Asimov, Isaac - "Nightfall"
Asimov, Isaac - "The Last Question"
Barthelme, Donald - "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby"
Beckett, Samuel - "That Time"
Bisson, Terry - They're Made Out of Meat
Boyle, T. C. - The Hit Man
Carver, Raymond - Little Things
Chekhov, Anton - "The Bet"
Dick, Philip K - "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" Gibson, William - Dogfight ("...he had nobody to tell it to. Nobody at all.")
Hemingway, Ernest - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
Hemingway, Ernest - Hills Like White Elephants
Makkai, Rebecca - "The Briefcase"
Bradbury, Ray - "The Veldt"
Saroyan, William - "Seventy Thousand Assyrians"
I would point others to Robert Browning’s Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came. It’s a late romantic poem about the time after Camelot’s glory has faded and all hopes have been dashed by man’s weakness and the inexorable hunger of time. A fitting poem for those of us who live in an age whose greatest promises lay unfulfilled. These were not the robots we were promised.*
*Tagline stolen from a truly stellar Op-Ed from last year available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/opinion/sunday/household-...
1) Songs of Innocence and of Experience from William Blake.
2) The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
3) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I've started to enjoy reading poetry again. The education system managed to extinguish any love I had for poetry. It's been a bit over half a decade since I was in school, and I've started to enjoy reading poetry again.
Turns out it's possible to just read a poem and enjoy it without having to go through line by line and word by word analysing the thing to death.
I actually prefer poetry to long form text right now. I don't have the time or attention span to sit down and read a whole book, but poems are like a shot of literature. I've been enjoying reading sci-fi short stories for the same reason.