Short Stories in the 2023 Tagset

[donutsweeper]

A compilation post for poems and short stories, available in either written or audio form, in the tagset with links on where to find them (or more information about them) if possible.

Please comment with ones I've missed or if a different translation or version of a canon is preferred. Generally speaking, I've gone with writer's digest definition of a short story being under 30k words.

The Art of Deception - Stephanie Burgis

The Attic - A. M. Burrage (promo post comment)

Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black — Isabel J. Kim

Christopher Mills Return to Sender - Isabel J. Kim

Der Stiefel von Büffelleder | The Boots of Buffalo Leather (Fairy Tale)

The Deepwater Bride - Tamsyn Muir

Eye of the Beholder - Trudi Canavan

Fandom For Robots - Vina Jie-Min Prasad

FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns

Farmer Giles of Ham - J.R.R. Tolkien

Growing Things - Paul Tremblay (Short Story)

Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti

Hey Diddle Diddle (Nursery Rhyme)

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers - Alyssa Wong

Hymn to Hermes - Homer

The Lady or the Tiger - Frank Stockton

Leaf by Niggle - J. R. R. Tolkien

The Magician's Apprentice - Tamsyn Muir

Mrs. Number Three (Chinese Folk Tale)

mulberry down!! - Nicole Kornher-Stace

nad and Dan adn Quaffy - Diana Wynne Jones (promo post comment)

oh Charlie Harper we love you get up - spit_kitten (AO3 Work, originally posted here)

Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne | East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Fairy Tale)

Prince Ahmed and the fairy Pari Banu (Arabian Nights)

Sandkings - George R. R. Martin

Seventy-Two Letters - Ted Chiang (pdf, audio version)

Skyggen | The Shadow - Hans Christian Andersen

Smith of Wootton Major - J. R. R. Tolkien

A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman

This Is New Gehesran Calling - Rebecca Fraimow

Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius - Jorge Luis Borges (one pdf version, a second pdf version, an online version in both English and Spanish, and an annotated version)

Top 5 Rat Movies I Made Up - John Paul Brammer: Legends of the Great Below (newsletter with plot descriptions/short reviews of the made up movies)

The Vicars of Lower Squashby Series - Jared Pechacek (twitter thread, originally here, accessible through nitter here)

The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot

We Are A Picturesque Small Town And We Refuse To Be The Setting For Your RomCom (McSweeney’s)

We Can Get Them for You Wholesale - Neil Gaiman

Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass - Sonya Taaffe

Wind Will Rove - Sarah Pinsker

Wulf and Eadwacer (old English version, modern English translation one, two, three)

The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Yudah Cohen Series - Rebecca Fraimow (Three short stories - "Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman", Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected, and Gitl Schneiderman Learns to Live With Her In-Laws)

Смерть Кощея Бессмертного | The Death of Koschei the Deathless (Fairy Tale)

木蘭辭 | Mùlán Shī | Ballad of Mulan (promo post comment with various translations linked)

Kids book:
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel - Virginia Lee Burton

Comments

[larryhammer]

Are you counting the Lyke-Wake Dirge as poem or song for these purposes? AFAK, the original tune hasn't survived, so it's usually called a poem.

And are you counting the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Eliot's The Waste Land as too long? What's your cutoff for poems? (FWIW, Waste Land is shorter than Goblin Market, and Hymn to Hermes only 13 lines longer.)

ETA: also on my list are Curragh of Kildare (Traditional Song), The Handsome Cabin Boy (Traditional Song), Tam Lin, Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle (which is nom'd under Arthurian Mythology, but with the character Dame Ragnelle, who appears ONLY in that poem), and Wulf and Eadwacer. (I'm assuming Odyssey, Aenied, Ramayama, and Tristan and Iseut are all too long?)

[donutsweeper]

There's a post collecting music, I'd assume the songs would go there?

As for poems, if the word count is under 30k, they can get listed here, just comment with how they appear in the tagset please.

Arthurian Mythology (in the whole) is in the tagset, not a specific poem, so I don't think it can be counted as a short story.

[larryhammer]

I'm asking about Curragh of Kildare, Handsome Cabin Boy, Tam Lin, and Lyke-Wake Dirge in the songs post.

And fair point about Arthurian faffing about. The others, though, I believe fit here: Hymn to Hermes, The Waste Land, and Wulf and Eadwacer.

[donutsweeper]

added

[larryhammer]

And the maintainer of the list of music/songs in the tagset is declining to mention those four traditional songs. Can we list them here as lyrics?

[donutsweeper]

I don't really think they would fit this list. You could always put together your own compilation post of songs and ballads?

[larryhammer]

Done -- also including all the poems. (I cribbed a couple of your links, so, er, thanks for those.)

[donutsweeper]

Excellent!

[sovay]

AFAK, the original tune hasn't survived, so it's usually called a poem.

The Young Tradition's version had been ultimately field-collected, although if Hans Fried is right about the origin of the version he passed on to them, then we all have to trust that Boulton recorded it faithfully rather than doing some Baring-Gould embroidery. What I have never been able to get a line on is whether Benjamin Britten had access to a published tune or only a text when he incorporated the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" into his Seranade for Tenor, Horn and Strings in 1943, because his setting is not so far off from the supposed folk version that I can't tell if it was created by the same process as his settings of British and Irish folk songs or if it actually filtered back into the folk tradition more widely and diffusely than the directly credited singing of Buffy Sainte-Marie, which is how I first heard and learned it. tl;dr I have had for years the impression that there is a tune associated with the text predating the twentieth century, but all my information about it is secondhand. I should just look up the Boulton sometime.

[larryhammer]

Interesting! I've only scratched the surface of this issue, but haven't got a clear handle on anything. It looks like there isn't much that is clear?

[sovay]

I've only scratched the surface of this issue, but haven't got a clear handle on anything. It looks like there isn't much that is clear?

Some of the unclarity may have just been introduced by me, for which I apologize. Basically, there are two versions of a tune for the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in circulation and the question is where they came from. The Young Tradition recorded one version for their self-titled debut album in 1966; the chain of transmission for their tune is supposed to go back to Harold Boulton's Songs of the North (1895), which I have never looked into and consequently feels like a major gap in any information I can provide on the subject. The other version was used by Benjamin Britten for a classical arrangement in 1943 and popularized in a much sparer, creepier folk style by Buffy Sainte-Marie in 1967. (She was my introduction to the song; it frightened me as a child. I am never going to get over the sistrum. It makes it sound older than Christianity, old as Demeter in the dark.) I know of at least two other, earlier classical settings by reputation, but every version of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" I have personally heard has descended from either the Britten or the Young Tradition, and one of the points of confusion is that if you give them a listen and strip away the close, dark harmonies on the one hand and all the discordant strings and brass on the other, you will see that while they are not mutually interchangeable, they are within plausible hailing distance of one another. Adding to the confusion, Britten was into British folk music himself and began his literally lifelong project of setting folk songs as art songs right around the same time as he was working on the song cycle into which he incorporated the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," making it plausible that he had access to a tune which he was adapting rather than inventing for the at least early seventeenth-century text, but I have never seen, although the same caveat applies that I haven't thrown myself into his archive to find out, that he said anything about it one way or the other. Further adding to the confusion, the Young Tradition and Buffy Sainte-Marie hit the zeitgeist as part of the same era of British folk revival, at which point the Britten version went straight into the folk tradition alongside the version that may have been collected by Boulton, but since it predates by two decades the singing of the Young Tradition and they learned their tune from Hans Fried who admits that he may have altered it unconsciously along the way, I can't prove zero influence if Fried had ever heard the Britten. Altogether it feels as though there should have been a tune which survived to diverge in the twentieth century, but I have not done enough research myself to distinguish the likelihood from a tinfoil hat and will stand corrected by to anyone who comes along with better information.

(The knock at Sabine Baring-Gould was gratuitous, but the Devil's Interval point out in their liner notes that his collection of the "Midsummer Carol" has got flowery Victoriana all over it and I've never been able to take some of its rhymes seriously since. On the other hand, absolutely nobody appears to be able to figure out where the "Bonfire Carol" came from unless it's fakelore and I don't care, it's terrifying.)

[lannamichaels]

Thank you for doing this! :D

[blackeyedgirl]

I think 'Seventy-Two Letters - Ted Chiang' would qualify? I don't have the wordcount but it's about 60 pages in the paperback!

I don't think I know enough about golems to offer it but I really hope someone picks up whatever the worldbuilding request is ♥

[donutsweeper]

Looks like it's small enough so I've added it, thanks!

[lirazel]

That was my request! I'm really, really hoping someone writes it for me! :D

[blackeyedgirl]

Aw, I really hope someone picks that up! It was one of my favourite stories in the short-story collection (we read it for book club this year) and I was excited when I saw it and then worldbuilding in the tagset. So many questions about what's going on outside the perspective of the narrator and their society :D

[waydownhadestown]

I nominated Christopher Mills Return to Sender - Isabel J. Kim (~6k words, and available to read for free here: https://www.fantasy-magazine.com/fm/fiction/christopher-mills-return-to-sender/)!

[donutsweeper]

Added! And thank you for linking to the story as well :)

[kittyeden]

The Magician's Apprentice by Tamsyn Muir is also a short story, and available to read here!

[donutsweeper]

Added! Thanks for the link :)

[sushiflop]

Sandkings, a GRRM short story, is in the tagset! It is readable here, or otherwise available in the short story collection by the same name so far as I know.

[donutsweeper]

That link seems kind of sketchy but I'll add the story to the list.

[sushiflop]

It is Googleable and posted in various locations other than the particular site I linked to fwiw!

Art of Deception by Stephanie Burgis

[(Anonymous)]

The Art of Deception by Stephanie Burgis is about 12,000 words long.
I don't think it's available for free, but it's bothe available as a standalone ebook and in her collection, Touchstones.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Deception-Stephanie-Burgis-ebook/dp/B01K5OI81S
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Touchstones-Collection-Stephanie-Burgis/dp/B0B5KK42HQ

It's not YA even though the author is perhaps most well know for YA. I should do a proper promo post, but to quote a random review: "A fascinating magical library, a twisty and intrigue-filled plot, assassins and sword fights and romance, humour and warmth"

Lesserstorm

Re: Art of Deception by Stephanie Burgis

[donutsweeper]

I'll add it, thanks!

[tigerlily]

Eye of the Beholder - Trudi Canavan is also a short story, found in Grimdark Magazine Issue #19! It's not free, but the issue can be purchased at the site in PDF or ePub format, or through Amazon (where it is also "free" if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.)

Not sure of the word/page count, but I read it in half an hour.

[donutsweeper]

Added, thanks!