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Your Favorite Short Stories

Ophiucha

Auror
Having the beliefs set forth in the work itself doesn't necessarily bother me.

I find his to be a bit too heavy-handed to get past. I read a lot of political SFF, from all sides of the political spectrum (one of my favourite authors is an anarchist, which I'm not), but they don't tend to make the villains such blatant and cartoonish strawmen like in Empire. And let's not get into the atrocity that is Hamlet's Father... even his most dedicated supporters couldn't defend that one. I definitely avoid buying his work because of his political actions in real life, but let it be said that his recent dip into political activism has also had a dreadful effect on his writing. Which is a shame, because despite how little I like his politics, Ender's Game is still a pretty good book and it's a shame he's not writing things of that calibre any more.

On the interest of staying on topic, some other short stories:

The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I love everything by Hawthorne, be it science fiction or novels about red alphabetic symbols, but this one is probably my favourite. I love Georgina and I like how Hawthorne presented the main character's desire for perfection. I feel like he was speaking from a personal place with a few of those lines, as I feel the same way as the main character sometimes about my writing.

The Wife's Story by Ursula K. LeGuin. I can't describe it too much without giving away the ending, but it's about a wife who begins to suspect that something is amiss with her husband. Short and sweet, but the twist works well with how short the story is. Any longer and you'd catch on, so I think it really illustrates how the shorter medium can be used for a good fantasy story.
 
Ah yes, "The Wife's Story"--the quintessential story of the "Jar of Tang" style. I had to read it and respond to it for a test in high school, answering various questions to demonstrate that I'd understood the twist. At the time, I considered it the perfect test of reading comprehension--at what point do you sit up and go "Bwuh?", and can you piece it together from there?
 

Ophiucha

Auror
I think The Wife's Story works almost entirely because it doesn't drag it out. I don't have it with me, but it couldn't be more than a couple pages long. Enough time to take the bait and get suspicious, but the switch comes like a paragraph after the suspicion. It's not quite enough time to over-analyse it, unless you stop and think, so the ending still hits hard enough for a decent 'gotcha!'. Which is really all I ask for these days; 15 years of English class and you can see a twist from the cover and the title.
 

Lancelot

Scribe
They don't have to be fantasy (any other genre is fine) although that would be my preference.

Any short stories that really blew you away?

Just fiction, not fantasy but by a fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin. She wrote a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

I can't read that story without crying and simultaneously becoming enraged with the characters. It is a very powerful story. It is probably more-so if you have a child or more as I do.

Read it and let me know. It is available free, I am sure.
 
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