Favorite Short Stories

Everyone talks about the great American novel and there are lists upon lists of the best novels ever written. For the longest time after Gutenberg changed the world, novels were a rarity.  Back then, shorter stories and poems dominated, if only because of the cost, not to mention the limits on literacy.  I enjoy novels as much as the next person, I suppose, but there are some frightfully good short stories that have garnered my respect and that deserve mention.

Here, then, is my list of my favorite short stories:

To Build a Fire:  I've since come to realize that as a person, Jack London left a lot to be desired.  But this short story is one of my favorite.  The suspense builds throughout and one can almost feel the cold and the desperation as death nears with each passing hour.

The Most Dangerous Game:  Richard Connell wrote four novels, none of which I've ever read, but this story still resonates with me. The concept of man hunting man for sport is at once vile and intriguing.

The Lottery:  As chilling a story as The Most Dangerous Game, one can easily see this as an episode of The Twilight Zone.  That it was written by a woman makes it even scarier.

La muerte y la brújula:  A story by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, it translates to Death and the Compass.  A detective follows clues leading to a potential murder victim only to discover that he's been led to his death by his murderer.

El milagro secreto:  Another Borges work, The Secret Miracle involves a Czech denounced in pre-war Prague who's then imprisoned in a jail by the SS.  The protagonist is a composer with Jewish blood in his background, hence the reason for his arrest.  He bargains for time to finish his great symphonic work, which he's granted as the physical world stops to allow him to compose.  The minute he's finished with his work, he's shot dead.

Silvina y Montt:  The names of the two protagonists, this is a tragic May-December story that isn't really a romance so much as it is a horror story.  Montt is friends with Silvina's parents, who's some twenty-two years his junior.  She views him as almost an uncle until the time he has to go away for business reasons. Years later he returns to find a ravishing young woman of roughly eighteen years of age and is immediately smitten.  Given the mores of the times and his close friendship with her parents, combined with the awkward age difference, Montt leaves suddenly and goes to a seedy neighborhood, gets drunk and wakes up the next morning in bed with a woman who's now his wife.  Shortly after he awakens, a note is slipped underneath the door from Silvina, telling him that she loves him and no matter the backlash, is coming to be with him as his wife.

A la deriva:  Like Silvina y Montt, another excellent work by Horacio Quiroga.  Quiroga, a devotee of Edgar Allan Poe, wrote gothic horror stories set in the jungle.  Here, a man is bitten by a venomous snake in the depths of the jungle.  The only doctor who can cure him is miles away, accessible only by river.  The bitten man gets on a raft and drifts down the river, hopefully towards salvation.

There are more, but I can't remember the names of all of them.  One of Cervantes' novelas ejemplares tells the story of Lela Marien.  Hemingway wrote a short story about a bear hunt he experienced as a youth, I think, that I liked.  There's another one by Quiroga whose title escapes me that involves a man cutting sugar cane who trips over his horse's reins and falls on his machete, mortally wounding himself.  But there are some very good short stories that I read as a youth that I recall as well as the better novels I read.  To conflate two common sayings from another area completely, sometimes size doesn't matter that much, and good things do come in smaller packages.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles