Well, I suppose the headline is a shorn sheep, and we need to fish through the bale of wool for a more accurate assessment of the list. These are the best short stories I ever read that I can remember off the top of my head. Since the top of my head is a barren wasteland, at least on the underside, I can’t answer for what’s growing in there from day to day. Tomorrow I might have put McElligot’s Pool on the list. I can’t be trusted.

So it might not be a good list, but by golly, it’s a list. But please, don’t read anything into the numbers. You can rank them if you want, but I didn’t. And remember, no wagering.

1. The Dead – James Joyce
Of course The Dead is the last story in Dubliners, a compendium of short stories. Any one could have made this list. It’s just the best, and he knew it. Not many people know that before he decided to show off, and molest the dictionary for 900 pages at a time, Joyce was a profoundly good short story writer. The story is a memento mori that beggars my ability to describe it. It explains being Irish, being married, being drunk, and being invited into a woman’s mind. Unlike Joyce’s other stuff, the meaning is very dense, but there’s no textual congeries to unravel.

2. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber – Ernest Hemingway
I’ve never even gotten the urge to read Hemingway’s big books, or watch the movies made from them. I respected the comma-starved style he invented, but that’s about it. His autobiographical book, A Moveable Feast, ended up getting thrown across my living room about halfway through it. Man, I thought I was a self-absorbed jerk, but that book taught me I’m just a piker. The Old Man and the Sea is terrific, though, but it’s technically a novella, not a novel or a short story, so I wouldn’t put it on this list. It sums up Hemingway’s whole shtick, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I found out only fairly recently that Hemingway was a superb short story writer. Macomber illuminates the fight between heroism and cowardice in men, and how some women are either at your feet or at your throat, and how far they’ll go to get the last word.

3. The Devil’s in the Cows – Sippican Cottage
Speaking of self-absorbed writers, how about this guy? I’ll recuse myself from talking about it, at least. According to Chad, it’s a “stark, poetic reflection on rural labor, generational duty, and quiet sacrifice. Told through a father’s aching address to his son, the piece captures the brutal rhythms of farm life with lyrical grit. At once tender and unflinching, it evokes the weight of inheritance and the ghosts that come with it.”

4. Esmé – Saki
Ah, another pen name. H.H. Munro died pretty young in a shell crater during World War I, so his output is fairly small. In many ways, he was the prototype for comic writers like P.G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward. Esmé is a wild tale of two aristocratic ladies who more or less adopt a hyena while out foxhunting. It’s a wonderfully camp skewering of the upper class, with witty asides.

5. The Kiss – Anton Chekhov
An impressionable young man gets a kiss meant for someone else in a darkened room, and his mind runs wild afterwards. Men are, after all, the hopeless romantics in this world. Like lots of Russian stories, it’s straightforward and inscrutable at the same time.

6. The Man Who Would Be King – Rudyard Kipling
Lots of people encounter this tale via the superb 1975 film adaptation directed by John Huston with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. It’s a revelation to read the story afterward, and see how short it is. Hubris meets nemesis in one of the greatest tales of adventure ever written.

7. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
I was always staggered by Conrad’s ability to write in English. He was a Pole, and didn’t learn to speak English fluently until his twenties. His descriptive ability is unmatched by his peers, while he’s able to subtly weave in subtext that many overlook. Many writers can’t do either thing. A look at what happens to men unmoored from civilization and abstract morality.

8. The Gift of the Magi – O. Henry
O. Henry was a pseudonym. I love those. William Sydney Porter was about as prolific a short story writer as you could name. He wrote more than 400 of them, none better than the Gift of the Magi. The story can seem a little trite to modern folks, but then again, many people think Shakespeare’s stuff is full of hackneyed phrases, because they don’t know he invented them all. The lesson that generosity doesn’t require a bankroll is rather lost on people nowadays.

Sometimes prolific short story and novel writers have pretty unsophisticated vocabulary, but O. Henry was a lively stylist as well as a gifted storyteller.  Porter’s life story might be even more interesting than his stories. Accused of embezzling from a bank he worked at, he escaped to Honduras. His best friend there was a train robber. Porter wrote Cabbages and Kings, a collection of loosely related short stories about Central America, in which he coined the term “banana republic.” He eventually returned to the US to care for his sick wife, did a stretch in prison where he became the pharmacist, was let out early, and resolutely drank himself to death over a period of nine years. People still leave $1.87 in change on his grave.

9. To Build a Fire – Jack London
A man faces death in the wilderness. He learns the hard way that nature has no opinion. It’s the kind of story that intellectuals try to write, and fail miserably at, because they’ve never been outside during daylight. Jack was the man for the job.

10. Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was always a loopy writer, which made a lot of his output interesting for its own sake. Harrison Bergeron plowed the same fields as other dystopian stories like 1984, but had Vonnegut’s usual entertaining tics in it. It’s the best disquisition on the inequality of forced equality ever written. And if you’ve been paying attention to events recently, perhaps more prescient than any other dystopian scenario.

The “Not Quite a Short Story” Hall of Fame:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the greatest writer who ever lived, maybe save one. Mark Twain is famous for his short stories, but honestly, the ones he’s famous for aren’t his best work. For instance, The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County made his name, but it’s a minor work. The best Twain short stories are from his books like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. Most of his output was serialized in newspapers as he wrote it, and then collected, so they’re basically short stories stitched together. And the fact that they’re supposedly factual doesn’t make them any less of a story. As Twain once wrote, get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.

You can pluck out any number of vignettes in Innocents that are the funniest things ever written, like his butting heads with a gondolier in Venice, or trips to barbarous barbers, or being fumigated in Naples. But his rundown of the wonders of the Turkish bath in theory, and its repellent nature in fact, is one of his finest. Read it here, at the tail end of Chapter 34.

You can argue with me in the comments if you like. But not about Twain.