40 short stories I've just read

[originally an email]

It took me about 7 or 8 days. Originally I was going to read 100. All were found and read on my tablet. 20 or so from a collection I downloaded from Amazon for $1.99. I'm feeling bad I'm not going to read 100, but you sort of run out of quality after 40 to where I'd have to start buying books to get at specific stories, and this wasn't originally about reading every great short story that exists (that would be a big endeavor), but re-igniting my attention span muscles. I noticed early on that impressive novelists tended to write the most impressive short stories. A lot of short stories are overrated. Like they are merely gimicky concepts. Like the Lottery by Shirley Jackson. But then you read Araby by James Joyce, and you say, yes, that is describing something real and meaningful about the world or human nature. The epiphany stories tend to be the deepest. There are authors who you could read all their short works, and it wouldn't be a waste of time. Jorge Luis Borges is one. Joyce is one. John Cheever has many. D. H. Lawrence probably has many. Nathaniel Hawthorne. All of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Jack London has many. Katherine Mansfield. Kafka, Faulkner, and Stephen Crane. Charles Dickens (his first work, the Pickwick Papers has short stories, and many have said that one book is the truly pure Charles Dickens). Steinbeck. The great Russians Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. (If those symbols don't render they are gold stars. I starred 12 of the 40...

01. Signs and Symbols - Vladimir Nabokov🌟
02. The Interlopers - Saki
03. The Enchanted Bluff - Willa Cather
04. The Horse Dealer's Daughter - D. H. Lawrence
05. Cathedral - Raymond Carver
06. The Strength of God - Sherwood Anderson🌟
07. Araby - James Joyce🌟
08. The Ambitious Guest - Nathaniel Hawthorne
09. The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield
10. The Lightning-Rod Man - Herman Melville
11. The Nightingale and the Rose - Oscar Wilde
12. To Build a Fire - Jack London🌟
13. Eveline - James Joyce
14. Two Short Parables - Franz Kafka
15. The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad
16. That Evening Sun Go Down - William Faulkner
17. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. A Dark-Brown Dog - Stephen Crane
19. Gusev - Anton Chekhov
20. The Landlady - Roald Dahl
21. All at One Point - Italo Calvino
22. The Girls in Their Summer Dresses - Irwin Shaw
23. The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton - Charles Dickens🌟
24. The Storm - Kate Chopin
25. Malachi's Cove - Anthony Trollope
26. The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
27. Young Goodman Brown - Nathaniel Hawthorne🌟
28. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? - Joyce Carol Oates
29. The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges🌟
30. The Five-Forty-Eight - John Cheever🌟
31. The Killers - Ernest Hemingway
32. Miriam - Truman Capote
33. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway
34. The Chrysanthemums - John Steinbeck🌟
35. A Passion in the Desert - Honoré de Balzac
36. The Open Boat - Stephen Crane🌟
37. The Nose - Nikolai Gogol🌟
38. The Dilettante - Edith Wharton
39. The White Heron - Sarah Orne Jewett
40. The Dead - James Joyce🌟