TOP 10 SHORT-STORY WRITERS

WHAT is the quality that all great short stories share: they make us stop in our tracks and take a breath of fresh air. They make us see the world from another point of view; they make us do a double-take. Joyce Carol Oates defines the short story as “a minor art form that in the hands of a very few practitioners becomes major art,” while William Trevor, in a Paris Review interview in 1989, called the short story “an art of the glimpse,” whose “strength lies in what it leaves out.” A good short story resonates far beyond its size. Despite languishing in the shadow of the novel, the short story is not dying and has never died. It is alive and well.

Raymond Carver
John Cheever
Anton Chekhov
Andre Dubus
Deborah Eisenberg
Mavis Gallant
Ernest Hemingway
Alice Munro
V.S. Pritchett
William Trevor

Others
Richard Bausch / Ann Beattie / David Bezmozgis / Lydia Davis / Stuart Dybek / Nathan Englander / Richard Ford / Shirley Ann Grau / Adam Haslett / Jhumpa Lahiri / David Leavitt / Alistair MacLeod / David Means / Lorrie Moore / Antonya Nelson / Edna O'Brien / Flannery O'Connor / Grace Paley / James Salter / George Saunders / Christine Schutt / Carol Shields / Alan Sillitoe / Helen Simpson / Wallace Stegner / Ivan Turgenev / John Updike / Joy Williams / Tobias Wolff / Richard Yates