Short Story COUNTDOWN

So here's another list you all like so much, this time of my favorite short stories. I am not, I think, a short story expert, because I've only read one short story by Chekhov and that was in ninth grade. But whatever, I'm not a Judy Blume expert or a Robert Herrick expert either, and lord knows that didn't stop me from talking about them. Top five:

6. Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, by Franz Kafka -- So I think there are basically three kinds of short stories: short stories that basically do what novels do, but shortly; short stories that have a plot culminating in some sort of gimmick, like stories by O. Henry; and then there are stories like the ones by Kafka and Borges and Steven Millhauser, that are all gimmick and almost no plot. Like the one by Millhauser all about the town that is a copy of the town that the narrator lives in, or Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which is all about an encyclopedia. There is not really a plot, as such, to my favorite Kafka story, Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk. It is all about the one mouse, in the mouse community who wants to sing songs, and the slow-building resentment of the rest of the mice. It is a great slow burn, of mouse resentment, and it's weird, and, for Kafka, it's surprisingly undepressing. Or rather, still pretty depressing, but more depressing about mice than about us, which kind of lets us off the hook.

5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl --This story absolutely freaked me out when I read it as a kid, because at one point, the narrator interrupts his story about a guy who uses yoga to see through the backs of cards and win money to tell you what might happen next, and what the narrator tells you is that Henry -- a slightly unscrupulous but generally charming guy -- may just look at himself in the mirror and see, with his yogic powers, a blood clot, and then fall over dead. What actually happens is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, and founds orphanages all over the place. Imagine being twelve and having this author butt in to tell you that his characters survive only because of his caprices, that he could at any minute blood clot any one of them, even the titular hero of his "wonderful story". Yikes. This one gets on the list on sheer oomph.

3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri -- This is a pretty good example of the short story as a mini-novel: it's got an interesting, metaphor-ready situation (the main guy is a tour guide whose other job is translating diseases for a doctor who doesn't know English) and then a few hours' worth of emotionally charged plot. Not a lot "happens" happens, but with Lahiri's quiet prose, not a lot happens very very strikingly.

2. Menelaiad by John Barth -- This thing, which is seven levels of story going in and then seven more exploding out, is a bravura retelling of some of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, told by Menelaus. Of the stories on this list, except for the creepy authorial interlude in Henry Sugar, this one has the most going for it in terms of short story gimmick, what with its nested stories and classical references and such. And in the middle of all of that is the most plangent thing I think I've ever read -- in the middle of yet another narrative three-ring-circus about his slightly embarrassing marital life, Menelaus breaks through half a dozen layers of story to ask the reader, "Why don't they call her Helen of Sparta?" It there were ever a claim on which to hang my nerdy hat, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.

1. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov -- The season is cloudy and dull, but the story is wonderful. This is not a short story that's built like a novel, but a short story built like someone talking to you about a novel. It is also elegaic and full of delightful sentences and remorseless analysis, which is why I like it so much. I think that it strikes a mood of elegy, in fact, that is uniquely suited to a short story -- such a novel would get maudlin, such poems have too much the element of performance about them (see Dr. Johnson on Lycidas, e.g.) -- and makes it my favorite instance of what a short story can do.