Every month, literature-loving Rest Less Events members discuss a tale or two at Short Story Club. Over the hour session, we dive deep into any aspect of a story – whether it’s the form and themes used by the author or simply what we like and don’t like about it.
Our Short Story Club is perfect for anyone who’d like to join a book club but doesn’t want to read hundreds of pages, or perhaps just wants to dive deeper into literature.
Over the sessions, we’ve covered all kinds of writers – from masters of the form like Anton Chekhov and James Joyce to modern voices like Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri.
To give you a taste of what we do at Short Story Club, and to see if you’d like to join us, we’ve put together this list of the authors and stories we’ve covered so far.
1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
You may know Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez from his novels Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But did you know he was also an acclaimed short story writer? In our first-ever Short Story Club session, we looked at the weird and wonderful tale: ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’.
In this short and sublime fable, Garcia Marquez tells the story of a decrepit angel who crash lands in a Spanish-speaking seaside village. Combining miraculous events with very human behaviour, it perfectly introduces the author’s famous talent for magic realism – which weaves surrealist elements into the fabric of everyday life.
2. The Russians
Inspired by George Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – where the legendary writer gives us a glimpse into his course on Russian short stories at Syracuse University – we discussed ‘The Nose’ by Nikolai Gogol and ‘The Lady with the Dog’ by Anton Chekhov.
One is a poignant examination of love, while the other is a comic tale about a man who wakes up to find his nose has vanished.
These two wildly different stories give us a glimpse into the variety and influence 19th-century Russian writers have had on the development of the short story. Topics of conversation included the nature of translation, the power of satire, and how characters live on after a story ends.
3. Katherine Mansfield
In our first of many forays into the world of modernism, our Short Story Club read and discussed two tales by Kiwi author Katherine Mansfield in September of 2024. ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ explore themes like class division and patriarchal influence, showcasing Mansfield’s talent for subverting traditional literary conventions.
Our members spoke about how modernist writers used the short story form in reaction to World War One and why Mansfield’s was the only writing Virginia Woolf was jealous of.
4. Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver is one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time. This much-emulated but hardly matched scribe chronicled the lives of working-class Americans, from factory workers to door-to-door salesmen. His sparse prose belies a hidden emotional intensity that simmers under the surface of commonplace events and descriptions before hitting readers like a gut punch in a barroom brawl.
In this session, we analysed two of Carver’s most famous stories from his 1983 collection Cathedral. In the title story, a close-minded man is shown another perspective when his wife’s blind friend comes to stay, while ‘A Small, Good Thing’ follows a couple after their son is hit by a car.
One thing that stood out in this session was our discussion about the unusual influence of Carver’s editor on his work. This led some members to undertake further reading and prompted interesting thoughts about the nature of authorship.
5. W. Somerset Maugham
While William Somerset Maugham was a contemporary of Katherine Mansfield and other modernists who sought to revolutionise literature through formal experiments, his style was never considered innovative. In fact, Maugham’s straightforward prose even garnered its share of negative criticism for being a bit unoriginal.
However, the reason Maugham is such an enduring literary figure is down to his storytelling powers, which are demonstrated at their peak in ‘Rain’. This claustrophobic tale follows a self-righteous missionary seeking to reform a prostitute in American Samoa. It deals with three of Maugham’s favourite themes: class, religion, and hypocrisy.
6. Classic ghost stories
Though tales of terror have been told since humans’ early days, for many, they reached new heights in the Victorian era. As cutting-edge technologies were invented, new ways of seeing the world were unlocked, sometimes to spooky ends – for example, an unexplained whisper on a telephone line or a mysterious figure in the back of a photograph.
This (and other less interesting reasons) is what experts say provided the perfect climate for frightening fables to flourish in Victorian England. So, as the nights drew in during the winter of 2023, our Short Story Club members suggested that we cover some of the classic ghost stories of this period.
After many great suggestions, we decided to focus on Amelia B. Edwards’ ‘The Phantom Coach’ and ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M. R. James.
7. Alice Munro
After an excellent session on W. Somerset Maugham’s rather long story, ‘Rain’, we decided to tackle another tale that pushes the boundary between a short story and a novella: Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman’.
Originally published in The New Yorker in 1996, this sweeping narrative of secrets and lies in a small town has the scope of a longer piece. Munro’s treatment of her native rural Canada is simultaneously bleak and beautiful, and her insights into the choices offered to women in life (and how they react to them) are startlingly poignant.
If you’re up for a longer read (around 60 pages), ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ is a perfect introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author, who’s been described as “the master of the contemporary short story”.
8. Saki
In his writings, H. H. Munro (known by his pen-name, Saki) launched a one-man mission to lampoon the UK’s middle and upper classes during Edwardian times. Exposing, with his often very short, sharp, and amusing stories of talking cats and mischievous children, what he perceived as stupidity and pretentiousness of the higher echelons of society.
A far cry from our recent sessions of Short Story Club, the three Saki stories we covered (‘The Lumber-Room’, ‘The Open Window’, and ‘Sredni Vashtar’) injected our discussion with plenty of humour but no less poignancy.
Highlights of the conversation included the role of the enfant terrible in literature, some similarities and differences between jokes and stories, and the circumstances of Saki’s tragic death in World War One.
9. Zadie Smith
Often lauded for her longer works (like White Teeth and On Beauty), Zadie Smith’s short fiction isn’t to be overlooked – especially the story our group looked at earlier this year: ‘The Embassy of Cambodia’.
Smith’s tale of multiculturalism in North-West London is cleverly told and contains many fascinating insights into the way cultures, ethnicities, and genders interact in a modern, urban environment.
It follows Fatou, an African immigrant who works for a wealthy family in Willesden, and centres on the Cambodian Embassy, where an unseen game of shuttlecock is being played, setting the rhythm for the entire story.
10. Edgar Allan Poe
As a master of the macabre, the inventor of the modern detective story, and a trailblazing experimenter with science fiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s contributions to the world of literature have been immense. And since he’s often referred to as “the architect of the modern short story”, it was only a matter of time before we covered him in Short Story Club.
In this session, we spoke about three of his most famous stories: ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Purloined Letter’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. It featured discussions about how horror stories have morphed over time and Poe’s influence on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
To learn more, why not check out our article: 16 things you might not know about Edgar Allan Poe?
11. Ernest Hemingway
In May of 2024, the Rest Less Short Story Club took a deep dive into two stories by Ernest Hemingway: ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ and ‘The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber’.
Like him or loathe him, Ernest Hemingway is one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century. He’s just as famous for his gallanting lifestyle of fishing, bullfighting, and big game hunting as his highly-stylised literary works, many of which were short stories.
Topics raised during the discussion include the perils of toxic masculinity, Hemingway’s famous ‘iceberg theory’, and how much of his adventurous lifestyle was actually true.
12. William Trevor
From James Joyce to Elizabeth Bowen, the Emerald Isle has produced a healthy stock of short story writers over the years. But why are the Irish so good at writing short fiction?
As writer Anne Enright explains, some argue the Irish gravitate to the form because they identify with it as the literary outsider, though others suggest it may have something to do with the country’s long tradition of oral storytelling. These are just a few of the ideas we discussed in our session on the prolific and poignant William Trevor.
This time around, we focused on two of Trevor’s later stories: ‘Mrs Crasthorpe’ and ‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’. However, due to popular demand, we’ll revisit some of his earlier writings in the future.
13. Edith Wharton
Two old friends reunite in Rome – where they spent their youth together – while holidaying with their daughters. As they watch the sunset over the Forum, they reminisce and talk about their children before a dangerous secret from their past is let slip. This is the premise for Edith Wharton’s much-acclaimed short story ‘Roman Fever’, the focus of our July 2024 session.
Roman Fever is an absorbing tale that investigates the nature of truth and how a patriarchal society forces women into competition with one another. The title simultaneously describes the deadly strain of malaria that’s plagued the city over the centuries and the passions that bubble under the surface of otherwise stoic countenances.
14. Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri burst onto the literary scene in 1999 with her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Many of the stories from this book (including ‘A Temporary Matter’, which we looked at in our August session) explore the lives of Indians and Indian Americans, the immigrant experience, and the conflicts created between Eastern and Western traditions.
Since her early forays into short fiction, Lahiri has boldly pushed the boundaries of her talent by learning and writing in Italian. The second ‘story’ we discussed, isn’t really a short story at all, but a single chapter in her new novel, Whereabouts, which was originally written in Italian and translated back into English.
Final thoughts…
Since it started in the summer of 2023, our Short Story Club has covered a vast array of writers and works – spanning centuries, genres, and countries. Hopefully, this list has inspired you to check out one of our sessions, or maybe it’s just given you some new reading inspiration.
If you’re interested in joining our club, you can sign up for Rest Less Events and book your spot using the button below. Upcoming authors to look forward to discussing include Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Are there any writers you’d like to see us cover in Short Story Club? Or have you read any as a result of this list? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.