Ten Favorite Short Story Writers

(I can’t help but view lists like the two pictured below as invitations, and frankly I am a sucker for them. Just because some of my favorite fiction writers turned their hand to the short story does not mean they are necessarily among my favorite short story writers. Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Juan Emar, Leo Tolstoy, Clarice Lispector, Shirley Jackson: These are all writers I love whose novels I simply value more highly than I do their short fiction, a few stray gems aside. For this list, I ended up favoring writers whose short stories I not only treasure but also regard as their most significant work, or at least equal to it. Here they are, in order of preference—and here, for comparison, is a list of my fifty favorite individual short stories, with forty other writers whose work in the form I would recommend, too.)

 

  1. William Maxwell (try “The Thistles in Sweden” from Billie Dyer and Other Stories)

  2. J. G. Ballard (try “The Voices of Time” from The Voices of Time and Other Stories)

  3. Jorge Luis Borges (try “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” from Ficciones)

  4. Kelly Link (try “Prince Hat Underground” from White Cat, Black Dog: Stories)

  5. Giorgio Manganelli (try “Disquisition on the Difficulty of Communicating with the Dead” from To Those Gods Beyond)

  6. Mavis Gallant (try “From the Fifteenth District” from Paris Stories)

  7. Thomas Glave (try “The Torturer’s Wife” from The Torturer’s Wife)

  8. Peter Orner (try “Ineffectual Tribute to Len” from Maggie Brown & Others: Stories)

  9. Peter S. Beagle (try “The Last Song of Sirit Byar” from Giant Bones)

  10. Lucius Shepard (try “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” from The Dragon Griaule)


— November 23, 2025