Here is the subjective list of my 50 favorite short stories (and tales). Some are famous, some are more obscure, but all have struck my spirit and my memory. I hope they will give you the same pleasure I had reading them and will allow you to escape in another world in the time of a few minutes. At least I hope that this list will give you a few reading suggestions.
• Voltaire - Candide, or Optimism (1759)
• Heinrich Von Kleist - The Earthquake in Chile (1807)
• Adelbert von Chamisso - The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl (1813)
• E.T.A. Hoffmann - The Sand Man (1817)
• Nikolaï Gogol - The Overcoat (1842)
• Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Birth-Mark (1843)
• Ivan Tourguenev - The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850)
• Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener (1853)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)
• Gustave Flaubert - A Simple Heart (1877) (Three tales)
• Robert Louis Stevenson - The Suicide Club (1878)
• Emile Zola - The Death of Olivier Bécaille (1884)
• Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilitch (1886)
• Oscar Wilde - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1887)
• Guy de Maupassant - Le Horla (1887)
• Anton Chekhov - Ward Number Six (1892)
• Maxim Gorky - Konovalov (1897)
• Leonid Andreev - The Thought (1902)
• Henry James - The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
• H.G. Wells - The Door in the Wall (1911)
• Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (1912)
• Georg Heym - The Autopsy (1913)
• Herman Hesse - Knulp (1915)
• Katherine Mansfield - Feuille d’Album (1917)
• Sherwood Anderson - Hands (1919) (Winesburg, Ohio)
• Mikhail Bulkagov - Morphine (1925)
• H.P. Lovecraft - The Outsider (1926)
• Ernest Hemingway - A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1926)
• Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)
• George Orwell - A Hanging (1931)
• Evelyn Waugh - Mr Loveday's Little Outing (1936)
• Jean-Paul Sartre - Erostrate (1939) (The Wall)
• Yasushi Inoue - The Hunting Gun (1949)
• Richard Matheson - Born of Man and Woman (1950)
• Albert Camus - The Mute (1957) (Exile and the Kingdom)
• Julio Cortazar - Axolotl (1959) (Secret Weapons)
• Jean Rhys - Let Them Call It Jazz (1962)
• John Cheever - The Swimmer (1964)
• Yukio Mishima - Patriotism (1966)
• Richard Brautigan - The Revenge of the Lawn (1970)
• Jorge Luis Borges - The Other (1974) (The Book of Sand)
• Charles Bukowski - The Most Beautiful Woman In Town (1983) (Tales of Ordinary Madness)
• John Carver - Cathedral (1983)
• Patrick Süskind - The Pigeon (1987)
• Yi Munyol - Bird with Golden Wings (1990)
• Denis Johnson - Car Crash While Hitchhiking (1992) (Jesus’ Son)
• Sam Shepard - The Self-Made Man (1997) (Cruising Paradise)
• Haruki Murakami - Landscape with Iron (2002) (After the Earthquake)
• Vitaliano Trevisan - Nuages (Bic et autres shorts) (2008)
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