Bibliomania - Free Online Literature and Study Guides. 10 Wonderful Short Stories to Read For Free Online. Had she not passed away at the too-young age of 39 from lupus, today would have been legendary Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor’s 87th birthday. To celebrate her legacy of pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit, we’ve collected a few of our favorite works from some of the best short story writers of all time, all available online — though we can’t promise reading them that way will be as satisfying as hefting a huge tome of collected stories. This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online, to make your Sunday afternoon a little better.
Click through to read ten stories from some of literature’s greats, and link us to your own favorites in the comments! “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor. The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors. “Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates — “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”
Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point. In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:
Free Classic AudioBooks. Digital narration for the 21st Century. The 20 Best Reads of 2011. Publish Your First Book After 50. If you’re an older author trying to break into the publishing industry, it can be remarkably depressing to constantly hear the latest buzz about breakout novels from writers who aren’t even old enough to buy beer. The phenomenon is nothing new. Christopher Paolini wrote his bestselling novel Eragon when he was only 15. Helen Oyeyemi received a six-figure advance for The Icarus Girl at 20. And Kaavya Viswanathan’s roller coaster ride from literary “it” girl to accused plagiarist began when she was just a sophomore at Harvard University.
But these are merely the modern equivalents of Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein was published when she was 19 years old, and S.E. Hinton, whose iconic first novel, The Outsiders, hit the shelves before her 17th birthday. You’ve probably heard the standard advice to avoid falling prey to the mistakes that sabotage uninformed writers regardless of age. So why do your queries keep getting rejected when other (younger) writers’ don’t? 1. 2. 3. 4.
Why Writers Should Tweet. The long overly romanticized idea of the writer holed up in a cabin off of Walden Pond, furiously writing by candlelight and drinking warm whiskey until the wee hours is so. freaking. over. The writer of today is busy tweeting away on the Internet, connecting with like-minded folks while writing their next. big. novel. "If I am having a crappy day writing, I will on occasion send out a goofy tweet on Twitter to see how others are doing," Oak Park-based writer Gint Aras tells me via phone. "Then it will help me get through a period of blockage - but I don't think that's any different from getting on the phone and talking to a writer buddy. " Writers are solitary types. Mystery writer Julie Hyzy tells me that she uses Twitter less for online community, and more as a way to promote other writers and stay in touch with her readers.
Writer Sherrill Bodine tells me that she only started tweeting because of her publicist, Dana Kaye. As we chatted more, she softened up a bit on Twitter.