Last year, for the month of January, I read a short story every day. I set this challenge for myself as a concrete goal that would expose me to many authors, genres, and writing styles in a short time and collectively improve my own writing. And it did: After each story I’d reflect on what I’d read in terms of both content and writing, and then I’d write a blog post about it.
What I forgot to do was post a complete list of the 30 stories. So, requested by a reader and terribly belated, here it is– the 30 (actually 31) stories I read for this challenge. The links included are to the blog posts I wrote for each story, most of which contain links to where the story can be found online.
Enjoy!
30 Stories in 30 Days: The List
- “The Saucier’s Apprentice” by S.J. Perelman (Day 1)
- “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe (Day 2)
- “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury (Day 3)
- “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck (Day 4)
- “The South” (El Sur) by Jorge Luis Borges (Day 5)
- “The Door” by E.B. White (Day 6)
- “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez (Day 7)
- “Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy (Day 8)
- “The Tale” by Joseph Conrad (Day 9)
- “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (Day 10)
- “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (Day 11)
- “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant (Day 12)
- “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry (Day 13)
- “Graven Image” by John O’Hara (Day 14)
- “The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde(Day 15)
- “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor (Day 16)
- “The Standard of Living” by Dorothy Parker (Day 17)
- “The Happy Man” by Jonathan Lethem (Day 18)
- An Upheaval by Anton Chekhov (Day 19)
- “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs (Day 20)
- “Almost No Memory” by Lydia Davis (Day 21)
- “The Three-Day Blow” by Ernest Hemingway (Day 22)
- “The Second Bakery Attack” by Haruki Murakami (Day 23)
- “Putois” by Anatole France (Day 24)
- “The Ghosts” by Lord Dunsany (Day 25)
- “Nicolas was…” by Neil Gaiman (Day 26)
- “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut (Day 27)
- “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Day 28)
- “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov (Day 29)
- “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen (Day 30)
- *Bonus story! “The Apostate” by George Milburn (Day 31)
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Amazing list. I often think that short stories are not given enough time in today’s world, and yet we could read a new one every day – the commuter’s ideal 🙂
Absolutely! Perfect for filling in those spaces of downtime, and there is so much to be had from them!