Several times, making this list, I was tempted to pick different stories, to make me seem smarter or cooler or whatever. Where’s the Cheever? Nabokov? Welty? Joyce? I won’t say what I would’ve replaced to make me appear that way but each of these stories below I did pick have affected me in some way as a writer or, dare I say it, as a person. This list was hard to curate when, at first I was tempted to appear some way, and much easier when I just thought of stories I loved. Then I overshot a dozen so there were a few I had to leave out. I love these stories. I could read them, or experience them—since a couple are songs—forever. A short story, as gleaned from this list, to me, might just be a kind of consciously, or unconsciously, curated, or semi-curated, assemblage of beautiful images via language that culminate in something like a kind of tension or attention to the language itself. Or a short story might be something more traditional. Each of these stories have something I want in my writing. These stories are a little sad, beautiful, both, told in a kind of language, a kind of voice, that moved me and stuck with me over the last 10 years of writing, of trying to write. When I finish reading one of these, I think, I wish I did that.
A Personal Anthology, by Nathan Dragon
A Personal Anthology, by Nathan Dragon
A Personal Anthology, by Nathan Dragon
Several times, making this list, I was tempted to pick different stories, to make me seem smarter or cooler or whatever. Where’s the Cheever? Nabokov? Welty? Joyce? I won’t say what I would’ve replaced to make me appear that way but each of these stories below I did pick have affected me in some way as a writer or, dare I say it, as a person. This list was hard to curate when, at first I was tempted to appear some way, and much easier when I just thought of stories I loved. Then I overshot a dozen so there were a few I had to leave out. I love these stories. I could read them, or experience them—since a couple are songs—forever. A short story, as gleaned from this list, to me, might just be a kind of consciously, or unconsciously, curated, or semi-curated, assemblage of beautiful images via language that culminate in something like a kind of tension or attention to the language itself. Or a short story might be something more traditional. Each of these stories have something I want in my writing. These stories are a little sad, beautiful, both, told in a kind of language, a kind of voice, that moved me and stuck with me over the last 10 years of writing, of trying to write. When I finish reading one of these, I think, I wish I did that.