TWELVE GREAT SHORT STORY WRITERS YOU SHOULD READ
- Cully Perlman
- 6 days ago
- 15 min read
NovelMasterClass is, obviously, about the craft of writing novels. But before most writers dive into the deep end of the pool, they’ve likely tried their hand at shorter works like poetry, flash fiction, and short stories. Not that novels are superior; I’m not saying that at all. Only that shorter fiction is less intimidating for the beginning writer (and for a lot of us, let’s say, not so “newish” writers).
Now, I want to make something clear. The term “great,” when it comes to fiction is subjective. My kids love fantasy (as do, apparently, more people on earth than all the stars in the sky). Me? Not so much. I don’t have anything against fantasy fiction, it’s just not for me. I’m 99% realism, 1% magical realism, with a sprinkling, a taste, a dash, a dusting, a tinge of other fiction, depending how well it’s written. The writers I list are my personal preference. I don’t like all their short stories. I love chocolate and red wine but put lavender in the chocolate or a glass of some crappy shiraz beside the charcuterie board on the countertop in front of me, and I’m going to pass. I don’t care how much you paid for any of it. Catch my drift? I’m assuming you’re a bit like me when it comes to what you like—wine, vanilla macchiato cherry-infused cow dung coffee beans, music, and books. How can you not be?
For example, George Saunders, one of today’s (if not one of the last nearly two decades) literary superstar (he’s been on late night talk shows—Colbert, on Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, and other TV and radio programming—won countless literary prizes, yada yada), wrote a collection of stories called Tenth of December. Like thousands of other readers and writers, the book has changed the way I think about writing. There’s just something magical about that book. It’s like when you watch a Tim Burton movie for the first time (or, frankly, any time) and compare it to anything else. There’s a story there. There are characters doing things in Saunders’s book. Each story is somewhere between a few pages and sixty pages. And the stories are all just so different than anything else out there. On the other hand, I’ve been unable to finish reading Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline or Pastoralia, which clocks in at a mere 188 pages. His novel, Lincoln in the Bardo? I had to push myself through it. It was rough, to say the least. This isn’t a criticism of Saunders’s work; these books are just not my cup of tea. I loved Tenth, I couldn’t get through the others. His new novel, Vigil, has taken over all the headlines wherever literature is discussed. Same with William Trevor. Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault does nothing for me. I read it and re-read it, and nada. Bupkis. It’s one of those books that people love and that makes me question if I’m just not smart enough to see what they see, to appreciate whatever it is he’s doing in that book. Felicia’s Journey? I couldn’t put that damn book down. Sure, it’s a novel, but pick up his Collected Stories and jump in. Tell me you don’t fall in love with the writing. With the way he explores the ordinary lives of lonely, eccentric people. With the je ne sais quoi world you get pulled into through his words. It’s magical, what he does. Claire Keegan does the same in her short novels, especially Small Things Like These. She’s a superstar, and when one of her books come out, I have no issue paying full price for it, and I’m cheap!
If you’re a reader of short stories, or just a reader in general, I’m guessing you know most, if not all, of the below writers. Maybe you don’t know who David Vann is; I’d never heard his name until about fifteen years ago. I even fanboy’d and had a brief email communication with him just to tell him how incredible I thought his writing was. Now I can’t stop thinking about his short stories, or his novels, their themes, the powerful insights and aphorisms and universality in how his character act and feel and think. He is that good. I highly recommend you pick up his books.
Anyway, let’s get to it. Like I said, some of the stories by these writers may be your chocolate with lavender in it. Some of them may be your dung coffee. But I guarantee you, you pick up one of their books or even just google some of their stories, you’ll become a fan. Read them for pleasure. Read them as a writer. Borrow, don’t steal. Steal, don’t borrow, when writing your own fiction. If you can come anywhere near any of the impact of their words, of the worlds they create out of the ether, of the stories they give, like gifts, to the world and to your enjoyment of literature in general, you’ve done well. When writing your own short stories and novels, you may change your mind on which you’re writing, if your idea is a short story or a novel. But that’ll come with the writing.
There’s just something magical about that book. It’s like when you watch a Tim Burton movie for the first time (or, frankly, any time) and compare it to anything else.
Anyway, without further ado, here are twelve great short story writers you should read to improve your own writing:
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV
Born: January 29, 1860, Taganrog, Russia
Died: July 15, 1904
Russian playwright and short story writer. As an author of over five hundred short stories, Chekhov depicts the psychological and unsaid meanings in the realistic depictions of his characters. Chekhov is considered a father of Modernism, and his stories include a lot of dialogue, which speeds up the pace. If you like running through a story, he may just be for you.
His most famous story is probably “The Lady with the Dog,”* which tells the story of “an affair between two unhappily married people, Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna, who meet while vacationing in Yalta, Russia.” In my opinion, Chekhov and Hemingway are similar in terms of the narrative economy they use, and the meanings behind the subtlety employed by their characters.
If you’re interested in browsing some of the collections of Chekhov’s short stories, you can find them here.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Born: July 21, 1899, Oak Park, Illinois
Died: July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho (by suicide)
Hemingway began his writing career at the Kansas City Star just after graduating high school. During WWI, he served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front, where he was subsequently injured by shrapnel in 1918. Three years later, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he became one of the renowned members of the “Lost Generation,” which included the American expatriates Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Salvador Dali, and many others. Hemingway, it is said, changed the way fiction was written in the Twentieth Century. His focus on minimalism, directness, declarative sentences, simplicity, and use of subtext and repetition for impactful dialogue, changed how writers wrote, as literature moved more towards Hemingway’s style and away from the verbose Victorian-era style so common before he came along.
While there are many editions of his books and short stories, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition, is my favorite. I read all of the stories while living in Granada, Spain, going to bullfights, visiting Hemingway’s favorite haunts, and writing every day while living in front of the Alhambra castle.
ALICE MUNRO
Born: July 10, 1931, Wingham, Canada
Died: May 13, 2024, Port Hope, Canada
Controversies aside, Alice Munro is one of the most respected and revered short story writers in modern history. She was the Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate in 2013, and is the author of 14 short story collections, many of the stories considered parts of short story cycles (stories that are connected in some form or fashion, such as theme, settings, plot, characters, and so on). Though she ceased writing in 2013, eleven years before her death, Munro had already solidified her position in the literary world.
Munro wrote stories mostly set in Huron County, Ontario, which makes sense as she was Canadian. She wrote stories of girls growing up and coming to terms with their existences in their hometowns. Later, she wrote about those girls as women dealing with the complex lives they led readers to become entrenched in, namely the universal themes of loneliness, the bigotry within families, and the trials and tribulations of just being human.
I’d be remiss to not mention the controversy just before her death. Andrea Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, accused Munro’s husband of long-term sexual abuse. Munro left him, but returned shortly afterwards. Her husband pleaded guilty to sexual assault later on, but Munro’s continued relationship estranged her from her daughter stained her reputation, with the public asking a valid question, however painful to all involved: why didn’t Munro protect her daughter?
WILLIAM TREVOR
Born: May 24, 1928, Mitchelstown, Ireland
Died: Somerset, UK
William Trevor was born in County Cork, home of the Jameson Distillery, Blarney Castle, and Cobh, the last port of call for the Titanic. Trevor is considered one of the preeminent short story writers in the English language. His books were nominated 5 times for the Booker Prize as well as countless other prizes, and he won the 2008 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Compared to Anton Chekhov, Trevor’s short stories and novels were influenced by James Joyce, as well as the politics of Ireland and England, Catholics and Protestants. But what pulls me into his short stories and novels (which are relatively short as well) is his concern with the marginalized members of society his writings bring forth to us in his literature. Trevor wrote somewhere between twelve and fifteen collections of short stories as well as novels. For me, Trevor’s stories are so vivid, so enthralling, that when I read them I feel like I’m stepping into the characters’ lives, into Ireland, into England, and consuming their pains, their trials, their tribulations as my own. Read him. You won’t be sorry.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
Born: December 2, 1958, Amarillo, Texas
I met George Saunders in 2012 or 2013, while pursuing my MFA in Fiction at the University of Tampa. If you’ve seen any interviews with him, he’s the same way in person—funny, interesting, and, unlike a lot of writers I’ve met, a sweetheart. For many years, Saunders has taught at the esteemed creative writing program at Syracuse alongside Mona Awad, Mary Karr, Jonathan Dee, Arthur Flowers (another great writer I’ve met), and others. Tobias Wolff taught there from 1980 until 1997. This is before Tenth of December came out but years after he’d been a mainstay for his short stories, in particular the ones published in The New Yorker, which he’s been attached to for the last thirty-four years (he has a great working relationship as editor and author with Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the magazine).
Saunders’s stories are strange. They’re precise. They’re dark and funny and satirical. They focus on working class people under pressure. They’re sometimes sprinkled generously with marketing and corporate jargon. Not all of his works are accessible to everyone, myself included. Book Riot said to start reading Saunders by reading Tenth of December first, and then diving into other works afterwards. I have to agree with that. If you’ve read him, or do, let me know what you think.
RAYMOND Clevie CARVER Jr.
Born: May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Oregon
Died: August 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Washington
In Carver’s short life (he was fifty when he passed away from lung cancer), Carver wrote six collections of short stories, a few compilations, eight books of poetry, a couple screenplays and more. One of his most famous (and, in my opinion, best) short story collections is “What we Talk About When we Talk About Love,” and in particular the title story, which you can read here. I wrote a short story stealing a bit of the title, which was published in the St. Petersburg Review years ago. The title of my story was “Let’s Not Talk About Money”. And to be honest, I’m a little bummed I didn’t visit Carver’s home in Port Angeles, a cool town not far from where I lived on Bainbridge Island, just across the water from Seattle.
Carver was lucky enough to have studied under the great John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Grendel, On Becoming a Noveslit, and other books. Gardner also died young, from a motorcycle accident, four days before he was supposed to get married. Anyway, Carver’s style has been described as “dirty realism.” Like most of the writers in this post, Carver wrote about everyday people and middle-class people navigating the ups and downs of life as marginalized members of society.
Carver’s breakthrough publication was his short story collection “Will You Please be Quiet, Please?” which came out in 1976 and focused on the American working class and their struggles in mid-century America. During an around that time he’d been working as a textbook editor and a custodian at a hospital. His shorty story collection Cathedral was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
MARGARET Eleanor ATWOOD
Born: November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
In recent years, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has seen a surge in sales due to a Hulu series as well as the perception that women’s rights in recent times under a certain administration are and have been under attack. As an author, the acclaim is great. But Atwood is also an inventor, having “conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, what would later be known as the LongPen, that would enable a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet, thus allowing her to conduct her book tours without being physically present.” (Wikipedia). Besides that and having written 18 novels, she’s also an accomplished poet, with another 18 books under her belt, a literary critic, nonfiction writer, children’s author and graphic novelist. And that doesn’t include the nine collections of her short fiction. Talk about prolific!
Atwood books, short stories, and other works have made her a giant of letters, to say the least. She focuses much of her work on the themes of religion, power politics, gender and identity, climate change, and more. Her most famous short stories are “Headlife,” “Old Babes in the Wood,” “Stone Mattress,” and “Alphinland,” but honestly she’s written so much and as I mentioned writing is so subjective that I’d recommend you just pick up one of her books and start reading.
PS: Last year, in 2025, Atwood wrote a short, satirical story in response to The Handmaid’s Tale being banned by the Conservative Alberta government. Click the link above to read it or click here.
Saunders’s stories are strange. They’re precise. They’re dark and funny and satirical. They focus on working class people under pressure. They’re sometimes sprinkled generously with marketing and corporate jargon
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Born: March 25, 1925, Savannah, Georgia
Died: August 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Georgia
In her short life (she was only 39 when she died from lupus), Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels, thirty-one short stories, reviews and commentaries, and solidified herself in the annals of American literature. O’Connor won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction posthumously for her a compilation of her complete stories. If you’ve ever read the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” you’ll understand O’Connor’s focus: morality, Catholicism, transcendence, ethics, the “grotesque,” which may have been a label the north gave to her writing, in particular because O’Connor wrote from the south, sarcasm, and other in-your-face themes that hinted at the person she was on the inside. The Misfit, from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is, in my opinion, one of the best bad guys in literature. Click the link above to read the story (thanks to SCRIBD).
Like many great writers, O’Connor attended the oldest (and often considered the best” creative writing programs in the U.S., the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. She wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin and The Southern Cross, over eight years, from 1956 – 1964.
WILLIAM Cuthbert FAULKNER
Born: September 25, 1897, New Albany, Mississippi
Died: July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Mississippi
You don’t have to be a writer or literary buff to have heard of William Faulkner. His novels The Sound and the Fury (the title is from a line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” in particular from Act 5, Scene 5). His other novels, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, and A Fable, are considered part of the American canon by many. Most of his fiction takes place in the fictional setting of Yoknapatawpha County, which is based on Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.
Faulkner’s novels are well known, but he also wrote countless short stories with the same themes he wrote about in his novels: the trauma of having fought and lived through the Civil War, the butting of heads between tradition and the modern world, isolation, humanity’s connection to nature, social injustice, and other issues he saw in his daily life. The use of stream-of-consciousness in his works is prominent, and often a bit difficult for the average reader to appreciate. Other writers fond of stream-of-consciousness are Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac (the first real influence of mine that launched me into a literary career), Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, and others. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.
JOHN “Jack” Griffith LONDON (né Chaney)
Born: January 12, 1876, San Francisco, California
Died: November 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, California
Another writer to die young (he was only 40 at the time), Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang have been made into movies countless times and hold a special place for Americans where the wilds of Alaska and nature in general thrive in our collective imaginations. They are short novels, or rather novellas, meaning they fall somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 words. And they’re great.
But London, who famously spent much of his life at sea, sailed out with family members to join the Klondike Gold Rush, where he began writing many of his most famous short stories. In Alaska, he got scurvy, lost his front teeth, and suffered other maladies and injuries. London’s short story, “To Build a Fire,” is one of the stories that arose from those times, and it’s also one of his most famous works of short fiction. You can read the complete short story here, or by clicking the link above.
The themes in Jack London’s short stories and novels are heavily focused on the brutality of nature, survival of the fittest, evolution and a return to the wild, as well as the arrogance and failed intellect of the characters who journey forth in conditions most people aren’t capable of surviving. The power and awe of nature, in real life and in London’s works, show us, in no uncertain terms, that we’re smaller than we think, that our hubris is closer than we think, and our survival in the harsh elements of this planet are dictated more by luck than skill.
I once visited London’s Wolf House, in Glen Ellen, California, a 26-room, 15,000 sq ft beast of a property. It’s a rustic place with a lake and dam, trails and heavy foliage, and there’s a certain feel to it that I can’t describe. Though he never got a chance to live in it (it burned down in 1913 before he was to move in), you can sort of feel his presence there, in particular if you’ve read any of his works. The house is now part of the Jack London State Historic Park, and a place that’s magical to visit, in my opinion.
JOHN CHEEVER
Born: May 27, 1912, Quincy, Massachusetts
Died: June 18, 1982, Ossining, New York
Called the “Chekhov of the suburbs,” John Cheever’s short stories, including, probably, his most famous one, The Swimmer, which you can read in the New Yorker, often dealt with the lives of suburban Americans post WWII. Themes common in his short stories are the pursuit of the American Dream, the duality of human nature, infidelity, alcoholism and its affect on families, and the decline of traditional values in the United States.
I have a copy of the stories of John Cheever prominently displayed on my book shelf, for it’s a collection I often turned to for the simplicity and beauty of the pictures he creates of ordinary people and the anxieties that exist below the surface of what appear to be normal, happy people living normal, happy lives.
Cheever’s stories, like George Saunders’s stories, were mostly published in the fiction section of the New Yorker. Between 1935 and 1981, just months before his death, the magazine published a hundred of his works. But he published in other magazines as well, including Collier’s, Story, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.
DAVID VANN
Born: 1966, in Adak Island, Alaska
Vann is an American novelist and short story writer and former professor at the University of Warwick in England. He’s been published in 23 languages, and has won countless awards, including the Prix Medicis Etranger and Premi Llibreter, the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, and written for the Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Esquire Russia, The Guardian, and just about any other publication you can think of. The film Sukkwan Island, based on Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025.
Vann’s writing is raw. It’s visceral. And, like many of us, he’s a pantser—he rarely, if ever, outlines his fiction prior to writing. His fiction often deals with the death of his father’s suicide. Rural landscapes are a big part of his fiction, and when I read Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island, I felt like I was struck by lightning. I could not put either of those books down, not for a second. The trauma, the dysfunctional relationships of his characters, many obviously autobiographical, are heavily impacted by the past, with the desolate landscapes contributing to the intense isolation familiar to anyone who has lived like that for any period of time. Oh, and Vann says he write seven days a week. SEVEN! So get to work.
*Thanks to Project Gutenberg for “The Lady and the Dog”
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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This is a good list if you like literary fiction, which many people (myself included) do not. You have missed some great short story writers here, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury (who wrote horror, sci-fi, pulp detectives, and many uncharacterizeable stories), Howard Waldrop, and Harlan Ellison (who never wrote a novel), come to mind. The sci-fi anthology series The Road to Science Fiction does not have a bad story in the bunch. Even Lawrence Bloch has a book of terrific shorts out there.