The story then explores, chillingly, how darkness would strike a civilisation who had never experienced it before. The story concerns a planet – Lagash – that receives light from no fewer than six suns, so that its inhabitants never experience complete darkness – until one day a one-in-a-million alignment leads to a total solar eclipse.
Asimov is known now primarily for his themed short stories in I, Robot and for his Foundation series of novels, but among genre fans, his short story ‘Nightfall’ is considered among his best work. The Golden Age of science fiction (defined roughly as the mid-30s to mid-40s) was a period of huge volumes of short stories published in books and magazines, and the tradition of science fiction short stories has continued up to the present day. Of all genres, science fiction has probably embraced the short story most completely. Nightfall – Isaac Asimov (1941) ‘Nightfall’ describes a planet with multiple suns. It is that makes the story so masterful, capturing perfectly how people speak when they are attempting not to have an argument or discuss serious matters in public, but are failing to keep their emotions in check all the same. Hemingway never states outright what it is that they’re talking about, and there is no commentary on the characters’ interior feelings the whole story is narrated as if observed by someone sitting silently at a nearby table, with the reader left to work out how the characters are feeling for themselves. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe” and the man snaps back, “Oh, cut it out.” They talk in non-sequiturs, and take offence at each other’s superficially inoffensive statement, such as when the woman says, “Everything tastes of liquorice.
Yet Hemingway’s rebuttal to Faulkner – “does he really think big emotions come from big words?” – is also proven correct, as with a few sparse words Hemingway evokes the oppressive heat that exacerbates the tension in the couple’s strained conversation. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.” William Faulkner’s comment on Hemingway – that “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary” – is certainly in evidence here, with descriptions such as “The girl was looking off at the line of hills. This celebrated short story is less than 1,500 words long, and comprises mostly dialogue between an unnamed American man and woman in Spain. Hills Like White Elephants – Ernest Hemingway (1927) The story is set by the Ebro river in Spain. But even the greatest short stories are generally ignored: how many people would first think of Ernest Hemingway as the author of ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ rather than, say, The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls? In this article we’re going to look at the top English-language short stories that everyone should read. There are rare exceptions, many of them made into films, such as Philip K Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ (adapted into the much less enjoyably titled Total Recall) or Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in fact, it’s arguable that short stories are better suited to adaptation into film format than longer fiction. Yet truly great short stories are few and far between. We suffer from the idea that short stories are something people write when they don’t have the stamina for a novel. Perhaps the problem here is that we are all taught to write short stories churning one out in under an hour used to be a requirement of the Year 6 SATs in England.
But tell them that you love short stories, and you’re in danger of them concluding that you don’t have much of an attention span. Tell them that you adore modern theatre and you’ll sound like an intellectual. Tell them that you’re a big fan of poetry and they’ll think you’re sophisticated and cultural. Tell someone that you love great Victorian novels, and they’re likely to nod in approval.
9 Classic Novels for Students of English as a Foreign Language.12 Essential English Novels Everyone Should Read