Six for Sunday: Fav Short Stories

Six for Sunday is a bookish meme created and hosted by Steph at A Little But a Lot.

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This Sunday’s topic:

Favorite Short Stories

Short stories aren’t my favorite things, so I haven’t read many of them. But every once in a while, I’ll pick up a collection to read. The following are some of my favorites.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman

The copy I own contains both “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “Herland,” but I’ve only read the former so far and really liked it. When I read it back in 2014, I was surprised to find a classic so… readable and entertaining, despite being unsettling too. The story is semi-autobiographical and is about a woman who’s depressed and is prescribed bed rest by her physician husband. There’s a hint of horror to the story, but it’s not scary; it’s more of a psychological horror, I think.

The Inheritance by Robin Hobb

This is a collection of short stories written under the pseudonyms Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb. I didn’t love the collection, but I certainly enjoyed the stories written under Robin Hobb because they are all set in the Realm of the Elderlings world. If you have read the Realm of the Elderlings books and are curious about the first people to live in the Rain Wilds, I highly suggest that you pick up this collection (maybe borrow it) and read “Homecoming.” It’s about how the Rain Wilds were settled and who were the first people to settle there and how they went about it. Reading this makes it more obvious that the Realm of the Elderlings stories are about the sacrifices of women — even Fitz’s story touches on that.

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez, transl. by Megan McDowell

I really enjoined this collection. The stories are macabre, haunting, and unsettling, yet so gripping that I could hardly put the book down and kept wishing the stories were longer. The stories cover a variety of topics, but the constant ones were political and sociological climate in Argentina. I have several favorites in the collection but the foremost was the titular one, which is about women protesting physical abuse by burning themselves.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

I read this collection last year and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It’s a collection of nine stories about the lives and experiences of Black women in America and almost all are about protagonists accepting themselves and coming to terms with certain expectations placed on them. Two of my favorites are “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” which is about an artist who meets a physicist she likes at a conference. I love how the story is written: It flows like a poem. The other is “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands,” which a woman apparently provides to the married men she has affairs with. I like the snarky tone of it.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

My copy is part of the Penguin Little Black Classics (number 31) and is actually a collection of three of Poe’s short stories. My favorite of the three is the titular one, which reads like a fast-paced psychological thriller and is about a young man tortured by guilt after killing a blind old man. It’s the narrator’s voice that hooked me and made me speed through the short story. It’s one I’d like to reread.

Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Macabre Tales by Washington Irving

This was one of the first books I read and reviewed on here. It’s been such a long time since I read it (back in 2012) that I can’t remember much details of the stories, but I recall my reading experience — that I enjoyed the stories, was hooked and sped through them. I think the one I liked the most was of the dude who fell asleep and woke up old or several years in the future or something… I should reread these too.

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Have you read these short storY collections?

LET ME KNOW BELOW.