Last month, I shared a first attempt at a list toward the “25 Best Short Stories of the Century (so far).”
It was super fun. I asked the Short Story, Long contributors if they wanted to put together some of their own lists, and those turned out great!
With both lists, I heard from a number of you who really liked and appreciated the idea although, like many of my ideas, my primary estimation of their success has been in what they’ve meant for me — I’ve already discovered a few new faves from others’ lists, I’ve loved seeing some conversation around people’s favorites, and I think just spending the time reflecting and thinking about my own list was a worthwhile exercise, in remembering and revisiting some favorite stories that have meant to much to me, and also in seeing some similarities and echoes across my list and thinking about what makes me especially connect with a story.
As noted on the “About” page, I started Short Story, Long really wanting to publish and celebrate and champion short stories. This “25 for 25” project has already been such a fun way to do that, while taking a little break from publishing new stories.
Today, we’ve got a handful more lists from contributors!
And then in the coming weeks, we’ll have some interviews with authors of some of these favorite stories; probably some more lists; maybe an essay or three about short stories, in general and especially across the last 25 years; and possibly some other miscellany!
And then, in July, back to publishing new fiction every other week!
Brittney Uecker (“Dead Deer”)
10 Favorite Stories of the 2000's (in no particular order):
“Look At Your Game Girl” by Kristen Roupenian
Honesty is Bragging When You’re Me: A Portrait of a Bitcoin Millionaire by Tess Fahlgren
“Unauthorized Bread” by Cory Doctorow (technically a novella, but oh well)
Michael Don (“The Visitor”)
Ten of my fave 21st century stories off the top of my head in no particular order:
“Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” Danielle Evans
“Mon Plaisir,” Miranda July
“Rhinebeck,” Andrew Porter
“A Private Experience,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Someone Else Besides You,” Viet Thanh Nguyen
Matt Leibel (“Martha”)
A list of 20 (I’m pretty sure I could come up with an alternate list of 20 more I like just as much, but this was kind of my brainstorm, kind of a mood board of the sort of stories I like):
“Candy” by Naja Marie Aidt
“Superstar” by Susan Steinberg
“Typhoon” by Yukiko Motoya
“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt
“What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” by Lesley Nneka Arimah
“Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” by Bennett Sims
“21 Extremely Bad Breakups” by Mark Leidner
“Belle Lettres” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Jeff Chon (“Nothing Personal”)
25 for 25: Favorite Short Stories of the 21st Century (in no particular order)
“The Finkelstein 5” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Refresh Refresh” by Benjamin Percy
“The Brothers” by Lysley Tenorio
“Pharmacy” by Elizabeth Strout
“Why Antichrist” byChris Adrian
“The Woodcarver’s Daughter” by Paul Yoon
“An Independent Organ” by Haruki Murakami
“The Inventor 1972” by Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Mr. Wu” by Otessa Moshfegh
“On the Way to the Killing Spree, the Shooter Stops for Pizza” by Tom McAllister
“Nate’s Pain Is Now” by Sam Lipsyte
“St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell
Michael McClelland (“Not Another Time L∞p!”)
The 5 Best Stories of the 21st Century
With poetry, we so often share the poems that lead to other poems. But with fiction, sometimes we act like everything is supposed to be absolutely original and never before attempted. Which is obviously rubbish. Here are 5 of the greatest pieces of short fiction from the last 25 years, and I feel this way about them because they were so influential upon my own work. So I've shared the stories and, in some cases, the stories I ended up writing in response to them.
"Hungerford Bridge" by Elizabeth Hand (2009) - Conjunctions, reprinted in Lightspeed
This story, which is so queer and weird and wonderful, reminded me so much of the time I spent living in London. I lived right by the Tower Bridge and I was obsessed with London's major bridges, including the lesser known Hungerford Bridge. Hand's excellent story about two old friends who meet for a sort of mysterious passing of the baton, inspired me to write my own story about queer friendship. The question at the core of this story for me was — if a dear friend were to ask you to believe the absolutely impossible, would you believe them? Could you? And, would you be more likely to believe them if they were hot?
My story:“Float” by Reginald McKnight (2016) - Georgia Review
Reginald McKnight is one of the finest short story writers of all time. What I love about his stories is how the voice often operates in response to wonder. In “Float” a kid walks into his room and finds one of his Air Jordans floating five feet above the ground. I used this story to help me craft the voice for my story “Not Another Time L∞p!” for Short Story, Long, which is about an otherwise normal teenager who gets trapped in a time loop.
My story:https://ashortstorylong.substack.com/p/not-another-time-lp-by-mike-mcclelland
“Blue Million Miles” by Alex Higley (2020) - Joyland
This story is absolutely brilliant, and I used Alex's method of introducing his main character here — a concise but overflowing and quirky list — as a template for introducing my characters in my novel, The Pioneers, which is on submission right now.
“Love & Hydrogen” by Jim Shepard (2001) - Harper’s (not free online but you can find it through the library as it was reprinted in several "Best of" anthologies)
Someone has to make this story into a movie. It's about two male engineers who fall in love aboard the Hindenburg. What I adore about this story is how it just tells it how it is. With love stories, especially, writers often put themselves through the ringer trying to show characters falling in love. Shepard, in the just the sixth paragraph of this story, tells us, “Meinert and Gnüss are in love,” and then goes from there. Shepard obviously wanted to share nerdy details about the Hindenburg, and he is able to indulge himself and readers with those details because he creates a very sturdy and forthright love story to pin those details on, much like James Cameron did with Titanic. I used this story as a framework for writing for my story “The Pioneer,” which Poet Laureate Rita Dove then chose as the winner of a contest, so I think of it as a lucky charm.
My story:https://writersfestival.agnesscott.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/50th-Writers-Festival-Mag.pdf
“Phantoms” by Stephen Millhauser (2010) (not free online but you can find it through the library as it was reprinted in several "Best of" anthologies)
This gets my vote as the best story of the 21st century, perhaps alongside Millhauser's own “A Change in Fashion” (which was in Harper's in 2006). The form here is just incredible, a series of reports and statements about ghost-like apparitions that have appeared in a small town over a number of years. It's just exceptional and completely different from how we are usually taught to structure short stories. I've actually used this story as my map towards writing one of my favorites of my own stories, which I'll share below. Just as you’d use Pride & Prejudice as the framework for a love story, I use this story as a guide for spooky, place-based storytelling. What’s so cool is that, looking now, my story really hardly has anything in common with Millhauser’s, but that structure was so key in order for me to be able to go ‘wild’ with my ideas.
My story:
Aaron Burch (Editor, Short Story, Long)
I so liked Mike’s idea of thinking about stories as how they’ve inspired and influenced your own work, and it made me want to revisit my own list, and so…
5 Stories from the 21st Century that are Favorites Because They are Great and also Because I was Specifically Inspired by Them:
“Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover (2011)
This story is up there for me with Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” as, first and foremost, a perfect short story. And then, adding to that, doing something new with narrative that I at least hadn’t before read anything quite like. The way he collapses time, using each sentence to speed forward so fast it is practically time traveling. I revisit it often, and while never borrowing or stealing anything from it quite exactly, there’s an energy to it that I’m often chasing and trying to capture at least a fraction of. I think I most did so in my short short, “The Plan.”
My story:
“The Plan” (Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 2017)“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” by Kevin Wilson (2005)
I love… pretty much everything Kevin has written. The stories in his first collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, were especially formative, and have stuck with me because they’re so fun and so great, and also because they hit me pretty much exactly when I needed them, as I was beginning to find my voice as a writer. This story starts with a couple of lines that immediately undercut the title itself. “First of all, we were never tunneling to the center of the earth. I mean, we’re not stupid.” I’d never really read a story do that before and, what can I say, I fell in love. I pretty much stole (er, borrowed) it for my current novel manuscript, The Last Lock-In. “You don’t yet know this will be your last lock-in. Your last night of youth group.”
My story:
The Last Lock-In (currently querying)“Notes for a Story of a Man who Will Not Die Alone” by Dave Eggers (2005)
This is maybe obvious, but this story is exactly what the title promises: more notes for a story than story itself. The magic trick though, is that those do actually become the story. I’ve read some responses, and heard my students say versions of, dismiss the story as “too clever,” and I get that, it kinda is… but it works for me. Every time I revisit it, I think the magic will have worn off, but every time, I get swept up in it anew. Like Coover’s “Going For a Beer,” and those first couple of sentences in Kevin Wilson’s “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” and elements of Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” it did something I’d never seen or read before, and maybe it was playing with and riffing on something that came before it that I just wasn’t familiar with, but it opened up some possibilities for me, and I think that is among the best compliments I can give a piece of art.
“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le (2006)
I read this story in 2006, when it was published in Zoetrope — I had been writing and editing Hobart for 4 or 5 years at that point, but was still another two years away from starting my MFA, and I’m sure I’d read some metafiction, but probably not much, and we were years away from the word “autofiction” (I think? Am pretty sure? I’m not actually going to dig around and look into this though, I don’t actually care). I had very little interest in reading fiction about a writer and had something of a negative opinion about MFA programs — in general, and Iowa, specifically — but this short story about a protagonist, Nam Le, trying to write a story for workshop, totally swept me up in it. I come back to this phrase often, but it really felt like a magic trick. I revisited the story, and also Egger’s “Notes…” when I was trying to write a story for my own MFA workshop and I’d turned in a few shorter pieces and set myself the challenge of writing the longest thing I’d turned in yet, and so I wrote it in pieces, with one piece being an extended “Notes” section, that got incredibly meta and self-referential, including citing both the Eggers and Le stories as inspiration.
My story:
“Any Number of Moments” (Bridge Eight, 2018)
“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson (2014)
In a way, this story was the impetus for this whole “25 for 25” project. I was recently asked on a podcast what my favorite story of all time was, and that is an impossible question to answer, and this was the one that jumped to mind. I don’t think it is right answer… but it isn’t wrong either. There’s a hundred different pieces and elements of it that have already influenced me. One is that it includes one of my favorite sentences of all time: “This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life—the distance I’ve travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms—that I almost crashed the car.” I liked that sentence so much, I basically literalized it in one of my own, in a scene where the narrator starts thinking about burying his dogs while driving and then…
I got to thinking about all that and started crying anew, tears coming down my face so I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then Tony yelled from the backseat, and I slammed on the brakes, and Davey, sitting shotgun, flew headfirst into the dashboard.
My story:
“Around the World” (Rejection Letters, 2020)
I said this before, but I love turning this into a bigger discussion. I myself have already read a handful of stories I hadn’t before, from both contributor lists and comments! Keep ‘em coming!
Thanks!
-Aaron
"Good Old Neon", that is such a great fucking story.
What a collection! Thank you for putting this together. Looking forward to diving in.