Top ten short stories

Tessa Hadley's novels include Accidents in the Home, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, and Clever Girl. She has stories published regularly in The New Yorker, and also in Granta and the Guardian; a collection, Sunstroke and other stories, was published in 2007. A second collection, Married Love, came out in 2012.

She named her top ten short stories for the Guardian. One title on the list:

"Love of a Good Woman" by Alice Munro

Munro has changed our sense of what the short story can do as radically as Chekhov and Mansfield did at the beginning of the 20th century. She uses the form so capaciously – a whole community in 1950s rural Canada is captured in the loose weave of this one – around a woman who believes she's uncovered the secret of a violent death. She makes plans to do the right thing, bring the secret into the light of day. There's never a false or fussy note, as Munro penetrates in words into the hidden roots of how we choose to live, and why we act.

Read about the other stories on the list.

Also see: Rosamund Bartlett's five top books on Russian short stories, Chris Priestley's top ten scary short stories, Jane Ciabattari's five must-read short-story collections, and Alison MacLeod's top ten short stories.

--Marshal Zeringue