Who are your favourite short story writers? Can we have a thread about some less popular writers of short fiction (ie not Hemmingway, Chekhov, Carver, Salinger, Gogol)
My favourites are Kjell Askildsen and Breece D'J Pancake (and Katherine Mansfield, but she's quite popular I think). Anyone else ever read these writers? Have some unheard of favourites?
I've read Breece DJ Pancake and enjoyed his stories Trilobytes, The Hollow and A Room Forever.
Pinckney Bennedict has a collection called Town Smokes. He's another West Virginia boy that made it to a fancy school and had some famous writer teachers who helped him along (like Pancake)
James Alan McPherson (one of Pancake's teachers) had a collection of short stories called Hue and Cry that I really liked.
Scott Wolven wrote a collection of short stories called Controlled Burn mostly about New England meth hicks and Idaho white supremacist militia types. He's a bit more noirish than Pancake and doesn't have Pancake's lyricism but he does tell some interesting stories.
Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior was pretty good and sexy and depressing.
Harold Brodkey's first collection of stories First Love and Other Sorrows was pretty awesome.
His later stories were a mix of interesting and "Jesus fuck you are self-absorbed you narcissistic asshole".
This trap queen
Krzhizhanovsky
>>7640489
Start with "A good man is hard to find" and dig from there. I read all of her stories in chronological order from a compilation which was 700 pages or so. You can do that too, her work ain't vast and most of her stories are at least enjoyable.
I can't think of many off the top of my head but I can recommend Richard Brautigan and David Sedaris. Angela Carter may be too well known to fit this thread.
Irwin Shaw was pretty famous in his day but his novels were pretty pleb-tier (Rich Man, Poor Man was his most famous. Entertaining junk.) His short stories were much more literary. The Girls in Their Summer Dresses is one of my favorite short stories.
Why, Walser, of course.
Borges is really good. Really obscure too; few have heard of him since he isn't an American author. So is Alice Munro.
>>7641072
>few have heard of him
>>7641072
Just weird b8
How about Harlan Ellison? Dystopian short stories from him are very good.
>>7640446
Clarice Lispector's stories range from ok to fantastic. Family Ties is a pretty solid collection. My favorite was Preciousness, for admittedly egotistical reasons.
Ted Chiang is really good too. I don't think he's "less popular" but I don't see him mentioned much around here.
Jakov Lind...I don't exactly like him, but he has interesting stories. They make me feel the same way I do looking at a Francis Bacon painting: vaguely uneasy and kind of instinctively inclined to get away from it.
>>7640523
This guy's great too.
>>7640635
I like Sedaris, but after you've read 1 collection they're all pretty interchangeable imo. Very funny though, and I like the subtle(ish) social commentaries.
>>7641126
>genre fiction
ok pleb
