Quick Lit: 15 Inspiring Stories You Can Read In An Hour

Juliette Donatelli — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 07:00:53 +0000

The short story is one of my favorite art forms. It’s precise, to the point and extremely powerful. Here are 15 inspiring stories you can read in one sitting.

A short story always reminds me of Pablo Picasso’s sketches of a bull, because the art is reduced to it’s bare minimum–only the essentials. Each sentence, each word and each image is so concise and purposely placed. Through these inspiring stories, authors teach us so much while explaining so little.

Can’t sit down to read a short story? Take it with you. The New Yorker Fiction podcast is a great way to experience inspiring stories on the go. In each episode, an author published in the New Yorker, chooses a short story from the magazine’s archives.

Regardless of how you consume them, here are 15 inspiring stories to read this week.

1. “Gertrude Talks Back” by Margaret Atwood

2 .”A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka

3. “Teddy” by J.D. Salinger

4. “Roy Spivey” by Miranda July

5. “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant

6. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez

7. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

8. “The Daughters of the Moon” by Italo Calvino

9. “Voices Lost in Snow” by Mavis Gallant

10. “A&P” by John Updike

11. “Eve’s Diary” by Mark Twain