[Every time I put up a new post, I’ll add a story to this page.] First: this isn’t Cooperstown. These are stories that have stuck with me for various reasons—their design, their heart, their compression, their suprisingness . . . I was going to say their unprecedentedness but (aside from not wanting to foist such an ungainly word on you), all stories come from earlier stories—or as art historian Leo Steinberg wrote, All art is infested with other art.
Second: Since I have a bunch of years on most of you, I’m going to focus on stories that are at least twenty years old because: a) you’re less likely to know them, and b) if you write stories I believe they’ll help you write better stories.
We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where the moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the back seat of my father’s rusted Rambler which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa that he delivered on weekends from my Uncle Vincent’s meat market. . . . 1
“Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin
“Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” Lucia Berlin
“Silver Water,” Amy Bloom
“The Hector Quesadilla Story,” T. C. Boyle
“The Falling Girl,” Dino Buzzati
“All at One Point,” Italo Calvino
“Tell Yourself,” Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Fat,” Raymond Carver
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Raymond Carver
“The Swimmer,” John Cheever
“In the Gloaming,” Alice Elliott Dark
“Pigeons at Daybreak,” Anita Desai
“A Father’s Story,” Andre Dubus
“We Didn’t,” Stuart Dybek
“Babylon Revisited,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Last Running,” John Graves
“The Ledge,” Lawrence Sargent Hall
“Nebraska,” Ron Hansen
“A Story About the Body,” Robert Hass
“A Vermont Tale,” Mark Helprin
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Ernest Hemingway
“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
“Car Crash While Hitch-Hiking,” Denis Johnson
“The Jewbird,” Bernard Malamud
“The Man in the Moon,” William Maxwell
“The Proxy Marriage,” Maile Meloy
“Lust,” Susan Minot
“Carried Away,” Alice Munro
“Miles City, Montana,” Alice Munro
“The Elephant Vanishes,” Haruki Murakami
“Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx
“Twenty Minutes,” James Salter
“Hunger,” Bob Shacochis
“The Way We Live Now,” Susan Sontag
“No One’s A Mystery,” Elizabeth Tallent
“Deaths of Distant Friends,” John Updike
“A Sandstone Farmhouse,” John Updike
“Nowhere For You, My Love,” Eudora Welty
“Bullet in the Brain,” Tobias Wolff
“The Other Miller,” Tobias Wolff
“On the Desert,” Patricia Zelver
“We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek, in I Sailed With Magellan (2003).