As literature and folklore PhDs, we’ve read a LOT of short stories. 

You start reading the classics somewhere in middle school (everybody remembers being traumatized by “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury around 8th grade, right? Or maybe “Cannibalism in the Cars” by Mark Twain? Or “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson?? Why are the classics like this?) 

Well, we went on in school for about 18 years after that, during which we were exposed to a lot more stories in pretty much every genre you can think of.  

We’ve noticed, however, that even though we’re taught early on that short stories matter and can be absolutely life-changing/ wildly memorable/ scarring, most people tend to stop reading them as they get older. You no longer have a teacher dispensing them at you, and far fewer short story collections are published than other kinds of literature. They also don’t often pop up in book clubs, which tend to be all about novels. If you’re not deep in a literary scene, you just don’t see them around as much.  

But y’all… short stories can be so so good. This is why we made reading one (at least one) part of our 2025 Carterhaugh School Summer Reading Challenge. We already recommended Cat Valente’s “The Lily and the Horn,” “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar, and “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker, but here are four more from each of us that have really stuck with us (and that you can read for free online right now!) We each did two modern ones and two classics!

Brittany’s Picks:

“For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll – I don’t even know how to express how much I love this story. Carroll takes the cat of the delightful 1763 poem “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” which was written by Christopher Smart when he was confined to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, and builds an entire story around it. Jeoffry’s voice in the tale is so perfectly cat-like that I can’t stop smiling the entire time I’m reading – oh, and did I mention he and his cat buddies defeat the Devil who is trying to take Smart’s soul? Yep. Cats are amazing. Also there is a terror of a kitten named Nighthunter Moppet who is even more delightful than you think she’s going to be. 

This one was actually recently adapted into a short film for the Netflix series Love, Death, and Robots! It’s not quite as good as the short story, but it’s pretty great (and also written for the screen by Tamsyn Muir of Gideon the Ninth fame!) 

“The Witch of Duva” by Leigh Bardugo – Also first published by Reactor, interestingly enough, “The Witch of Duva” by Leigh Bardugo is just so well done. It draws on “Hansel and Gretel,” but takes everything in a completely different direction. The twist is masterful. The other thing that I really like about this one is that it ultimately inspired Bardugo to create a whole book of short folk stories set in her imaginary world of Ravka, The Language of Thorns, which I loved. Sara and I are always saying if you want your speculative world to feel really, really real, give it some folklore, and that’s exactly what Bardugo does. Witchcraft, fairy-tale reworking, hex the patriarchy solidarity vibes… yep, where do I sign?

“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin – For my first classic story, I want to share “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. I’m picking this one at least partly because it doesn’t seem like a story I would pick, as it’s totally realist, but I absolutely adore it (I also love teaching this one in particular, there is so much to talk about.) Set in 1950s Harlem, it’s the story of two Black brothers, the unnamed narrator and Sonny, who has addiction issues but is an amazing musician. It’s about music and injustice and forgiveness and pain. It has some of the most profound insights and perfect descriptions of art I’ve ever read. It makes me tear up just to read certain paragraphs, they’re just so deeply true. If you’ve never read anything by Baldwin before, give this one a shot. It’s absolutely one of those stories that will stay with you long after you read the last paragraph.      

“The Dead” by James Joyce – For my second classic story, I’m going to go with Joyce’s “The Dead.” I first read it in high school with a great teacher, and I will always have a soft spot for it because it was one of the first things I read that showed me how incredibly beautiful and powerful literature really can be. It was a key inspiration for my going on to study for my PhD. It’s a love story, a ghost story, a story about how well and how little we really know those we love. It also has one of the most beautiful final paragraphs of anything I’ve read ever. I think of it whenever it starts snowing – 

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” 

Sara’s Picks: 

“The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” by Theodora Goss – I love this one for so many reasons. I love that it’s a feminist reimagining of the greatest science-fiction hits of the 19th century: the main characters are all daughters of those pesky scientists in Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and many more. And they’re all super weird and powerful, in complicated ways. I love that this story came out of Dora’s dissertation research. And I love that it was the seed of her first novel…and her first trilogy. “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” shows, in so many ways, the interconnectedness of literature and creativity, spilling from one work to the next, moving between scholarship and fiction. It just doesn’t get cooler than that.

“Shimmering, Warm, and Bright” by Shveta Thakrar – Honestly, I debated between this one and “Krishna Blue” (a vampire who loves to paint and eats COLORS! It’s terrifying! I love it!), but I went with “Shimmering, Warm, and Bright” because it’s such a beautiful, important, and compassionate depiction of depression. I deeply appreciate that it avoids the super toxic, super common idea that suffering = art and that depression or being miserable is a necessary condition of making good art. (Spoiler: being incredibly ill makes it HARDER to make art!) Nope, what Shveta does here is gentle, beautiful, and profoundly magical. Also, there’s a sunshine closet. 

“The Machine Stops” by EM Forster – Forster wrote this nightmare fuel in 1909, and it has haunted me ever since I read it in a graduate seminar on the fin de siecle (turn of the 20th century), a time of rapid technological change and anxiety (sounds RELEVANT, no?). The story tells of a world where humans no longer live on the surface of the planet, instead dwelling in physical isolation underground in standardized rooms where all their needs are seen to by a giant machine. People are connected by technology that gestures towards instant messaging and the internet, and they pass all their time discussing second-hand “ideas” but almost never meet in person. It is SURREAL to me that Forster wrote this absolute banger more than 100 years ago. 

“The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter – Possibly my favorite short story of all time. Carter is at her most Gothic in this reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, in which Sleeping Beauty’s “sleep” is the curse of vampirism:

“Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.”

Yes. Just yes.

So there you have it! What’s your all-time favorite short story? What story has stuck with you the most? What story totally traumatized you in middle school, causing you to now hate us for making you remember it again? Head to the comments and let us know!!

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