Let’s the get the short story ball rolling with the recognized father of the format, Anton Chekhov. You might know him better for his plays – The Cherry Orchard in particular is still performed today – but just as important, I think, is his short work. There is not to my knowledge a compendium of *all* of his short stories. Maybe with the increasing popularity of the Kindle, Nook, and other eBook formats this will change but this is a man who wrote literally hundreds of short stories, which range in size from a couple hundred words (this review may well end up being longer than some of his short-shorts) to 30-40 pages in length.
Given that very high volume of stories, and given Chekhov’s own philosophy of what a writer ought to deliver – when asked, one time, about the “morality” of his work, he responded that if he was to write a story about a horse thief, it was his job to make the reader understand what life as a horse thief is like, not to tell them that horse thievery is right or wrong – he covers practically everything there is to cover in late 19th century tsarist Russia. A couple of the best ones which I would refer a reader new to Chekhov to are:
Sleepy, an account from the perspective of a tired, overworked, and too-young nanny for a young child of a well-to-do family.
The Lady With The Little Dog, a longer story (for Chekhov anyway) about a man whose dalliance with a cute girl changes both of their lives forever.
Oysters, one of Chekhov’s more whimsical short stories.
If you liked these, I’d also like to recommend a couple that didn’t make this particular book:
Ward Number 6, about life in a Russian insane asylum, told from the perspective of a doctor who slowly descends into a level of insanity of his own.
Christmastime, a story about the power of writing and expectations which, I have to admit, makes me cry a little bit inside every time that I read it.
Death of a Government Clerk, which to me is Chekhov’s best of his short-shorts. It concerns a toady who literally dies of embarrassment after transgressing a superior.
While I think the historical aspect of the stories makes them interesting enough on their own (seriously, is there a better way to understand what life in that world was like better than reading a handful of these stories), I think that they’re also worth reading for the sake of the craft. The short story has grown a lot since Chekhov wrote; for instance, Ernest Hemingway generally had to rewrite his shorter work 10 or more times until he was satisfied, and the sheer bulk of Chekhov’s work indicates that he didn’t really do this. That being said, there are a few things that he just plain got right the first time that other people have been copying ever since. I think specifically of a piece of advice from one of his letters which is also repeated in this work. This bit talks about description, specifically how to effectively describe a setting without overdescribing. What he said – to pick out 3 or 5 different, specific details of a place and to let the reader fill in the rest in his own mind’s eye – is a bit of advice you will still see writers as diverse as Natalie Goldberg and Stephen King espouse today.
I don’t want to say that Chekhov is a “must-read” for anyone attempting to revive the mostly-dead short story genre because the only real “must” with that sort of thing is that to be a writer you must simply write. That being said, if you’re looking for someone’s style to ape or for inspiration, it’s hard to go wrong with Chekhov. On top of that, a collection of his stories makes a good bathroom book; there are bound to be pieces short enough for a quick 2-minute break or an hour-long bathtime read.
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 