Project Gutenberg is a free library of 70,000 free books in various e formats, from pdf & txt to pub and mobi.Great suggestions so far, Gents! I was going to wait a couple weeks before we got going, but since a handful of you are already interested, we might start at the end of this week.
That's my thought as well. I can't think of any contemporary shorts stories that I've read. I believe Gish Jen's Who's Irish? is the newest that I've read, and that was published in 1999.
Due to the nature of some of the books in the picture, or possibly because of the wood flooring, desk, and chair with no electronics in sight?
I was actually revisiting some Shirley Jackson, John Updike, and Ursula LeGuin last night.
My plan is to not pick anything that might be too inaccessible. I have a couple dozen PDFs saved of stories that I don't own paper copies of. Many classics can be found on university websites. I'll check into the legality of sharing the PDFs in case some of the stories cannot be easily found from a quick search on the web.
We'll probably stick with shorter short stories, at least to begin with. I should have most of everything figured out in the next few days, but I'm thinking one story every week. If folks aren't keeping up, then we can switch to a story every other week, or even one per month. I certainly don't want this to feel overwhelming. Also, I was thinking of making individual threads for each story. After a certain amount of time, I can merge them into a master thread. That way members who might be late to the game can still add their thoughts, even after we've started in on the next reading.
They do have short stories and compilations.