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Short story reccommendations

The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges

He was so crazy for this one. Like a lot of Borges' most famous stories, this one plays with the idea of a narrative within a narrative that complicates itself. There's a straightforward 20th-century international spy plot, but it's bent around the paranoia of the narrator and a series of existential diversions.

I Can See Right Through You - Kelly Link

The main characters in this story are movie stars in the latter arc of their careers, haunted by their experiences as young people in Hollywood and by actual supernatural forces. It bounces around in time, but the bulk of the action is set at a supposedly haunted nudist camp where the two exes reconnect.

Insekt or large verminous thing - Kate Zambreno

A painfully real stream-of-consciousness story about a professor trying to teach a lesson about Kafka's The Metamorphosis on Zoom while she meditates on the alienation and capitalist manipulation she experiences in her own life.

The House of Asterion - Jorge Luis Borges

This wasn't the first Borges story I read, but it was my first favorite. It's so short, but it's a real showcase of Borges' ability to play little literary games before slapping you with the empathetic core of the story. To sum it up, it's a brief monologue from the perspective of the Cretian Minotaur.

Another Manhattan - Donald Antrim

This story revolves around two couples, four people, who are mutually cheating on each other, and it takes place over a few hours on a winter evening in New York. It's wonderfully structured, and the slide from "keeping up appearances" to "crisis" feels inevitable from the start. While there's a lot of fun, stylistic flourishes, the beating heart of the story is the tension inherent in living with a debilitating mental health condition -- struggling to find your own life and agency -- and loving someone with a debilitating mental health condition while handling your own shit.

Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want - Danielle Evans

A commercially and critically successful artist starts apologizing to all the women he's wronged -- his ex-wives, his daughter, his employees, his colleagues, his flings. But not all of them want apologies. As the apologies get more and more extravagant and public, the women grapple with how they should feel about it.

Tardy Man - Thomas Pierce

This story is so good I almost regret putting anything else on this list. In this near-future hellscape, "tardy man" is a person who is hired to use a flame-retardant suit to respond to natural disasters (namely, forest fires) by saving people's property. As long as they pay for your services.

Mermaids at the End of the Universe - Kendra Fortmeyer

This story has been my gold standard for mermaid-related fiction for almost a decade. Mermaids are the most beautiful creatures on earth, and there are a finite number of them. They are immortal, but they can give themselves over to death whenever they choose. Bahari is the last one. She experiences the infinite.

Amendments to the Pub Crawl - Jason Roeder

No one else thinks this story is as funny as I do, but this is my list. The whole thing can be summed up by the title and the line "I'm going to have to first head home and GIVE MY PARAKEET HIS EAR MEDICATION."

The Death of a Government Clerk - Anton Chekhov

A short meditation on social propriety and being annoying. Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov sneezes at the opera, and then he just can't stop making it worse.

Wikihistory - Desmond Warzel

A story told through forum posts on a website for time travelers. SilverFox316 has to repeatedly fix other users' attempts to go back in time and kill Hitler, which would mean time travel would never be invented.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin

If I lived in Omelas I would have a really annoying podcast about how much it sucks to live in this beautiful city whose beauty is predicated on suffering and all my friends would pretend to listen to it and lie to me that it's not annoying, actually. I probably would not walk away from Omelas, unfortunately. I know who I am.

Yeah I’ve Been Feeling Pretty Good Lately Except For - Danny Lavery

It's just, like, you know?

The Game of Smash and Recovery - Kelly Link

The other Kelly Link story I included on this list is light years away from this one, literally. It's a sci-fi retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel, but the twisty emotional depths are heart-dropping. Not every story can be so perfectly summed up in the first two sentences.

A Cross-Section of Reactions to Judy Garland Pausing Her Carnegie Hall Show to Chug a Glass of Water, 1961 - John Waddy Bullion

More of a moment or an experiment than a story. It couldn't be about anyone other than Judy.

Live Today Always - Jade Jones

A lot of these stories are about alienation under capitalism, huh? In this one, a black copywriter at a PR company is abandoned by her team to damage control after their white influencer client was caught on video singing a song with the n-word in it. Today also happens to be a turning point in her relationship with her girlfriend, which has been on rocky ground because of her work schedule and the pressures of cohabiting during a pandemic. Each mundane challenge blends together and deepens the other. And don't worry -- the dog is okay.

Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue - Charlie Jane Anders

Another near-future dystopia, one that goes hand-in-hand with the dehumanizing world of "Tardy Man." In this story, death won't stop a twisted marriage of capital and government surveillance from using your body against your will. One way it does that is by taking the minds of maladjusted individuals -- trans people -- and resurrecting them inside donated corpses in such a way that they'll never complain about what was done with them. That's what's happening to Rachel; one of her childhood friends works at the company, and Rachel's arrival forces him to face what he's doing to her and what he's done in the past.

The Mezzotint - M.R. James

Like a lot of the stories in this collection, it's about some daffy British people fussing over a preternatural antique. This story is genuinely dread-inducing, and the art piece at the center of it all is one of the coolest haunted/cursed objects in old-school weird fiction. A really solid horror short with some fun observational humor of bygone English culture.

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