I'm looking so forward to sampling these recommended stories!
Here are a few more stories, and a poem. I read these at various times over the last several months. There are a lot of stories I like, but these keep rattling around in my head. I always had a sense of
whoa after reading them.
Imago by Andrew Peery, about 5000 words. Oh, this story! This was his first published story (and it was in
The Gettysburg Review, no less), and immediately when I finished it, after I stopped being awed by it, I was jealous. I want to write stories like this. It's literary, but it's also the rare not-first-person literary story that tends to tell a story rather than just create an epiphanic moment at the end. I ended up just soppy about this thing.
Free Radical by D.M. Gordon. This is a prize-winning short poem, and it's the type of poetry I wish I could write well, because it's the type I like to read the most. I think it's stunning without a single incoherent line.
Reddog by William H. Coles. A little over 5,000 words, I guess. You can read several of his literary stories
here. I actually own his book on writing literary fiction, and it did give me some insight. When I feel like giving up writing literary stories, because when I approach them I always, always feel like I have no clue what I'm doing, I read certain parts and feel better about it all.
Most of his stories are finalists in competitions like the William Faulkner competition, or prize winners in other contests. Some have been published in prestigious places like
The Chattahoochee Review. I've enjoyed everyone I've read to one degree or another, but Reddog is my favorite because of the subtleties and the way you can
get it at the end without ever being told exactly what's going on. I think it's a perfect example of an unreliable narrator, but the reader gets the truth anyway.
Facing Grace with Gloria is probably my second favorite of them all, followed by The
Thirteen Nudes of Ernest Goings.
He has several essays about writing at his site. I actually got a lot out of his bit on creating a character-based literary story
here. It's a bit pedantic in places and just odd at times, but the lesson in there's worth getting through the rest (IMO) if you're interesting in writing literary fiction. It gives what I think is a pretty functional definition, and some tips (even though I do think it's easy to be turned off by the way it's presented, I'm not sure why).
Shelley