Short story challenges

I mentioned during Readathon that I love short stories. I'm a big fan of listening to them on my iPod -- both Public Radio International and the New Yorker have shows that feature them. So when I found two great short-story challenges recently, I immediately decided to jump in. Both were created by Rob and sound great. You can check out his posts on them by clicking on the pictures below.

Rob describes this one as follows: "The challenge is a simple one - no time limit, no specific titles, just the goal of reading 100 self-picked short stories as and when possible." Simple, right? And you can knock out a short story in no time, certainly a heck of a lot faster than full-out novels. I'm not going to attempt to pick out my list beforehand, I'm just going to read them as the mood takes me. I'll keep a running list in another post.

Anton Chekhov wrote 201 short stories, in addition to his wonderful plays. The goal of this challenge is to read all 201, in the order presented. There's no time limit. I've been looking at the bookstores, and many of the Chekhov story compilations out there only offer, at most, about 40 of the stories. There is a box set of all 201, translated by the great Constance Garnett, which will be going on my Christmas list. In the meantime, I'll have to get by with reading them online. The entire collection can found here. Again, I'll keep the list in a separate post.