Whose greatest?

While Forbes is ostensibly an American business magazine, it’s also popular for its lists – such as The Richest 400 Americans; The World's Most Powerful People, and The World's Billionaires. Two years ago, however, on 1 June, 2024, it published “The 25 Greatest Short Stories Of All Time”. That’s a tall order and of course it can’t be definitive in any way; it can only represent the subjective view of the list’s compiler, Sughnen Yongo, a former contributor to the magazine. While there are a number of classics that would be at home on any short-story shortlist – Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro (placed 17); William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, (14); Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (12); Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find (3), and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (2) – they don’t all fall into that category. The point is, such lists are little more than personal views or personal favourites. Certainly, they can’t be universally proven by statistical data as The Richest 400 Americans can. Also, there is no such thing as expert analysis and insights in the context of producing such a list as Forbes would have us believe its contributors are capable of. A better headline would be “Our 25 Greatest Short Stories Of All Time”. We’re also sure readers would come up with contenders that don’t appear on this particular Forbes’ index, or that a list compiled by another Forbes’ contributor would produce a very different set of short stories.