Short Stories Bucket List

An angel lands face-down in a courtyard after a storm, and the village starts charging admission to look at him.

An officer demonstrates the machine that writes a condemned man's sentence into his back over twelve hours.

A village gathers on a June morning for the annual draw; the New Yorker lost subscribers over what the draw is for.

A universe of hexagonal galleries holding every possible 410-page book, nearly all of them gibberish.

A city whose happiness depends on one child kept in a cellar, and the few citizens who leave rather than accept the terms.

Seven contradictory accounts of one killing in a bamboo grove, the dead man's included; the source of Rashomon.

A clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for one ball, loses it, and spends ten years paying off the replacement.

She sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch; he sells the watch to buy her combs for her hair.

Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.

A gilded statue and a swallow give away his gold leaf and his sapphire eyes to the poor, and both are thrown out.

A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.

A mermaid trades her voice for legs that hurt at every step, and does not get the prince; Andersen's ending is not the film's.

A woman shut in a nursery for a rest cure starts reading the wallpaper and finds a figure creeping behind the pattern.

Three wishes on a mummified paw, and the knocking at the door after the second one.

A Wall Street copyist answers every instruction with "I would prefer not to" and stops doing anything at all.

A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.

A man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.

A Dublin party, a song heard on the stairs, and a husband learning about the boy his wife loved first; the last story in Dubliners.

A murderer insists on his own sanity while the old man's heartbeat gets louder under the floorboards.

Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.

Earth colonises Mars in linked stories; Bradbury's melancholy frontier.

The three laws of robotics in nine stories; Susan Calvin and the machines.

Two constructor robots build machines that write poetry and simulate kingdoms; Lem's comic fables.

A point that contains every other point, in a Buenos Aires cellar; Borges' second collection.

The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.

Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.

Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.

Six stories, and the one where Geralt finds a girl named Ciri in Brokilon forest.

The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.

The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.