... Saturn Street

Try Roald Dahl... especially his 'Uncle Oswald' series (such as 'The Visitor')... oldies, but goodies.

DOG HEAVEN BY Stephanie Vaughn

DOG HEAVEN BY Stephanie Vaughn

DOG HEAVEN BY Stephanie Vaughn

No. 4) DOG HEAVEN BY Stephanie Vaughn No. 3) WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN by Joyce Carol Oates No. 2) A ROMANTIC WEEKEND by Mary Gaitskill No. 1) THE DEAD by James Joyce and my very, very, very best favourite of all, that needs no numbers: THE WHITE ROOSTER by William Goyen Please bear with me while I quote from Goyen's magnificent prose: "He strode upon the watered grass all dripping with the rain, a tinkling sound all about him, the rain twinkling upon his feathers, folorn and tortured. Yet even now there was a blaze of courage about him. He was meagre and bedraggled. But he had a splendour in him. For now his glory came by being alone and lustreless in a beggar's world, and there is a time for every species to know lacklustre and loneliness where there was brightness and a flocking together, since there is a change in the way creatures must go to find their ultimate station, whether they fall old and lose blitheness, ragged and lose elegance, lonely and lose love; and since there is a shifting in the levels of understanding. But there is something in each level for all creatures, pain or wisdom or despair, and never nothing. The white rooster was coming upon the grass." Oh, yes, and almost any story by T. Corragasen Boyle.