Perhaps the best way to get acquainted with a writer, especially of classics, is to start with his/her classic small stories. Short stories offer a great deal of insight into the writer’s creative process, literary style and the genres he/she tackles. Moreover, they serve as a great introduction to the writer’s large body of work, which sometimes may feel inaccessible. So here’s a list of 15 most iconic short stories that remain classics till date.
List of 15 Most Iconic Short Stories of All Time | Classic Small Stories:
The Gift of The Magi by O’Henry
This beautiful story by O’Henry is typical of his style – with an unexpected twist at the end. This is the story of two foolish lovers, Jim and Della, who live their life in poverty and somehow stretch their means to get a meaningful Christmas gift for the other. But the gifts, in the end, prove meaningless since each has sold the prized object for which the other got a gift.
The Bet by Anton Chekhov
This story deals with an important debate – whether life imprisonment is better than a capital sentence or whether the latter is preferable. The protagonists of the story – a lawyer and a banker – wage a bet on the same topic. The lawyer, who is in favour of life sentence, decides to prove his point in practice by accepting an imprisonment of fifteen years. If he succeeds in spending those in solitary confinement, the banker shall awe his entire fortune to the lawyer. The story deals with the outcome of the bet.
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
This stunning story of deception and appearances follows our main character, Loisel, a woman of extraordinary beauty, intelligence and class who is born to a clerical family but considers herself aristocracy. Even as her husband tries to give her all that she desires, she complains and curses her fate. When he procures tickets to an elite ball, she is ashamed at not having any jewellery. She borrows a beautiful necklace her friend, which she loses at the ball. The couple spends years making money to repurchase it and return it, during which Loisel loses her beauty due to years of hard, crude work. Ultimately, in an ironic end, it is discovered that the necklace they borrowed was not real in the first place.
Lihaaf by Ismat Chughtai
This beautiful story deals with themes of female sexuality, homophobia and sexism. It is told from the point of view of a young girl who visits her aunt Begum Jaan. Begum Jaan’s royal husband is thought to be a respectable man due to his lack of encounters with prostitutes. However, his true secret is that he likes men. Begum Jaan, lonely and unloved, finds solace in her ugly but crafty masseuse, Rabbo. The title refers to the quilt, which makes odd shapes at night, traumatising the young niece.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Written in the quintessential Marquez style, this is full of magical realism and torrid, sensual beauty. This story follows a small town village community as they find a dead, disproportionately large and handsome young man washed ashore. What follows is the renewal and reformation of the village due to his arrival.
Girls in Summer Dresses by Irwin Shaw
This story by Irwin Shaw, which is taught in almost all literature syllabi, is a wonderful exploration of the institution of marriage. A married couple, several years after their marriage, seem to have everything sorted and normal. However, a day trip sheds light on their insecurities and the lack of passion. As usual, however, they end up in the same routine, ignoring these feelings altogether. The story tackles importance themes of lust, infidelity and insecurity.
How I Taught My Grandmother to Read by Sudha Murty
This heart-touching story follows our young female protagonist as she teaches her illiterate grandmother to read. Every week, the granddaughter would narrate a novel that appeared as a serial in the magazine Karmaveera to her grandmother. But while the granddaughter was away, the grandmother was unable to read and felt ashamed of her incapacity. Thus, the story of the granddaughter teaching her grandmother begins.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This hauntingly beautiful story deals with a very important subject – mental health. A young woman suffering from a mental illness moves with her husband to a summer mansion. She is forbidden from writing or working. So she spends her time analysing and describing the yellow wallpaper, in which she thinks a woman is trapped. She starts ripping the wallpaper out to free the woman inside, but ends up believing that she herself was the woman trapped.
The Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore
This endearing story follows an expected and beautiful bond that blossoms between an aristocratic young girl Mini and a Kabuliwala who sells his wares on the street. However, when the Kabuliwala is arrested for a murder for several years, Mini grows up and becomes mature and shy. When he returns on the eve of her wedding several years later, she is a changed woman. The Kabuliwala remembers his own daughter back home and weeps, for she must have frown up and altered just like Mini. The narrator ends up giving the Kabuliwala a sum of money he had reserved for Mini’s wedding. In this selfless deed, the bittersweet ending gives hope and joy – to the father, the Kabuliwala and the reader.
The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin
This work of feminist fiction follows the story of a woman with a weak heart who discovers that her husband is dead. Although she weeps and mourns the loss, when she is alone in the room, she thinks that she is now finally free. At the end, when she discovers that her husband is actually alive, her heart fails and she dies. The irony is that while the others proclaim her heart failure as a sign of excessive joy, the readers know that it was because she almost attained the freedom that was snatched away from her at the last moment.
The Dead by James Joyce
Featuring in Joyce’s acclaimed Irish fiction anthology, The Dubliners, revolves around Gabriel Conroy and explores his relationships with family and friends. A teacher and book reviewer, Conroy, arrives late at a Christmas party. The events that unfold and his death at the end make it a magnificently moving short story.
The Open Window by Saki
This is the story of Framton, who has just moved to the village and who pays a visit to the Sappletons house. Here, he is greeted by Vera, a young girl, who informs him that her aunt Mrs Sappleton has gone insane. She keeps looking out of the French window for her husband and sons, who left the house for hunting one day and never returned. Mrs Sappleton comes in and tells him that they are going to return soon from their expedition, at which point, Framton believes Vera. However, soon the husband and children are seen in the distance, walking towards the house. At this point, Framton freaks out and leaves, believing them to be ghosts. However, all this is soon revealed to be Vera’s mischief.
A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi
This is an extremely innovative story that deals with the limitations of language, brevity of life, trivialness of distant events and smallness of human understanding. It is the story about the interconnectedness of human life, which has now become a modern classic.
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
This moving story follows our protagonist as his wife invites a blind man whose wife has recently died for a visit. His wife worked for the man and at the end of the job, he touched her face and she wrote a poem about it. Later she tried committing suicide but escaped and started writing audiotapes to him. This has made the husband jealous and he doesn’t want the man to come over, but by the end of the story, ends up befriending him due to a beautiful realization and connection.
The Aurelian by Vladimir Nabokov
Paul Pilgram is an aurelian, a scientist who studies butterflies and deals in them. He longs to visit the great butterfly gardens of the world but has no money or resources to travel. Ultimately, he cheats a customer of his and is earns the money, and is even prepared to abandon his wife for his dream – but suffers and untimely stroke and dies. The narrator, however, says that this is not tragic – for he died in a state of utter bliss, having seen the gardens in his dreams and having hoped to see them in reality.
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