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Not in english, but we read Anne Frank's Diary in grade 8, Andorra by Max Frisch in grade 9 or 10.

But the most disturbing was "Der Sandmann" in grade 11 and "Der gelbe Vogel" (originally "Alan and Naomi") in grade 9.

• "Gentlemen, your verdict" by Michael Bruce - trolley problem on a submarine (attention: weird vertical formatting)
• "Just Lather, That's All" by Hernando Téllez" - a barber during a civil war

The second one actually gave me half of a mental breakdown, but not because it was too violent for me.
One analysis that I read made the exact opposite conclusion that I made, and it showed me this: in the subject of English, two diametrically opposed points can both be equally correct! Nothing is fixed! Reality is mutable!

Also The Lottery, The Veldt, Harrison Bergeron (which others have already mentioned)

The egg by Andy Weir

i figured the tweet was about The Lotterry and everyone would go "Oh it's obviously a tweet about The Lottery" but nope.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Someone did a great adaptation to film as well.

My senior year in high school, my English teacher started the year by having us turn in a list of all of the books we had read. My list was much longer than most of my classmates. He then assigned us books to read and report on based on some criteria (hypothesis: books that would make us miserable). I got assigned two existentialist plays, "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit." I think those plays did permanent damage to my psyche.

(Sidenote: a classmate who didn't read very much got assigned Virginia Wolff. She thought it very unfair that I only had to rea d couple of plays.)

During online school we had to read about the "Edmund Fitzgerald" and there was a cringy song too. We were constantly being accused of skipping classes because zoom was under too much load and never loading, or would make 2 separate calls for some reason. Whole society under collapse and we had to uproot all of education just so we could learn that a fucking boat sank. THATS ALL THE UNIT WAS. Just a stupid boat sinking.

Harrison Bergeron

A Rose for Emily.

It was about some old lady hermit. She had some relationship with the town and after she died they went into her house. >!Emily had been sleeping next to the corpse of her dead husband for probably decades!<.

Top of mind for this subject: Flowers for Algernon.

Of Mice and Men might qualify, but weighs in at 100 pages. I'm not sure what the threshold is for "short."

On my own time in High-school, I read: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.

A separate peace was a book we got in highschool where a kid possibly has homosexual feelings for another and throws him out of a tree which shatters his leg and eventually kills him.

Alan and Naomi by Myron Levoy

It's a novel, but not a very long one.

Been looking for this book for a long time, maybe someone here can help? It was in french, no idea if it was ever translated. The whole story is a guy in room alone with his dad, the dad is in a coma and expected to die (I believe the familly decided to unplug him). The guy is bitching to his dad, telling him how much he hates him for being an abusive asshole or something. It was really crude and emotonial. At the end, instead of dying when he's unplugged, the dad wakes up. Maybe it was not a novel, but a part of a book, and maybe the title had the work Duck in it.