A brief survey of the short story
Chris Power looks at masters of the short story through the ages
Stuart Dybek: bungee jumping through the trapdoors of time
Unaccountably little-known outside the US, his stories take the reader from a carefully observed midwest into a past that is very much alive
'Enough heroin to kill the whole street': does Anna Kavan's life overshadow her fiction?
The details of Anna Kavan’s life loom large over her work, says Chris Power, but the brilliant light of her short fiction illuminates psychological trauma and mortality
Rebel, radical, relic? Nadine Gordimer is out of fashion – we must keep reading her
Returning to his survey of the best short story writers of all time, Chris Power looks at Gordimer’s long career documenting South African apartheid
James Salter's unreliable genius
Some of his short stories have conspicuous faults – not least in their portrayal of women – but the best show a unique, sad beauty
George Saunders's funny, sad stories from a divided nation
With a surrealism that owes a lot to the real world of ordinary Americans, his stories offer sharp, moral parables of contemporary life in the US
Samuel Beckett, the maestro of failure
Better known for his plays, Beckett felt his prose fiction was his central work, and his fearlessly bleak short stories are among the 20th century’s greatest
A brief survey of the short story: Lucia Berlin
Sketching lives very similar to her own, Berlin’s stories of hardscrabble lives resemble Raymond Carver’s – while also invoking some of Proust’s spirit
A brief survey of the short story: Elizabeth Taylor
Her work may be set in a world of dated manners, but its hard insights into social vanity and anxiety speak all too clearly to our own
A brief survey of the short story: Silvina Ocampo
While her collaborator and fellow Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges created fantastical worlds, Ocampo infected the recognisable with strangeness and cruelty
A brief survey of the short story: David Foster Wallace
For all its elaborate formal tricks, Wallace’s work is marked by a deep desire for authentic connection, to his subjects and to his readers
A brief survey of the short story: Varlam Shalamov
Shalamov’s great work on the Soviet gulag, Kolyma Tales, acquires philosophical dimensions when seen as an epic cycle
A brief survey of the short story: John Updike
The longevity and prodigal output of this ‘conspicuously autobiographical writer’ give his complete works the shape of an entire life
A brief survey of the short story: Robert Aickman
Written with real psychological depth, these enigmatic tales rise far beyond straightforward ghost stories, writes Chris Power
A brief survey of the short story: Nikolai Leskov
Chris Power: Perennially falling into and out of fashion, he is a stunningly versatile writer and a very un-Russian Russian great
A brief survey of the short story: Barry Hannah
Chris Power: A writer who captured the violence, bigotry and wild humour of the American deep south in line after unpredictable line
A brief survey of the short story: Italo Calvino
Chris Power: A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction
A brief survey of the short story: John McGahern
Chris Power: Returning over and over again to the same territory, these bleak but beautiful stories build into a complete fictional world
A brief survey of the short story: Isak Dinesen
A Dane who wrote almost exclusively in English, Isak Dinesen used lurid subjects, including incest, murder and witchcraft, to explore philosophy, morality and questions of identity, writes Chris Power
A brief survey of the short story: Jean Rhys
Filled with doomed women in loveless relationships, Jean Rhys's prose would be very hard to read if it weren't so extraordinary, writes Chris Power
A brief survey of the short story, part 56: Clarice Lispector
This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures, writes Chris Power
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