collection of short stories books

20 New Must-Read Short Story Collections

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Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

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collection of short stories books

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover—and in some cases even make and unmake—the various uncharted parts of existence. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that—a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

A good short story has an incredible amount of power. In just a small amount of pages, authors of short stories are able to create entire worlds, depict characters who feel real, and evoke deep emotions. If you’re a fan of short stories, you’re in luck, because 2022 has been an excellent year for short story collections. In fact, there are so many great short story collections this year, that it was hard to narrow it down to just 20 must-reads. We couldn’t possibly cover them all, so if your fave didn’t make this list, no worries! It’s still amazing.

As for the ones that are on this list, these are the 20 must-read short story collections that you’re going to love, no matter what genres you normally gravitate towards. Literary fiction is heavily represented on this list, but there are short stories in plenty of other genres as well! Love speculative fiction? Of course you do. There’s plenty of that here on this list. Mysteries? Thrillers? Suspense? Yep. Horror? Aww yeah. Sci-fi? Fantasy? Check and check. Basically, these short story collections are doing everything, and you’re going to love them.

So get your TBR lists ready, because you’re going to want to add all of these books to your to-read pile right away.

cover of Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Jean Chen Ho’s debut is a collection of linked stories following Fiona Lin and Jane Shen, two Taiwanese American women who have been best friends since the 2nd grade. Growing up in Los Angeles, Fiona and Jane have very different but equally tumultuous family lives. As with most friendships, there are moments in time when Fiona and Jane grow closer to one another, and other periods of time where they drift apart. Each short story explores a different moment in their friendship throughout their lives. Together, these stories paint a vivid portrait of friendship, love, loss, and coming of age in contemporary America.

cover for seasonal work

Seasonal Work by Laura Lippman

If you are already a fan of Laura Lippman’s work, then you absolutely have to add her latest short story collection to your TBR list. But even if you’ve never read Lippman before, you’re in for a treat. Seasonal Work is a collection of psychological suspense/thriller stories featuring murder, mystery, love gone wrong, deception, scandals, and so much more. If you only read one crime fiction short story in 2022, make it one from this short story collection.

cover of Seeking Fortune Elsewhere: Stories by Sindya Bhanoo; image of a brown suitcase wrapped in pink flowers

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere is the debut short story collection from O. Henry Prize winning author Sindya Bhanoo. From Pittsburgh to Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories explore the lives of South Indian immigrants and the families they leave behind. Bhanoo’s stories show how the lives of these characters and the decisions they make are complicated, filled with moments of regret, hope, and triumph.

cover of Out There by Kate Folk

Out There by Kate Folk

What strange and eerie secrets lurk beneath the lives of seemingly ordinary people? That’s what Kate Folk examines in her short story collection Out There. These highly imaginative short stories infuse elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction into the literary fiction landscape. Each story looks deep into the reader’s subconscious dreams and nightmares.

cover of Night of the Living Rez: Stories by Morgan Talty, pastel font over illustration of night sky seen from the forest floor

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

This collection consists of 12 short stories that look at life in Maine’s Native Penobscot Nation in the 21st century. These dark but honest stories follow a troubled family dealing with issues of grief, depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, and more. But these stories are filled with hope and magic as well. At the center of Night of the Living Rez is David. Each story explores the lives of David, his family, and his friends at different points in their lives.

the cover of Life Ceremony

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

Life Ceremony is Sayaka Murata’s first short story collection to ever be translated into English. In these 12 stories, the award-winning author of Convenience Store Woman mixes her signature blend of the humorous, the awkward, and the terrifying to tell stories of loners and outcasts who buck traditions and societal expectations. Murata’s stories will have you questioning what it means to be human in this world and what is sacrificed when we try too hard to fit in.

ghost lover book cover

Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

From New York Times bestselling author Lisa Taddeo comes a stunning collection of nine short stories you won’t want to miss. This collection includes two Pushcart Prize winners and a finalist for the National Magazine Award as well as previously unpublished work. Ghost Lover tells stories of complicated, fascinating, and flawed women and their experiences of deep love, wild obsession, and uncontrollable grief.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu book cover

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a collection of 12 speculative fiction short stories where the ordinary is made strange and the strange becomes ordinary. Each story in this collection creates a strange world where readers will get lost. From a group of children who steal a haunted doll to an insomniac seduced by the Sandman, each of these short stories digs deep into human nature and the contradictions that live within us all.

Bliss Montage cover

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

Ling Ma stunned readers with her debut novel Severance in 2018, and now she’s back with a short story collection that’s just as mesmerizing. Through eight short stories, Ma introduces readers to characters and stories that examine the realities of motherhood, friendship, love, loneliness, and more. In one story, a woman lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends. In another, a toxic friendship is built around a drug that makes you invisible. These situations seems strange, but the emotions and characters are entirely relatable.

natural history book cover

Natural History by Andrea Barrett

The six short stories in Andrea Barrett’s collection Natural History feature characters Barrett has written about in her work since 1996’s Ship Fever . But even if this is your first Andrea Barrett book, you will connect with these characters right away. In these interconnected stories, Barrett allows readers into the intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators. Following their lives throughout the years, readers see the ways women’s lives and the expectations put upon them have changed over the years.

what we fed to the manticore book cover

What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

What We Fed to the Manticore is a really fun short story collection because it consists of nine short stories all told from a different animal’s perspectives. Through these animals’ eyes, debut author Talia Lakshmi Kolluri discusses environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family. Whether the story is told from the perspective of a donkey, a vulture, or a pigeon, readers will become full immersed in these characters and their stories.

Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-lee Chai cover

Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-lee Chai

Tomorrow in Shanghai is May-lee Chai’s beautiful follow-up collection to her award-winning collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants. These stories examine the lives of people in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and people of Chinese descent living throughout the world. Whether the characters are rich or poor, male or female, living in the city or the country, each story looks at issues of prejudice, power dynamics, and interpersonal struggles in the globalized world.

cover of The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

The Memory Librarian  is like a literary tie-in for Janelle Monáe’s high-concept album  Dirty Computer,  set in a world in which thoughts can be erased or controlled. This collection expands on the totalitarian existence imagined in  Dirty Computer . To fully flesh out this sci-fi world, Monáe also collaboraties with several talented sci-fi/fantasy authors, including Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas — just to name a few.

Seven Empty Houses cover

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin

Seven Empty Houses is a short story collection that just made the  National Book Award longlist  for best book in translation. In this collection, Samanta Schweblin tells seven stories about seven strange houses that are all empty in different ways. Some are devoid of love. Some don’t have any furniture. Or any people. But in every case, something always creeps in: trespassers, a ghost, a list of things to do before you die…you get the idea. Samanta Schweblin has already wowed readers with her collection Mouthful of Birds, and this one is just as good if not better!

a sliver of darkness book cover

A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

This debut short story collection from author C. J. Tudor features 10 tales that are creepy, twisty, and mind-bending. For instance, there’s “The Lion at the Gate,” a story about a strange piece of graffiti that leads four school friends into a horrifying encounter. And as the world descends into darkness in “Final Course,” a group of old friends find time for one last dinner party. Then there’s “I’m Not Ted,” in which a case of mistaken identity turns deadly. This one is a must-read for horror fans and anyone who is hungry for stories that will stick with you long after you’ve finished the final page.

heartbroke book cover

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

Chelsea Bieker, the acclaimed author of Godshot, is back with a remarkable collection of short stories set in California’s Central Valley. From a woman who steals a baby from a shelter, to a mother and son selling dreamcatchers along the highway, to two teenage girls playing a dangerous online game, all of Bieker’s characters burn with deep and reckless desires. And all are heartbroken in their own ways.

Milk Blood Heat book cover

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

The last collection was set entirely in California, and Milk Blood Heat is all about Florida. In the cities and suburbs of Florida, the characters in these stories each find themselves confronted by moments of violent personal reckonings. Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut collection is filled with intimate, emotional moments that shed light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, and how we are all connected to one another.

city of saints and madmen book cover

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer, who has been called “the weird Thoreau,” is probably most known for his sci-fi/weird fiction Southern Reach trilogy ( Annihilation, Authority , and Acceptance ). In City of Saints and Madmen, VanderMeer introduces readers to the world of Ambergris, a place unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. Through this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports, VanderMeer creates a fantasy world that feels incredibly real.

Cover of Gods of Want

Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang

With each story in K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want , the author mixes myth, memory, and surrealism to tell feminist stories about Asian American women from different walks of life. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law goes to torturous ends in an attempt to get a wife out of her home. In “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad becomes real. And in “Auntland,” a stream of aunts attempt to adjust to American life in strange ways. These uncanny stories explore questions of power, identity, and memory.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs cover

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana

All of the stories in Sidik Fofana’s Stories from the Tenants Downstairs are set in a low-income Harlem high rise where gentrification weighs heavy on the tenants’ minds. Each of the eight interconnected stories explores the hopes, struggles, and strengths of the tenants in the Banneker Homes. Every tenant there has a unique, touching, and thought-provoking story to tell.

Looking for more must-read short story collections? Here are 10 speculative story collections to enjoy in 2022 . And here are the sci-fi/fantasy short story collections you won’t want to miss .

collection of short stories books

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How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

Celebrated fantasy and sci-fi writer N.K. Jemisin's debut short story collection includes an excerpt from her Hugo Award-winning trilogy, Broken Earth . Throughout her thought-provoking narratives, she seamlessly takes readers to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and the Jim Crow South. 

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Winner of the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction, O'Connor's collection includes 12 stories that were previously unpublished. Set in chronological order, the book—packed with her detailed prose and dark, humorous voice—is a reminder that she's one of the 20th century's greats.  

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

For his second collection, Carver digs deep into the themes of friendship and love while sending one clear message of hope—even in the darkest of times.   

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

This collection of sci-fi writer Chiang's first eight stories leads readers through various fantastical worlds and ideas, such as that of a man building a tower to heaven. One single narrative,  Story of Your Life , was even adapted into the 2016 film  Arrival   starring Amy Adams.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's Newberry Medal and Hugo Award-winning collection of stories and poems includes items previously published in other anthologies and magazines. Here, he encourages readers to imagine the otherworldly, offering exciting and disturbing prose with one story even set in the world of The Matrix .   

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

This posthumous collection of the Nobel Prize winner's work contains classics such as  Hills Like White Elephant  and  The Snows of Kilimanjaro .

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Labeled in 2015 as "one of most addictive books of the last 25 years" by O , this Pulitzer Prize-winning debut highlights the challenges both Indians and Indian Americans face while abiding by old and new traditions.  

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Salinger may be best known for  The Catcher in the Rye ,  however, some of his most popular prose— including F or Esmé—with Love and Squalor  and A Perfect Day for Bananafish— is packed into this collection. 

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Flip through The Paper Menagerie if you'd like a taste of the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi and fantasy stories that earned Liu critical acclaim.  

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

A master of supernatural fiction, Carter puts her own dark, sensual spin on classic gothic folk and fairy tales like  Little Red Riding Hood ,  Beauty and the Beast , and  Puss in Boots.   

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

With 30 stories, Chekov's signature stream-of-consciousness writing style is on full display as he interprets life in Russia.

A Rose for Emily and Other Stories by William Faulkner

Nearly all stories are based in the exact small town where Faulkner was born and lived during his lifetime, offering insight into the mind of a literary legend. 

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

All 41 stories published in this 1983 winner of the National Book Award for Fiction accurately depict the rich diversity of life in the American South.  

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The individual narratives in  Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury's collection are weaved together to tell the story of humans who work to colonize Mars after escaping an apocalyptic earth.

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

From a proud Nazi to an imprisoned Mayan priest, Borge uses his skillfully illustrated characters to take a philosophical approach in depicting the complexities of the human experience.  

Pastoralia by George Saunders

In his critically acclaimed second short story collection, Saunders  uses his thrilling imagination to write about an odd, alternate version of America that, at times, strikingly resembles our own.

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McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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Penguin Random House

20 Must-Read Collections for Short Story Month

Explore some of the most exciting voices in short fiction. the collections below include established authors and newcomers – celebrate short story month with the collections below., the thing around your neck, by chimamanda ngozi adichie.

The Thing Around Your Neck Book Cover Picture

Paperback $17.00

Buy from other retailers:, the safety of objects, by a.m. homes.

The Safety of Objects Book Cover Picture

Paperback $22.00

American housewife, by helen ellis.

American Housewife Book Cover Picture

by Ramona Ausubel

Awayland Book Cover Picture

Paperback $16.00

By jenny zhang.

Sour Heart Book Cover Picture

Paperback $18.00

The king is always above the people, by daniel alarcón.

The King Is Always Above the People Book Cover Picture

After the Quake

By haruki murakami.

After the Quake Book Cover Picture

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

By denis johnson.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Book Cover Picture

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang.

Stories of Your Life and Others Book Cover Picture

Paperback $15.95

The bus driver who wanted to be god & other stories, by etgar keret.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories Book Cover Picture

Tenth of December

By george saunders.

Tenth of December Book Cover Picture

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

By helen oyeyemi.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Book Cover Picture

Homesick for Another World

By ottessa moshfegh.

Homesick for Another World Book Cover Picture

Things We Lost in the Fire

By mariana enriquez.

Things We Lost in the Fire Book Cover Picture

The Bed Moved

By rebecca schiff.

The Bed Moved Book Cover Picture

Paperback $20.00

This is how you lose her, by junot díaz.

This Is How You Lose Her Book Cover Picture

by Alice Munro

Dear Life Book Cover Picture

Lovers on All Saints’ Day

By juan gabriel vasquez.

Lovers on All Saints' Day Book Cover Picture

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

By mona awad.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl Book Cover Picture

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The Best Short Story Collections for Great Literature in Small Portions

Works by revered writers like Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, as well as breakthrough names like Emma Cline and Carmen Maria Machado

short story collections

Short stories are more than just a quick fix of fiction for the time-strapped. When crafted well, short stories are like grenades which quickly explode in front of us. They let us dip our toe into strange minds and foreign worlds, or conceal something which lurks behind the pages before sliding into view. Here we round up the best classic and modern short story collections that should be on everyone's radar, whether you're looking to get more into the form or discover some hidden gems.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

wells tower everything ravaged everything burned book jacket

When it was first published in 2009, this debut short story collection by the American writer Wells Tower was something of a sensation. Here was a practitioner who seemed to have sprung fresh out of the traps already in possession of an innate mastery of his form: a gift for shaping intriguing, funny and occasionally devastating tales – about disaffected American schoolboys and disaffected marauding Vikings alike – which contained laser-sighted observations about human behaviour. Over a decade later, Towers’ book has lost none of its power or its poise.

Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

complete stories by flannery oconnor book jacket

It is hard to underplay the legacy of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, of which she wrote 32 in her relatively brief life (she died of lupus at 39, in 1964). Winning the National Book Award for Fiction for this collection (posthumously) in 1972 might be one of them, though in 2009 it was named the best book ever to have won the award (commiserations to John Cheever and Eudora Welty). A devout Catholic with an ear for the sardonic who came to epitomise the Southern Gothic, Flannery’s world view, once deemed progressive, has come under closer scrutiny of late – particularly around race – but for understanding the development of the short story in mid-century America this collection is essential.

Pastoralia by George Saunders

pastoralia by george saunders jacket

If there’s one thing that George Saunders nails in his short stories (and there’s not one, there are many) it’s his imaginative eye for the absurd. Thus the title story of Pastoralia , his second short story collection, published in 2000, is an account of the inner neuroses of a failing father with difficult co-workers, who just so happens not to work for an accountancy firm, but for a nightmarish evolution-of-mankind-themed visitor attraction at which he earns his living by grunting like a caveman and pretending to eat bugs. It’s typical of the pathos and humour that Saunders is so good at eliciting, so that even the bleakest, most ridiculous scenarios are still infused with delight.

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

afterparties

The Central Valley of California is the backdrop of this psychedelic debut from Anthony Veasna So, a Cambodian-American writer who tragically died before the book was published. In it, So tells tales that ricochet between being tenderly moving and darkly amusing, drawing on his own race and sexuality to create characters with many different, and sometimes clashing, identities.

[An earlier version of this entry included incorrect information about the circumstances of the author's death.]

Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery

show them a good time

The buzzy debut from Irish writer Nicole Flattery inspired a bidding war ahead of its publication in 2019, and reading the collection it feels as though she has inhaled the absurdity this strange collective moment and let it out in one steady plumes. One story finds a woman maniacally dating during an apocalypse, while another watches a plucky teenage girl trying to seduce her parent's builder by watching The Exorcist together.

Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich

objects of desire

In eleven distinct but spiritually interwoven stories, New Yorker editor Clare Sestanovich finds women at different crossroads in their lives. In the title story, a woman finds herself unable to move on from her ex and questioning the life she has built since leaving him, while another focuses on a woman who finds herself on the outskirts of a polyamorous relationship, berating herself for not being in the middle of the action.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

filthy animals

Brandon Taylor's electric novel Real Life, which offered a Black perspective on the pernicious yet subtle racism entrenched in American college life, earned him a Booker Prize nomination in 2020. His next work is a collection of linked short stories set in the Midwest, including an outbreak of violence amongst a group of teenagers, a girl who pushes her babysitter to the edge, and a man in a precarious open relationship with two dancers.

You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

you will never be forgotten

As the dismembered body which features on the cover might suggest, Mary South's pitch-black collection of stories is not exactly a jolly read. Here you'll find Black Mirror- esque tales about a moderator for grim online videos of suicide and beheadings, a rehabilitation camp for internet trolls where one guest goes astray, and the tale of an architect who finds her work inspired by her daughter's birth defect. An alluring collection of stories about the ways our pain manifests and the polarised world we live in.

Daddy by Emma Cline

daddy

The author of the best-selling The Girls, inspired by the Manson family and killing of Sharon Tate, finds equally dark territory in this collection of stories about who holds power between men and women, adults and children. In one story we visit a family at Christmas time who are trying to move past the abuse of the father figure, while in another a violent incident brings a father and son together. Cline's understanding of the darkness inside human beings bringing each story to life.

Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg

deborah eisenberg

This acclaimed collection of six stories, the first release from Eisenberg in 12 years, is brilliantly droll and crackling with life. Whether dismantling our relationship with money or the lasting wounds which grief leaves us on, Your Duck is My Duck is both moving and amusing.

Sam The Cat by Matthew Klam

sam the cat

The Office Of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

office of historical corrections

This celebrated 2020 collection is an exploration of race which takes you on a journey alongside the conflicted characters which Evans presents. From the story of a white university student who finds that a photograph in which she's wearing a Confederate flag bikini has gone viral, to the tale of how a wedding takes an unexpected twist, Evans tiptoes through uncomfortable topics with enjoyable and impressive results.

To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss

nicole krauss

Krauss, author of acclaimed novels such as Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, here takes the long view of life. These stories connect a moment in a girl's adolescence to the feeling of youth felt by a woman in later life, linking up the sons, husbands and friends in a woman's life to question the differences between the sexes.

You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

curtis

In an age rife with hustles and scams, Sittenfeld's You Think It I'll Say It looks not at those trying to con us, but at the acts of self-deception we engage in. Whether that means the ways which we misread other people or our tendencies to unknowingly dupe ourselves, these ten stories feel timeless yet knowing of the current zeitgeist.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Shoulder, Text, Joint, Font, Poster, Neck, Chest, Back,

The debut book from Machado explores the various violences inflicted in women's bodies, her writing walking a tightrope between the erotic and horrific, the amusing and the macabre. In 'The Husband Stitch' she explores the body-wrenching pain of labour and the joke of men asking the surgeon for an extra stitch when putting their wife back together, while 'Eight Bites' digs into the fairytale promises of weight-loss transformation.

Grand Union by Zadie Smith

Font, Text, Poster, Logo, Graphics, Brand, Graphic design,

Having mastered the novel and essay formats, British literary stalwart Zadie Smith turned her pen to short stories in 2019. The 19 different tales in Grand Union are sprawling in their reach, touching on everything from single motherhood to the free speech debate in universities, objectifying men to the urban myth of Michael Jackson leaving New York with friends on the morning of 9/11, all told in Smith's commanding prose.

Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill

Text, Font, Poster, Adaptation, Stock photography, Photography, Black-and-white, Album cover, Illustration, Art,

Long, long before Phoebe Waller-Bridge caused a stir with Fleabag , Mary Gaitskill was dissecting the power dynamics of sex and relationships between men and women with her intense tone of voice. Bad Behaviour burns with longing and passion, from stories about ex partners haunting a city to a woman waiting for a date to show up while he watches her from across the street. These stories are uncomfortable, prescient and fascinating.

Florida by Lauren Groff

Best short stories

Snakes, crocodiles and lizards stalk the pages of this 2018 collection from one of America's most celebrated novelists, in which the muggy, murky state of Florida is always a principle character. Groff's mastery of language, plot and dialogue are on full display in a set of stories that linger long after you've closed the last page.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

junot diaz

In his unmistakably brash style, Díaz pulls you into the life of his recurring protagonist Yunior at the point of his break-up with his long-term girlfriend, then when a woman that comes into his life fleetingly then dumps him and an older woman he has an affair with who becomes his teacher. Despite the message of how flawed our relationships are, Díaz reminds us that “ love, real love, is not so easily shed.”

The Love Object by Edna O'Brien

Best short stories

One of great modern Irish writers, this 2014 collection spans five decades of brilliance from O'Brien whose prose style is among the most revered of any living author. Her characters range from lonely nuns to single mothers to modern millionaires and are consistently brilliantly.

Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.

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Have You Tried Reading a Short Story?

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If you, like some of us, have been struggling to make it through some of your more ambitious reading material — like Middlemarch , In Search of Lost Time, or Journal of a Plague Year especially — it might be time to consider a short story. Sure, they might not give you the sense of accomplishment you’d feel tearing through a tome, but they are economical, transportive vehicles all on their own. And what matters most isn’t what you can accomplish during this time, but whether you can successfully spend a few minutes doing something — anything — but think about our present moment. Below, the Cut staff weigh in on what story collections have been holding our attention.

Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories by Lily Tuck

In Heathcliff Redux , National Book Award winner Lily Tuck revisits the gothic romance of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to tell the deliciously spare story of a Kentucky wife and mother having an affair with a seemingly dangerous man. Formally inventive, the novella and following short stories are erotic, unforgiving, and pack a punch in very, very few words. —Brock Colyar, editorial assistant

Best American Short Stories 2019 edited by Roxane Gay

This might be dorky, but I love the yearly Best American Short Stories collections from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. If I’m feeling indecisive — which is often — I can dive into a collection that’s curated by a favorite author (Meg Wolitzer! Roxane Gay!) and see what kinds of stories have recently captured their attention. Plus, it’s a good opportunity to discover writers I didn’t know. (I discovered Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, and Curtis Sittenfield this way.) The collections are massively satisfying. —Kerensa Cadenas, senior editor

The Bed Moved by Rebecca Schiff

Disclaimer: I would rather read Middlemarch or In Search of Lost Time than a short-story collection. That being said, when I read Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved four years ago, I remember thinking it was my ideal collection. The main narrator, an irreverent 20-something woman with a very dark sense of humor, is hilarious; the stories are simply a joy to read. In particular, I remember one in which she stumbles upon one of her dead father’s favorite porn sites, which gives her troubling insight into what got her dad off (topless women boxing). If that narrative appeals to you, I’d recommend picking it up. —Amanda Arnold, writer

Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg

There are many moments in Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories, when, in an instant of knifeblade concision, it becomes clear that all is not as it appears to be. “I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking,” opens “Days,” the first story Eisenberg ever wrote, “by which time there was hell to pay for it.” Charlotte, the narrator of Eisenberg’s first published story, “Flotsam,” which became the opener of her 1986 collection, Transactions in a Foreign Currency , is either tall or ungainly, depending whose sightlines she happens to reside in. (As her boyfriend falls out of love with her, “my athletic tallness, which Robert had admired when we met, with the dissolving of his affection came to feel like an untended sprawl”.)

These hairpin turns of recalibration are Eisenberg’s specialty. Her occasions can be mundane or cataclysmic — a breakup and scene change in “Flotsam” or 9/11 in “Twilight of the Superheroes” — but she understands that all turbulence is turbulence, and the global and the personal burble between the two. “It’s very, very, very difficult for people, particularly people with a certain level of comfort or privilege, to take in the reality of a situation,” Eisenberg told the New York Times Magazine in 2018, when the magazine celebrated her as a “chronicler of American insanity.” She’s a slow, methodical writer; each story apparently takes her a year. I’d call them jewels, but that doesn’t seem hard enough, sharp enough. They’re gems. —Matthew Schneier, features writer

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath

Written for Mademoiselle when the poet was a student at Smith College in 1952, the short story was later rejected and published for the first time, in its original, “sinister” form last year. The story of a young girl on a mysterious train ride, it is a quick, suspenseful read with a very Plathian story line and surprisingly light-hearted ending. You’ll wonder for weeks what the hell it was actually about (and maybe it’s about hell?). —Brock Colyar, editorial assistant

The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac

Upon rereading Balzac’s 1832 short story “A Passion in the Desert,” it strikes me as relevant to a couple phenomena that have come to dominate our days: self-isolation and the Netflix docuseries Tiger King . A young French soldier on a military expedition in Egypt falls into the hands of an opposing army but manages to escape. He finds himself quite alone in the desert, a prospect at once terrifying and depressing, his mind full of nothing but his former life. But then — twist — his quiet desperation is interrupted by the presence of a wild panther, Mignonne, who quickly becomes the soldier’s everything: friend, enemy, and beloved. It’s a classic tale of being utterly alone in this world and at the same time obsessed with a large cat who may or may not kill you at any time. “She was lightening fast in passion,” says the narrator, “a block of granite slipping forward, and she froze at the name ‘Mignonne.’” —Hannah Gold, writer

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

If you want a masterclass in short stories, read Carmen Maria Machado’s electric collection Her Body and Other Parties . Machado delivers a genre-bending exploration of gender, sexuality, love, sex, and even Law and Order . It’s hard to not read it with your mouth agape over her prose and her total mastery of the form. She makes a modern gothic fairy-tale deeply unsettling and incredibly human. —Kerensa Cadenas, senior editor

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One: 1929–1964 edited by Robert Silverberg

I know some people look down their noses at “best of” albums and greatest hits collections, but those people need to hop off their high horses. Here are 26 of the greatest English-language sci-fi stories ever written. I couldn’t pick one favorite, they’re all excellent. “Coming Attraction” hits differently now — it’s set in a dystopic future in which all American women wear face masks, all the time. —Rachel Bashein, managing editor

The Soho Press Book of ‘80s Short Fiction edited by Dale Peck

In an effort to put a dividing line between “staring at the news on my phone time” and “fitfully nodding off to sleep time,” I’ve begun reading a single story from this anthology every night before going to bed. The ’80s really were a golden era for the short story, a time when notorious editor Gordon Lish helped make writers like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel into the disaffected, minimalist titans we know them as today. All those classics of the genre are here, plus sexier, more subversive and harder to find work by writers like Rebecca Brown, Robert Glück, and David Wojnarowicz. Open it up and you’re not sure what you’ll find — the best story ever written about grief or a diaristic novella called “Weird Fucks”? —Jordan Larson, essays editor

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Book Scrolling

Best Book Lists, Award Aggregation, & Book Data

The Best Short Story Collections Of All-Time

The Best Short Story Collections Of All Time

“What are the best Short Story Collections Of All-Time??” We looked at 382 of the top books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 25 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Short Story” book lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 350+ books, as well as the lists we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 25 Short Story Collections

25 .) 20th century ghosts by joe hill.

collection of short stories books

Lists It Appears On:

  • Long Beach Public Library
“Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. . . . Francis was human once, but now he’s an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . . John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. . . . Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of ’77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. . . . The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. . . .”

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24 .) A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

collection of short stories books

  • Paste Magazine
“A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.”

23 .) Can’t And Won’t by Lydia Davis

collection of short stories books

  • Scottic Book Trust
“Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of “”Bloomington”” reads, “”Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.”” Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in “”A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates,”” a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis’s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.”

22 .) Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

collection of short stories books

“A collection of fourteen dark tales, Everything’s Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and “Riding the Bullet,” King’s original ebook, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade. Two of the stories, “The Little Sisters of Eluria” and “Everything’s Eventual” are closely related to the Dark Tower series. “Riding the Bullet,” is the story of Alan Parker, who’s hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” a sparring couple’s contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d’ gets out of sorts. “1408,” the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards” or “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses,” and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn’t kill him, he won’t be writing about ghosts anymore.”

21 .) In the Country by Mia Alvar

collection of short stories books

  • Knopf Doubleday
In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.

20 .) Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

collection of short stories books

  • Cool Material
  • Publishers Weekly
Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson’s prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.

19 .) Night Shift by Stephen King

collection of short stories books

Night Shift—Stephen King’s first collection of stories—is an early showcase of the depths that King’s wicked imagination could plumb. In these 20 tales, we see mutated rats gone bad (“Graveyard Shift”); a cataclysmic virus that threatens humanity (“Night Surf,” the basis for The Stand); a smoker who will try anything to stop (“Quitters, Inc.”); a reclusive alcoholic who begins a gruesome transformation (“Gray Matter”); and many more. This is Stephen King at his horrifying best.

18 .) Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

collection of short stories books

  • Huffington Post
The Stories: A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, Just Before the War with the Eskimos, The Laughing Man, Down at the Dinghy, For Esme — With Love and Squalor, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, and Teddy.

17 .) No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

collection of short stories books

Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly—they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.

16 .) Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

collection of short stories books

Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today’s most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic.

15 .) The Best American Short Stories (annual)

collection of short stories books

  • Acton Memorial Library
The Best American Short Stories 2017 casts a vote for and celebrates all that is our country. Here you’ll find a man with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, naval officers trapped on a submarine, a contestant on America’s Funniest Home Videos, and a gay man desperate to be a father—unforgettable characters waiting for an outcome, burning with stories to tell.

14 .) The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

collection of short stories books

“One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. “”Power and haunting,”” and “”nights of unrest”” were typical reader responses. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, a story remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane. The Lottery and Other Stories, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson’s lifetime, unites “”The Lottery”” with twenty-four equally unusual short stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson’s remarkable range — from the hilarious to the horrible, the unsettling to the ominous — and her power as a storyteller.”

13 .) The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

collection of short stories books

  • The Guardian
In these twelve dazzlng stories, the bestselling, award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

12 .) Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works by Kurt Vonnegut

collection of short stories books

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

11 .) Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

collection of short stories books

Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

10 .) Dubliners by James Joyce

collection of short stories books

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.

9 .) Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

collection of short stories books

“Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear. In “Nirvana,” a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.”

8 .) Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

collection of short stories books

“She has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.” Now Kelly Link’s eagerly awaited new collection—her first for adult readers in a decade—proves indelibly that this bewitchingly original writer is among the finest we have. Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.”

7 .) Pastoralia by George Saunders

collection of short stories books

Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as “graceful, dark, authentic, and funny,” George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape.

6 .) Runaway by Alice Munro

collection of short stories books

This acclaimed, bestselling collection also contains the celebrated stories that inspired the Pedro Almodóvar film Julieta. Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

5 .) Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman

collection of short stories books

Fragile Things is a sterling collection of exceptional tales from Neil Gaiman, multiple award-winning (the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Newberry, and Eisner Awards, to name just a few), #1 New York Timesbestselling author of The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and the groundbreaking Sandman graphic novel series. A uniquely imaginative creator of wonders whose unique storytelling genius has been acclaimed by a host of literary luminaries from Norman Mailer to Stephen King, Gaiman’s astonishing powers are on glorious displays in Fragile Things. Enter and be amazed!

4 .) Tenth of December by George Saunders

collection of short stories books

“One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet. In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation. Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.”

3 .) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

collection of short stories books

Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

2 .) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

collection of short stories books

In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

1 .) This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

collection of short stories books

“From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness–and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses.”

The 350+ Additional Short Story Books

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collection of short stories books

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collection of short stories books

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The Best Short Story Collections That Keep You Reading

Which of these captivating collections will you be picking up next?

female young behind book with face covered for a red book while smiling

Short story collections offer the perfect medium for fiction writers to craft compelling, affecting narratives that simply may not warrant a full-length novel to explore the ideas. The short story collection’s compact form delivers concise, impactful ideas and can free authors to explore a multitude of themes, characters, story arcs and styles within a single collection. Collections of short fiction have allowed writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin to experiment with different tones, voices and plot devices while providing readers with gripping but approachable standalone stories.

These 8 short story collections are extremely readable, cover a variety of genres and authors and may give you a newfound appreciation of writers you already love.

Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

a ring with a person's face on it

From one of the most compelling, propulsive voices in contemporary fiction, Moshfegh’s 2017 short story collection is an eclectic compendium of some of her best fiction work—much of which was previously published in places like The Paris Review , The New Yorker and Vice . Exceedingly atmospheric and permeated with Moshfegh’s hallmark sordid wit, Homesick For Another World interrogates the ubiquitous afflictions of the human condition and our capacity for cruelty through the collection’s generally amoral, misanthropic protagonists. A highly anticipated follow-up to Moshfegh’s breakout debut novel Eileen , Homesick was later named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 and drew innumerable comparisons to the work of renowned authors like Mary Gaitskill and Flannery O’Connor.

Earth Angel by Madeline Cash

a lizard on a woman's head

An electric debut from author Madeline Cash, Earth Angel is a collection of short stories that rockets through the reader’s imagination like a fever dream. Teeming with chimeric vignettes synthesizing the mundanely sinister realities of a capitalist culture with cataclysmic doomsday tropes, Earth Angel manages to be both endlessly funny and deeply poignant without feeling didactic. Cash both parodies and embraces the myopic stylings dominating popular fiction in a way that never feels malicious, but rather like the playful ribbing of a writer that refuses to take herself too seriously. Irreverent, compelling and laugh-out-loud funny, Earth Angel marks the emergence of one of contemporary fiction’s most exciting new figures.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

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A surrealist collection from Severance author Ling Ma, Bliss Montage marks Ma’s first published short story collection after her phenomenal debut novel (which has no relation to the recent Apple TV+ series, by the way). Uncanny, otherworldly and above all evocative— Bliss Montage contains eight wildly different stories each touching on universal themes of the human experience against phantasmagoric, though eerily familiar backdrops. Ranging from a tale of two friends bonded by their shared use of a drug that turns you invisible to the story of a tourist caught up in a fatalistic healing ritual, Ma’s unforgettable collection manages to be both ingeniously unique and undoubtedly universal at once. Somehow both outlandish and quotidian, Bliss Montage keeps readers wrapped up in Ma’s captivating prose from start to end.

Daddy by Emma Cline

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A thrilling examination of unspoken power structures (predominantly male power in a patriarchal society), Daddy by Emma Cline offers glimpses into the unexamined lives of each story's protagonist, often playfully alluding to, but never explicitly pointing to, a certain moral paradigm. Fraught familial dynamics, imbalanced romantic relationships and moral nuance permeate Cline’s collection, and each story offers a taste of her infectious prose and incisive style. The ten stories on offer often end achingly realistically, rejecting a tidy, personally gratifying ending—making each story appear as a certain tableau harkening to an idea rather than a traditional beginning, middle and end. Suspenseful, richly descriptive and engrossing—Cline’s collection begs to be devoured.

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

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First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

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First published in July 2020, First Person Singular is a collection of eight short stories each told from, you guessed it, the first-person singular perspective. Written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular explores themes of nostalgia and lost love through stories from the perspective of mostly unnamed, middle-aged male protagonists believed to be based largely on the author himself, though some are more fantastical than others. Ranging from slice-of-life stories wherein the narrator reminisces on a past relationship, to the tale of a monkey doomed to fall in love with human women, the stories employ a myriad of hallmark Murakami techniques like magical realism, music, nostalgia and aging.

The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila

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The first collection by beloved Mexican author Amparo Dávila to be translated into English, The Houseguest is a collection of 12 short stories touching on themes of obsession, paranoia and fear primarily featuring female protagonists and narrators. Often compared to horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson, Dávila’s writing often deals with abstract feelings of dread and paranoia, imbuing them with magical realism to craft jarring, transfixing narratives that seem both eerily familiar and preternatural. Each tale menaced by an unseen, pernicious force, Dávila’s writing revels in its ambiguity with no straightforward answers. The Houseguest is an anxiety-inducing page-turner which will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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Though technically a short story cycle (a collection of self-contained short stories arranged to convey a concept or theme greater than the sum of its atomized parts), Olive Kitteridge consists of 13 stories each taking place in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. The stories predominantly center on Olive Kitteridge, a brusque but caring retired school teacher and longtime resident of Crosby. Other stories show Olive only as a secondary character or in a cameo capacity and are from the point of view of other townsfolk. Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the collection was later adapted into a critically acclaimed miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Zoe Kazan and Bill Murray. Profound, heartbreaking and human, Olive Kitteridge is an unforgettable first-read that will still impact you even if you watched the miniseries before.

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The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2020

Featuring nicole krauss, stephen king, emma cline, zora neale hurston, and more.

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Nicole Krauss’ How to Be a Man , Stephen King’s If It Bleeds , Emma Cline’s Daddy , and Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick all feature among the best reviewed short story collections of 2020.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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1. To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss (Harper)

18 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed

Read an interview with Nicole Krauss here

“… like talking all night with a brilliant friend … Krauss imbues her prose with authoritative intensity. In short, her work feels lived. Some of these stories appeared earlier, in the New Yorker and elsewhere. But re-encountering them in a collection lets us absorb them as siblings … Krauss’s explorations of interior struggle press on, unflinching; aperçus feel wrested from depths … With chilling casualness, Krauss conveys the murderous realities lurking behind the scrim of social surfaces, that young women routinely face … Settings range globally without fanfare, as do Krauss’s gelid portraits of modern arrangements … the hallucinatory ‘Seeing Ershadi,’ in which a dancer and her friend become obsessed with an Iranian actor, seems to distill the strange urgency of Krauss’s art … What Ershadi represents to the women slowly unfurls, and (like much of this fine collection) continues to haunt a reader’s mind and heart.”

–Joan Frank  ( The Washington Post )

2. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans (Riverhead)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“… a new collection that is so smart and self-assured it’s certain to thrust her into the top tier of American short story writers. Evans’ stories feel particularly urgent at this moment of national reckoning over race. While they aren’t specifically about being Black any more than Alice Munro’s are about being white, many of the characters are shaped by the social, economic and cultural conditions unique to African American life … she brings an anthropologist’s eye to the material conditions of her characters’ lives … The hands-down masterpiece of the collection is the title novella … Reading these stories is like [an] amusement park ride—afterward, you feel a sense of lightness and exhilaration.”

–Ann Levin  ( USA Today )

3. I Hold a Wolf By the Ears by Laura Van den Berg (FSG)

14 Rave • 2 Positive

Listen to a conversation between Laura Van den Berg and Catherine Lacey here

“The terrain of Van den Berg’s difficult, beautiful and urgent new book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , is an ecosystem of weird and stirring places you’ll want to revisit, reconsider, maybe even take shelter in. It’s easy to get going, because Van den Berg is such a master of setups … Possessing some of Karen Russell’s spookiness and Otessa Moshfegh’s penchant for unsettling observations about the way we live now—personally incisive but alive with a kind of ambient political intelligence—Van den Berg feels like the writer we not only want but maybe need right now … There is range here, particularly in characters and relationships: single people, mothers and daughters, loners, but also people engaged in the long dance of marriage … Van den Berg is so consistently smart and kind, bracingly honest, keen about mental illness and crushing about everything from aging to evil that you might not be deluded in hoping that the usual order of literary fame could be reversed: that an author with respectable acclaim for her novels might earn wider recognition for a sneakily brilliant collection of stories.”

–Nathan Deuel  ( The Los Angeles Times )

Verge Lidia Yuknavitch

4. Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)

12 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read a story from Verge here

“With the powers of her prose on full, incandescent display, 6½ pages is all Yuknavitch needs to illuminate the connections between the body and the spirit, the fists and the heart, both beating in their losing battles … In these 20 efficient and affecting stories, Yuknavitch unveils the hidden worlds, layered under the one we know, that can be accessed only via trauma, displacement and pain. There is a vein of the wisdom of the grotesque throughout … the damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in.”

–Nicholas Mancusi  ( TIME )

5. Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford (Ecco)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed

“The finest and most substantial story here is ‘The Run of Yourself.’ One could say is has the richness and breadth of a novel, but that would be to slight the short-story form, of which Mr. Ford has repeatedly proved himself a master … However understated and oblique, Sorry for Your Trouble —which is what Irish people say to the bereaved at a funeral—is both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class. None of the main characters has to worry about money, which highlights the emotional malaise that underlies their lives and their frequent and almost absent-minded couplings and uncouplings. In the background are wars, financial crises, natural vicissitudes. This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision…the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.”

–John Banville  ( The Wall Street Journal )

Daddy Emma Cline

6. Daddy by Emma Cline (Random House)

9 Rave • 8 Positive

Read Emma Cline on Anaïs Nin’s erotic fiction and John Cheever’s journals here

“In an era whose ascendant short-story practitioners lean into high-concept experiments of genre and form, Emma Cline represents something of a throwback. The 10 stories that constitute her first collection, Daddy , are almost classical in structure—you won’t find a fragmentary collage, list or screenplay among them. Though she’s not one for a sudden, curious departure of voice or dissolution of the fourth wall, Cline has an unnerving narrative proprioception, and her stories have the clean, bright lines of modernist architecture … As for her style, she seems to eschew the telegraphic mode made popular by writers like Sally Rooney or Rachel Cusk for something at once direct and musical. Cline’s idiom is earnestness punctuated by millennial cool—but nothing too fussy, everything in just the right place … The aesthetic pleasure of Cline’s writing is anesthetizing. So much so that one could conceivably read these stories with the same drugged passivity with which one shuffles through a lifestyle catalog. But that would be a mistake … Cline is an astonishingly gifted stylist, but it is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life … the characters shift uncomfortably through the beautifully appointed shoe box dioramas of their lives, aware at once of their own insignificance and also of their desire for prominence. They ask if anything matters as though nothing does, and yet hope to be contradicted. But perhaps we all do. Perhaps, in these brilliant stories, that is the most daring and human thing of all.”

–Brandon Taylor  ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South (FSG Originals)

9 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

Listen to an interview with Mary South here

“South writes as though she has always been where we find ourselves now: looking back on a world where we believed we might gain personal agency over technology’s dominion, entering one where such agency is a luxury we might never again hope to afford … stories of exceptional loss, spilling out at the point of conflict between the cool detachment of the technological world and the tender vulnerability of the users living within it … This collection’s power, though, comes from South’s dark sensibility, her comfort with brutality, and her narrative insistence that, while the nightmare of tech capitalism won’t wholly eradicate the personal and the private, it will compress beyond recognition the spaces where personal, private moments can unfold … South writes with the assurance of someone who knows she has no answers to give. But instead of resulting in a shrugging ambivalence, You Will Never Be Forgotten  mounts an ever more effective critique of technology-amplified structural inequality … [the] stories are united by South’s keen examination of the thrill and risk of human connection—between lovers, siblings, parent and child, care-giver and care-receiver, and digitally connected strangers—under increasingly cruel conditions … Still, You Will Never Be Forgotten  shows us there is still tenderness to be found, and protected, in the brave new world to come.”

–Jennifer Schaffer  ( The Nation )

8. If It Bleeds by Stephen King (Scribner)

6 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Nobody does novellas like Stephen King … a quartet of stories that are a little too long to be labelled short, all of which are packed with that uniquely King combination of fear and empathy … One of the joys of King’s novella collections is the reminder that he, perhaps more than any of his bestselling peers, has a tremendous gift for giving stories exactly the amount of space they need to be properly told. Sometimes, that results in 700-plus page epics. Other times, just 70. Whatever it takes to get the story from his head to the page—that’s what King gives you. It’s remarkable really, that an author can create stories that cause a reader to shiver, to smile and to shed a tear in the space of a few pages—but really, should anything Stephen King does surprise us anymore? … practically pulses with the humanistic empathy that marks the best of King’s work. It’s an outstanding quartet, featuring four tales that are wildly different from one another, yet undeniably bound together by the voice of our finest storyteller. There is much to fear in the worlds created by Stephen King, but even in the depth of his darkest shadows, a light of hope steadily glows. More exceptional work from the maestro … Keep ‘em coming, Mr. King.”

–Allen Adams  ( The Maine Edge )

9. Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery (Bloomsbury)

7 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Nicole Flattery’s publisher paid big money for these debut stories (plus a novel-in-progress), and it’s not hard to see why: they’re often extremely funny—peculiar as well as ha-ha—and highly addictive … Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection, all tackled slantwise … It’s easy to read but trickier to get a handle on: Flattery’s off-kilter voice blends chatty candour and hard-to-interpret allegory (think Diane Williams or 90s Lorrie Moore), with the deadpan drollery and casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences … Trauma lurks in the background, with allusions to attempted suicide, abuse and a 13-year-old’s miscarriage … Yet Flattery’s stories don’t depend on bringing such things to light; they’re just there—part of a woman’s life—which ultimately proves more disconcerting … Flattery…doesn’t seem too bothered about sewn-up narratives running from A to B; it’s a mark of her art in these strange, darkly funny stories that we aren’t either.”

–Anthony Cummins  ( The Guardian )

10. Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

7 Rave • 4 Positive

Read a story from Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick here

“..a revelation not just in its celebration of Hurston’s lesser-known efforts as a writer of short stories but also in the subjects and settings that it takes on … Hurston’s stories do not merely document black experience in the early 20th century; they testify to larger truths about black life … tender and wry … Fans and scholars of Hurston’s work and the uninitiated alike will find many delights in these complex, thoughtful and wickedly funny portraits of black lives and communities … this book is a significant testament to the enduring resonance of black women’s writing.”

–Naomi Jackson  ( The Washington Post )

The Book Marks System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Short Story Collections

Featuring george saunders, ling ma, colin barrett, jamil jan kochai, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .

1. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here

“The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching … an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance ’s zest. Some stories are confident in their strangeness and ambiguity, a handful feel like promising sketches of sturdier narratives and the rest fall somewhere in between. The connections between them are loose, tethered by similar leads … Wry, peculiar stories like Los Angeles and Yeti Lovemaking confirm that Ma’s imagination operates on the same chimerical frequency as those of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Meng Jin. Each of these stories leans un-self-consciously into the speculative, illuminating Ma’s phantasmagoric interests. They are funny, too … Despite their nagging loose ends, Ma’s stories stay with you — evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility. They twist and turn in unpredictable ways and although the ride wasn’t always smooth, I never regretted getting on.”

–Lovia Gyarkye ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Liberation Day by George Saunders (Random House)

16 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed (86) Read George Saunders on reading chaotically and the power of generous teachers, here

“Acutely relevant … Let’s bask in this new collection of short stories, which is how many of us first discovered him and where he excels like no other … Saunders’ imaginative capacity is on full display … Liberation Day carries echoes of Saunders’ previous work, but the ideas in this collection are more complex and nuanced, perhaps reflecting the new complexities of this brave new world of ours. The title story is only one of a handful of the nine stories in this collection that show us our collective and personal dilemmas, but in reading the problems so expressed—with compassion and humanity—our spirits are raised and perhaps healed. Part of the Saunders elixir is that we feel more empathetic after reading his work.”

–Scott Laughlin ( The San Francisco Chronicle )

3. Homesickness by Colin Barrett (Grove Press)

16 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Colin Barrett here

“Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor … expands [Barrett’s] range, and though the first took place in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, the books share a fabric shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page. The language counterpoints the sometimes inarticulate desperation of the working-class characters, and that dissonance lends an emotional complexity to their stories … As a writer, Barrett doesn’t legislate from the top down. His unruly characters surge up with their vitality and their mystery intact. Their stories aren’t shaped by familiar resolutions—no realizations, morals or epiphanies. The absence of a conventional resolution does risk leaving an otherwise charming story like The Silver Coast with the rambling feel of a slice of life. But in the majority of the stories in this book, to reinvent an ending is to reinvent how a story is told, and overall, Homesickness is graced with an original, lingering beauty.”

–Stuart Dybek ( The New York Times Book Review )

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Read a story from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century here

“..the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity … Technology, rather than magic, catalyzes these changes. That is not to say there are not some traces of unexplained fantasy, such as a girl who sprouts wings from her ankles, but mostly, Fu’s monsters manifest from modernity … The success of Kim Fu’s stories is the element of the unexpected. There are surprises lurking in these narratives, whether it is a quick final plot twist or unexpected peculiarity … Although Fu seems more concerned with alienation stemming from individual relationships, there is criticism of conventional consumer capitalism … The characters in Fu’s collection are eccentric and unexpected in their choices, and many of their stories feature unforeseen endings that strike the right tone for the dark era we live in … Fu opens a window looking onto the sad possibilities of our own failures.”

–Ian MacAllen ( The Chicago Review of Books )

5. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD)

12 Rave • 4 Positive Read an essay by Jonathan Escoffery here

“Ravishing … The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet … There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free … Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education … The prose comes alive … These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style … Escoffery deftly renders the disorienting effects of race as they fall, veil-like and hostile, over a world of children … Throughout, the refrain runs like an incantation: What are you? Escoffery, hosing his characters in a stream of fines, bills, and pay stubs, studies the bleak math of self-determination.”

–Katy Waldman ( The New Yorker )

6. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Jamil Jan Kochai’s essay, “How Final Fantasy VII Taught Me to Write,” here

“Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader…Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer…The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California…Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

7. Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Book)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Morgan Talty here

“Talty depicts the relationship between David and Paige perfectly—the siblings clearly care for each other; it’s evident beneath the bickering and the long periods when they don’t see each other … The story ends with both mother and son experiencing terrifying medical emergencies; it’s almost excruciating to read, but it’s undeniably powerful, and, in its own way, beautiful … Talty’s prose is flawless throughout; he writes with a straightforward leanness that will likely appeal to admirers of Thom Jones or Denis Johnson. But his style is all his own, as is his immense sense of compassion. Night of the Living Rez is a stunning look at a family navigating their lives through crisis—it’s a shockingly strong debut, sure, but it’s also a masterwork by a major talent.”

–Michael Schaub ( The Star Tribune )

8. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)

10 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from How High We Go in the Dark here

“If you’re a short-story lover—as I am—you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft. If you crave sustained character and plot arcs, well, you’ll have to settle for admiring the well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts. Hardly small pleasures … The reader might best approach the book like a melancholy Black Mirror season … This is a lovely though bleak book. Humanity has long turned to humor in our darkest moments, but levity feels absent even in a chapter narrated by a stand-up comedian. That said, the somber tone unifies the disparate characters and story lines … a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the ‘speculative epic’: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes … Nagamatsu squarely hits both the ‘literary’ and ‘science fiction’ targets, offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits … a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.”

–Lincoln Michel ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle (Viking)

9 Rave •  5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid … Lest he be accused of focusing too much on men and their sense of victimhood, the countervailing magnificence of his women is worth noting. Part of Doyle’s genius resides in a kind of bathetic amusement at the follies of his male characters and always it’s the stoical good sense of women that saves the day … Another of his great strengths is the ability to drop in those little epiphanies that resolve the tension and conflict of a story in a single significant moment … Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers.”

–Bert Wright ( The Sunday Times )

10. Stories From the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana (Scribner)

12 Rave Read an interview with Sidik Fofana here

“… outstanding … The brilliance of this debut, however, is that Fofana doesn’t let anyone go unseen … masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification … Fofana brings his characters to life through their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Auxiliary verbs are dropped, words are misspelled, prepositions are jostled, all to create a sense of vernacular authenticity…Grammar is an instrument that Fofana plays by ear, to much success.”

–Joseph Cassara ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Many articles have been written about our culture’s shrinking attention spans, largely blaming the rise of smartphones for our dwindling attentiveness. So one might reason the short story should be rising in popularity, but there seems to be no such effect. Maybe because short stories often require more from readers. If you miss something about a character when reading a novel, you’ll probably get another chance. But with the condensed story form, short stories distill entire worlds and lifetimes into the most poignant moments, so the reader needs to be paying attention to each sentence—no filler here. Whatever the reason, story collections continue to get less attention than novels. But we’re fans of the form here at Chicago Review of Books. We put together this list to celebrate some of our favorite short story collections of the year. 

collection of short stories books

The Best Possible Experience By Nishanth Injam Pantheon Books Published July 11, 2023

Desire is central to the gorgeous, subtle, and sharp story collection The Best Possible Experience by Nishanth Injam. Injam beautifully portrays various types of longing that bubble underneath the surface of his characters, all of whom are either immigrants from India, members of the Indian diaspora living in the United States, or living in India in the stories themselves. Despite the different circumstances, settings, and situations the characters find themselves in, one thing that unites them is their yearning for something deeper than what their circumstances have to offer them. Farooq Chaudhry spoke to Nishanth earlier this year about this collection, grief, and longing .

collection of short stories books

Temple Folk  By Aaliyah Bilal Simon & Schuster Published July 4, 2023

Shortlisted for this year’s National Book Award, this stunning collection by debut author Aaliyah Bilal features Black Muslims as they reckon with family, faith, and community. A collection dealing with faith of any kind, regardless of the particular religion, should wrestle with the gap between what the characters believe and how they act, and Bilal is a master at drawing those contradictions. The characters come to life in these stories, which are often quiet, but never without an elegant assuredness. And the collection builds, ending on arguably the strongest story of the collection, “Due North,” about a daughter struggling with the recent death of her father, an imam. Temple Folk announces Aaliyah Bilal as a remarkable talent and a writer to watch.

collection of short stories books

White Cat, Black Dog By Kelly Link Random House Trade Published October 24, 2023

There’s a particular thrill in reading a masterful retelling of a long-told story. An author’s well-considered deviations—settings, characters, explorations of gaps—can bring out new dimensions of the original while amounting to an original in its own right. Kelly Link’s  White Cat, Black Dog  is a collection of such masterful retellings. Link recasts folk tales from different traditions, plopping, for instance, the French fairy tale “The White Cat” into a world of modern billionaires and “Hansel and Gretel” into that of science fiction. As Rebekah Bergman writes in her  review , “Each of Link’s stories feels both brand new and yet somehow, magically, like it has always existed. It is as though Kelly Link is only the latest in a long series of storytellers to pick up these threads and spin.”

collection of short stories books

Company By Shannon Sanders Graywolf Press Published October 3, 2023

This debut collection by PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize-winner Shannon Sanders introduces us to the Collins family, and a few of their acquaintances, as they prepare for visitors, arrive at someone else’s home, or host in theirs. Leaning into themes of performance and keeping up social appearances, these stories are told with such humor, heart, and grace. From its opening with the prize-winning story, “The Good, Good Men,” to its final story about a couple preparing for a social worker’s visit to approve them for adopting a child, these masterfully written stories will stay with you long after finishing the book. 

collection of short stories books

Witness By Jamel Brinkley Farrar, Straus and Giroux Published August 1, 2023

Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a finalist for the National Book Award, Jamel Brinkley’s sophomore story collection was among the year’s most highly anticipated. And it doesn’t disappoint. As Monika Dziamka writes in her review , “Racism, police brutality, failing social support systems, violence in social media, economic hardship—Brinkley bears witness to these topics through his characters, while he, with searing beauty and grace, also explores the intricacies of identity, friendship, family, community, growing older, and more—topics at the heart of the many broader, larger issues we face in America today.”

collection of short stories books

The Last Catastrophe By Allegra Hyde Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Published March 28, 2023

Last year, Allegra Hyde’s Eleutheria was one of our favorite debut novels , and this year, her second story collection is another favorite. As Erika Dirk writes in her review , “For all the ominousness of the title, The Last Catastrophe , Allegra Hyde’s sophomore short story collection is remarkably hopeful. Not hopeful as to the eventual collapse of ecosystems, or the extinction of species, or technology addiction, or pollution, or the state of American politics (though Hyde’s satire on this front is biting enough to be, if not hopeful, quite funny) but hopeful as to the human capacity to find joy in spite of it all.”   

collection of short stories books

Dare the Sea By Ali Hosseini Curbstone Press Published September 15, 2023

The stories in this notable collection explore the lives of Iranian people. Divided into sections—the first half set in Iran, both before and immediately following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the second half set in different places in America, where the characters are in exile, navigating life in a new country— Dare the Sea is an exquisite collection in breadth and depth. 

collection of short stories books

The People Who Report More Stress By Alejandro Varela Astra House Published April 4, 2023

National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela has a singular voice. This interconnected collection deals with the anxieties of people living on the margin, with an impressive range of stories in both subject and style. As Rachel León writes in her review , “But part of the magic of the stories in The People Who Report More Stress is they stretch beyond the thematic glue that holds the collection together. They examine long-term relationships, parenthood, communities, and class with humor and heart. They’re inventive and surprising.”

collection of short stories books

This Is Salvaged By Vauhini Vara W. W. Norton & Company Published September 26, 2023

collection of short stories books

Maxine Rae on Embracing YA, What Teens are Saying, and What Comes After You Get the Agent

The stories in Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara’s This Is Salvaged deal with loss and estrangement, as well as the power people can exert over others. Even though the stories often deal with dark emotions like shame, Vara manages to bring forth humor and tenderness. The stories are fresh and surprising—one deals with a couple of teenagers auditioning for a job as phone sex operators, another is about an experimental artist trying to replicate Noah’s Ark. But regardless of the subject, under the crackling prose is a glimmer of hope that connection can be salvaged amid alienation.

collection of short stories books

I Meant It Once By Kate Doyle Algonquin Books Published July 18, 2023

As Arturo Vidich writes in the introduction to the interview we ran with the author, “A good short story can feel like a mystical experience, or leave a reader remorseful, longing. Kate Doyle’s debut is a collection of such stories, linked in subtle ways, that perfectly encapsulate what it’s like to reflect on your youth while you’re still in it. The young women in these stories are on the cusp of changes they’re not sure they want, because to let go of the past would be to lose part of themselves, for better or for worse.” (Also, we ran an excellent essay Kate Doyle wrote about the seriousness of women’s stories.)

collection of short stories books

Call and Response By Gothataone Moeng Viking Published February 7, 2023

Wallace Stegner fiction fellow recipient Gothataone Moeng’s remarkable debut story collection didn’t receive the attention it deserves. The stories feature women and girls in Botswana—in a village and in the capital city—as they negotiate responsibility, tradition, and modern relationships. There’s a sweeping range to these cinematic and astonishing stories, with incredible scope yet emotional intimacy, making this collection one not to miss.   

collection of short stories books

Enough to Lose By RS Deeren Wayne State University Press Published September 5, 2023

RS Deeren’s debut features much of what we look for in a short story collection. Set in the small Michigan town of Caro, these stories show us a fully realized world of interconnected characters who are fighting to build stable lives for themselves. Deeren brings so much curiosity, care, and love for this often forgotten region, showing both criticism when called for and generosity when needed. And be sure to check out our interview and this book list RS Deeren put together on working-class books .

collection of short stories books

Wednesday’s Child By Yiyun Li Farrar, Straus and Giroux Published September 5, 2023

Through the myriad stories in Wednesday’s Child , Yiyun Li examines grief and the effect it has on us like one might examine an uncut gem. The distance she keeps between us and the characters invites us to look deeper than the surface, into the murky depths of human emotion and response. These are not stories of resolving grief so much as learning to live in spite of it, but they show that life is still possible, even when it feels like it isn’t. Wednesday’s Child is a generous, warm read, despite the difficult themes—and one whose weight will be carried long after you close the cover.

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130 Stephen King Short Stories

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130 stephen king short stories.

130 Stephen King Short Stories

Did you know that there are over 130 Stephen King short stories in existence? There’s no doubt that the man’s publishing career is impressive, but King was perhaps most prolific with his short stories: starting with "The Glass Floor" in 1967, he continued to write many short stories thereafter to pay the bills.

So if you want a taste of King's horror but don't have time to sit down and read a whole novel, we've got you covered. This list will take you through all of Stephen King’s short story collections , from the 1978 Night Shift to his most recent 2015 collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams . Read on… if you dare.

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Night Shift (1978)

This was King’s first collection of short stories, and let’s just say he entered this realm of literature not with a whimper, but with a bang. If you’ve ever watched an 80s zombie movie and found the low-budget, unrealistic gore scarier than the high-quality effects of today’s horror films, you’ll be a fan of Night Shift : its stories might lack the finesse of some of King’s later works, but they are the stuff of nightmares nonetheless. So rest assured: from deeply emotional stories — such as “Last Rung on the Ladder,” which is about a man who blames himself for his sister’s suicide — to gruesome post-apocalyptic tales like “Night Surf,” Night Shift has something for all horror lovers.

Number of stories: 20

Fun facts: Six of the stories in this collection have been made into feature-length films: "Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "Graveyard Shift," "The Mangler," and "Sometimes They Come Back.”

1. "Jerusalem's Lot"

2. "Graveyard Shift"

3. "Night Surf"

4. "I Am the Doorway"

5. "The Mangler"

6. "The Boogeyman"

7. "Gray Matter"

8. "Battleground"

9. "Trucks"

10. "Sometimes They Come Back"

11. "Strawberry Spring"

12. "The Ledge"

13. "The Lawnmower Man"

14. "Quitters, Inc."

15. "I Know What You Need"

16. "Children of the Corn"

17. "The Last Rung on the Ladder"

18. "The Man Who Loved Flowers"

19. "One for the Road"

20. "The Woman in the Room"

Different Seasons (1982)

King's first collection of novellas has a more dramatic than horrific bent. Indeed, its first story inspired the popular film (and an obsession with Morgan Freeman’s voice): The Shawshank Redemption . And while “Apt Pupil” and “The Breathing Method” could still very much be considered scary, Different Seasons stands out for the lack of sinister supernatural beings or luridly horrific images that have become staples of some of the other Stephen King short stories.

Number of stories: 4

Fun facts: King wrote each of these four stories at different times and left them unpublished for a while because his editors had expressed concern that readers wouldn’t buy non-horror fiction from King. Eventually, King and his editor decided to publish all four stories together, positioning the book as “something different” — hence the title of the book.

1. "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal"

2. "Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption"

3. "The Body: Fall From Innocence "

4. "The Breathing Method: A Winter's Tale"

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Skeleton Crew (1985)

Sometimes the best type of horror is the kind that turns the seemingly normal and innocuous into something sinister and downright terrifying. This is the rallying cry of Skeleton Crew . In one tale, a word processor — an otherwise boring and practical tool — becomes a deadly device in the hands of a man ("Word Processor of the Gods"). In another story, a supermarket becomes the site of a life-or-death face-off between an ever-growing mist consuming a town (“The Mist” — technically a novella, and one of King’s most famous shorter works).

Number of stories: 22 (including a novella and two poems)

Fun facts: “For Owen” is a poem King wrote for his son. And here’s a warning while we’re at it: of “Survivor Type,” King wrote that, while he prefers his stories grisly, this one might have gone too far even for him .

1. "The Mist"

2. "Here There Be Tygers"

3. "The Monkey"

4. "Cain Rose Up"

5. "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"

6. "The Jaunt"

7. "The Wedding Gig"

8. "Paranoid: A Chant"

9. "The Raft"

10. "Word Processor of the Gods"

11. "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands"

12. "Beachworld"

13. "The Reaper's Image"

15. "For Owen"

16. "Survivor Type"

17. "Uncle Otto's Truck”

18. "Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)"

19. “Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game (Milkman #2)"

20. "Gramma"

21. "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet"

22. "The Reach"

Four Past Midnight (1990)

Do you keep wishing that Stephen King’s short stories would last just a little longer? Rejoice: here’s another collection of novellas! Unlike Different Seasons , this book stays true to King’s quintessential flare for supernatural horror — also blending in elements of psychological and cosmic horror . 

Linking the four stories of Four Past Midnight is the theme of, well, midnight: a time fragmented between two days, inviting reality to fragment as well. Thus the stories feature people desperately attempting to clutch their sanity, while being pulled further and further from it.

Fun facts: Secret Window, Secret Garden features a thinly veiled version of King himself.

1. "The Langoliers"

2. "Secret Window, Secret Garden"

3. "The Library Policeman"

4. "The Sun Dog"

Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)

Jumping from horror genre to horror genre, incorporating a gamut of scary tropes, and inspired by a number of King’s favorite authors, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is a funhouse of a horror novel — in fact, it doesn’t take much effort to picture a real funhouse at an old-timey fair boasting this very title atop its unsettling doors. It’s said to be one of his stranger collections, and one doesn’t have to look much further than the freaky "Chattery Teeth" to be convinced: it’s a story about a pair of killer joke teeth on the hunt for blood.

Number of stories: 24

Fun facts: Crack open the novel and you will find mention of a “Thomas Williams” in the dedication. Who is he? A writing instructor and author of one of King’s favorite books, The Hair of Harold Roux .

1. "Dolan's Cadillac"

2. "The End of the Whole Mess"

3. "Suffer the Little Children"

4. "The Night Flier"

6. "It Grows on You"

7. "Chattery Teeth"

8. "Dedication"

9. "The Moving Finger"

10. "Sneakers"

11. "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band"

12. "Home Delivery"

13. "Rainy Season"

14. "My Pretty Pony"

15. "Sorry, Right Number"

16. "The Ten O'Clock People"

17. "Crouch End"

18. "The House on Maple Street"

19. "The Fifth Quarter"

20. "The Doctor's Case"

21. "Umney's Last Case"

22. "Head Down"

23. "Brooklyn August"

24. "The Beggar and the Diamond"

Hearts in Atlantis (1999)

This book features five sequential stories that take place during the 1960s-1990s, all connected to the horrifying events of the Vietnam War that continue to haunt well past its end in 1975. Despite the intended connection between each story, some reviewers still feel that each work better as part rather than a whole. However, other reviews claim that while this certainly isn’t King’s scariest work, it is one of his deepest, reflecting on the very real terrors that can stay with people for a lifetime. We invite you to read Hearts in Atlantis and to let us know what you think! 

Number of stories: 5

Fun facts: Hearts in Atlantis features a number of connections and references to King’s Dark Tower series.

1. "Low Men in Yellow Coats"

2. "Hearts in Atlantis"

3. "Blind Willie"

4. "Why We're in Vietnam"

5. "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling"

Everything's Eventual (2002)

This one has been called one of the “lighter” collections in King’s repertoire. This is perhaps because many of the stories provoke a sense of unease more than actual terror. But, as we all know, a deep sense of anxiety can stay with you much longer than an intensely frightening moment. The book’s most popular entry is “1408” — a story about a non-fiction writer who writes about the supernatural, despite not believing in it. Now, room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel is on a mission to prove him wrong in a fantastic meta take on the classic ghost story.

Number of stories: 14

Fun facts: In the introduction of Everything’s Eventual , Stephen King explained how he picked the order of the stories: “What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers.””

1. "Autopsy Room Four"

2. "The Man in the Black Suit"

3. "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away"

4. "The Death of Jack Hamilton"

5. "In the Deathroom"

6. "The Little Sisters of Eluria"

7. "Everything's Eventual"

8. "L. T.'s Theory of Pets"

9. "The Road Virus Heads North"

10. "Lunch at the Gotham Café"

11. "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French"

13. "Riding the Bullet"

14. "Luckey Quarter"

Just After Sunset (2008)

Not sure whether this book will leave you with that deliciously disturbing sensation that so many of King’s other works do? Well, take one look at that holographic book cover and we guarantee that your stomach will turn, proving right from the outset Just After Sunset’s ability to provoke unease. For a truly weird read, check out “The Cat from Hell.” Or if you’re looking for an excuse to avoid exercise, give “Stationary Bike” a try — it’s a story about a man whose efforts to reduce his cholesterol levels turn into the stuff of nightmares. Whichever of these Stephen King short stories you read, you’re sure to be left with that feeling that can only occur right after sunset, when the day gives way to night and sun gives way to darkness: that something is lurking in the shadows.

Number of stories: 13

Fun facts: The title of this book went through many iterations , including Pocket Rockets and Unnatural Acts of Human Intercourse . 

2. "The Gingerbread Girl"

3. "Harvey's Dream"

4. "Rest Stop"

5. "Stationary Bike"

6. "The Things They Left Behind"

7. "Graduation Afternoon"

9. "The Cat from Hell"

10. "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates"

12. "Ayana"

13. "A Very Tight Place"

Full Dark, No Stars (2014)

A collection of four novellas that’s not for the faint of heart. Not because of splattering blood or graphic violence, but because of the emotional turmoil readers are put through: each story burns slowly, with a twist for the grim bubbling away all the while. Readers know things will eventually go wrong, but they don’t know how or when — or what the consequences will be. Each story leaves you with the bleak sense that nothing is as it seems, and that we are all constantly teetering on the brink of chaos.

Fun facts: “1922” is set in Hemingford Home, Nebraska — a name you might recognize from a few other King works: the novels The Stand and It , as well as the short story “The Last Rung on the Ladder.”

2. "Big Driver"

3. "Fair Extension"

4. "A Good Marriage"

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015)

Do you love watching movies with the “director’s commentary” cranked up? If so, King’s latest collection will likely be one to add to your list, as each story is accompanied by a brief autobiographical passage that reveals the how the story came to be. 

Many see it as one of King’s more “polished” collections — mourning the freaky, pulpy tones of some of his earlier books like Night Shift . However, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams celebrates King’s years of experience, showing his ability to adeptly switch between themes of life, death, morality, guilt, and regret — all with his trademark spine-tingling, bone-chilling overtone.

Fun facts: Stephen King addresses readers directly a number of times in this book. In one instance, he creepily writes, “I made these stories especially for you. Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”

1."Mile 81"

2. "Premium Harmony"

3. "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation"

4. "The Dune"

5. "Bad Little Kid"

6. "A Death"

7. "The Bone Church"

8. "Morality"

9. "Afterlife"

11. "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"

12. "Under the Weather"

13. "Blockade Billy"

14. "Mister Yummy"

15. "Tommy"

16. "The Little Green God of Agony"

17. "That Bus Is Another World"

18. "Obits"

19. "Drunken Fireworks"

20. "Summer Thunder"

Can’t get enough horror? Check out some of our other posts to lead you to even more scary reads:

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‘Neighbors’ Opens the Door to a Literary Career Cut Short

A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings.

An illustration is made up of three panels showing, from left: The red silhouette of a walking woman, who is slowly fading away; a partially open dormitory door with a red pennant on its front and a shadow creeping on the floor from inside; and a close-up of a Black hand on a brown background.

By Alexandra Jacobs

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NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STORIES, by Diane Oliver

Ploughshares … Granta … Mademoiselle?

Yes, children, before it stopped publishing fiction in 1992 , this sadly defunct glossy magazine was, between the lipstick ads, a deep and shimmering American literary oasis.

Mlle, pronounced Millie around the office like the dependable farm girl she was, showcased the short stories of James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Barbara Kingsolver and a ballroom’s worth of other award-winning writers. It ran a summer guest editor program for college students whose alumni included Joan Didion, Ann Beattie and most famously — because of the novel “The Bell Jar,” with its memorable scene of ptomaine poisoning after a luncheon of avocado stuffed with crabmeat — Sylvia Plath .

Also Diane Oliver, whose death, at 22 after a motorcycle accident, was even more premature than Plath’s. She will be eternally mademoiselle.

Born in 1943 to schoolteachers in Charlotte, N.C., Oliver, who was Black, attended segregated schools, university in Greensboro and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lived to see four of her stories published, including in The Sewanee Review and Negro Digest. A new collection, “Neighbors and Other Stories,” gathers these with 10 more and an introduction by Tayari Jones , the author of “An American Marriage.”

At a moment when short stories seem less regular launchpads for long careers than occasional meteors , reading these is like finding hunks of gold bullion buried in your backyard.

Oliver’s primary topic — she didn’t have enough time on this earth to develop many — was the private bulwark of the family, during a time when Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws still ruled the South.

In the title story, which was posthumously awarded the O. Henry Prize in 1967, a mother, father and sister agonize over a young boy who, if they can stomach subjecting him to the experience, will be single-handedly integrating his elementary school in the morning. Police cruisers haunt their house. In “The Closet on the Top Floor,” a student named Winifred realizes she is “tired of being the Experiment” as she settles uneasily into a white college, deciding to major in history because drama would mean playing “the maid’s part for four years,” and biology might require field trips and “testing” how motels will receive her. Sublimating the stress and ringed by mean-girl white roommates, she begins hiding desserts — and then herself.

Food turns up frequently in Oliver’s work: nothing as fancy as the Plathian avocados, which have been romanticized and recreated by multiple food blogs and at least one Twitter “feed ,” but as totems of scarcity. I don’t think Bon Appetit will be publishing a recipe for “mice and rice soup,” from a story called “When the Apples are Ripe,” about brothers, an elderly friend and a pocket watch, anytime soon.

In “Traffic Jam” a mother of five, her husband’s whereabouts uncertain, leaves her baby and diapers in a laundry basket on an acquaintance’s porch so she can go work as a maid, and pilfers four slices of ham from her white employer’s fridge. The same mother appears in another story, hoping for peach trees to feed the children on the long walk home from a frustrating doctor’s visit. And when a young woman named Jenny joins a sit-in at a department store tearoom (“Before Twilight”), she observes how “all of the lights were soft pink and cast a hazy glow on the tablecloth,” and thinks “even brussels sprouts would taste good in a place like this.”

Such luminous simplicity is deceptive; these stories detail basic routines of getting through difficult days, but then often deliver a massive wallop. That might just be a variant on the phrase “you people,” the cold shock of casual, legitimized racism spoken out loud or as internal monologue. “Not that she was conscious of color, but light-skinned children looked brighter at spring parties,” one character thinks.“The more they smelled,” another has observed, “the earlier they came to school.”

“Mint Juleps Not Served Here,” wherein a patronizing social worker visits a reclusive Black family in the woods to check on their son Rabbit, who’s gone mute after being bullied, has a hilarious horror-movie twist. (In The Bitter Southerner, the writer Michael A. Gonzales compared Oliver to both Jordan Peele and Shirley Jackson , and I agree.) The succinct “No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk,” which the Paris Review ran last year , is a clever folding screen of fantasy, nightmare and tiring reality.

“Neighbors and Other Stories” is not wholly polished; how could it be? The experimental “Frozen Voices” whorls around and around confusingly, repetitively — something about an affair? A plane crash? “I never said goodbye,” the narrator intones again and again.

Jet magazine was one of the few periodicals to say goodbye to Diane Oliver with an obituary. Thanks to this collection, The New York Times now belatedly bids a full-throated hello.

NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STORIES | Diane Oliver | Grove | 320 pp. | $27

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

A Guide to Black History Month

The monthlong celebration honors how african americans have shaped the united states through both triumphs and trauma..

Carter G. Woodson’s house, the birthplace of Black History Month, was a hub of scholarship, bringing together generations of intellectuals, writers and activists .

Wondering how Black History Month  came to be? Learn about the history of this celebration .

Dig deeper with the 1619 Project , an initiative by The Times Magazine that aims to reframe America’s history by placing the consequences of slavery at the very center of the nation’s narrative.

Expand your knowledge with Black History, Continued , our project devoted to pivotal moments and transformative figures in Black history.

Explore Black love in all its forms and expressions with this collection of heart-warming stories .

Celebrate the contributions of Black authors to literature by diving into the works of Octavia Butler  and Toni Morrison .

Over the years, many important African American landmarks have disappeared or fallen into disrepair. Here are eight historical sites  that are being preserved.

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The Best American Short Stories 2023 : A step backward

James mcdonald 14 february 2024.

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The Best American Short Stories 2023  (Mariner Books) features 20 stories published between January 2022 and January 2023. The stories in this offering of the annual anthology were selected by guest editor Min Jin Lee from a group of stories originally chosen by series editor Heidi Pitlor. 

The last two years of the  BASS  anthology had seen a heightened awareness of the objective social and political realities that make up the context in which most American stories are set. There were stories that dealt directly with the COVID-19 pandemic, stories that depicted wildfires and contemplated the crisis of climate change, even stories that took a working class perspective and actually made themes of the conditions of work, and the lack of it, in contemporary America. It was a promising trend.

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This year’s installment of the series, in this regard, is a step backward. Before looking at what this book represents historically, however, it is appropriate to consider some of the individual stories that are worth a reader’s time.

Perhaps half the pieces in  BASS 2023  are coming-of-age stories, that lyrical standby now usually written in a gritty but still rhapsodic voice. The best of these in this book are Taryn Bowe’s affecting “Camp Emeline,” Benjamin Ehrlich’s “The Master Mourner” and Ling Ma’s Russian doll narrative “Peking Duck.”

Among the stories in other genres, the most intriguing are Tom Bissell’s “His Finest Moment,” about a well-known author who decides to tell his teenage daughter about his having committed a sexual assault years before, which he knows is about to be exposed by a ravenous media; Maya Binyam’s almost dreamlike “Do You Belong to Anybody,” which contemplates matters of history, revolution and suffering; Joanna Pearson’s beautifully written “Grand Mal,” and Kosiso Ugwueze’s grimly comic “Supernova,” a story about a suicidal Kenyan girl taken hostage by bandits.

A handful of stories attend to overtly political matters. “The Mine,” by Nathan Harris, tells of a local mine superintendent who must retrieve a body from deep in the pit before a visit by foreign corporate executives. “The Mine,” a bit overwhelmed by its own conceits, however, is not a fully satisfying story. Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s “It Is What It Is” tells the story of two young émigrés from Iran in a time of explosive turmoil, one of whom adopts a cat that was the only survivor from a plane that has been shot down over Tehran. Finally, Sana Krasikov’s “The Muddle” presents a pair of separated Ukrainian friends, one in Toronto and one in a dacha outside Kyiv, in the first year after the Russian invasion. The two characters, elderly women who grew up together in the Soviet Union and who see the invasion from opposing points of view, allow Krasikov to treat the narratives of both sides skeptically, as propaganda, without seeming to want to come down anywhere definite.

Other stories are worth mentioning as well, such as Manuel Muñoz’s “Compromisos,” Jared Jackson’s “Bebo” and Lauren Groff’s “Annunciation.”

While there are a number of fine pieces in the collection, a Rip Van Winkle who had been asleep for 20 or 30 years would have virtually no idea from reading  BASS 2023  that the America in the title is careening toward World War III, led by a government that is allowing a pandemic to ravage its population and that has already sacrificed over a million to the disease rather than slow the accumulation of unprecedented profits. Rip would find no indication that the country and its democratic institutions are crumbling under the weight of economic inequality, that the Republican Party is now openly fascist in all but name, or that the Democratic Party has become the leading defender of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as part of the US ruling elite’s drive to world war.

Contemporary fiction need not engage any of these matters as major setting or plot points, but fiction writers should by and large demonstrate a thematic awareness of the world beyond the feelings and personal relationships of their characters. Remove the cell phones and most of the stories in  BASS 2023  could have been written in the 1990s.

The good news is that this selection of stories is hardly representative of what is being written today. After all, they are only 20 stories. But beyond that, this year’s anthology, more than in years past, is drawn almost entirely from the most prestigious magazines and literary journals. Of the 20 stories in  BASS 2023 , 15 are taken from just six publications. There are four pieces from the  New Yorker  alone. One could argue that these magazines publish the very best that is available in American short fiction. That elitist argument is hard to maintain, however, when one realizes that thousands upon thousands of short stories are submitted for publication in a year. And in the back of  BASS 2023 , Pitlor lists well over 200 journals that publish short stories.

collection of short stories books

Lee and Pitlor share responsibility, of course, for the selection of stories in the book, with Pitlor shortlisting 120 stories from which Lee chose the final 20. Pitlor, who has been editing the series for years, is a known quantity, an editor with a good ear for sentences but whose social outlook ventures no further than upper middle class preoccupations such as identity politics.

Pitlor’s foreword to the volume says all the reader needs to know about the complacency of  BASS 2023 . Take these sentences, for instance:

After all, we are living in a disconnected time. Heap a waning pandemic that had us all working and attending school at home on a population increasingly isolated by technology, on top of a burgeoning political movement that worships individualism and capitalism and treats social justice and acceptance of diversity as affectations donned by nerds and schoolmarms, and you get a society that is far more fractious than collaborative.

Where does one begin? We weren’t “all” working at home during the first year of the “waning” pandemic (I,500 people were dying every week in the US at the end of last year). Millions were working “in-person” at cash registers and on assembly lines, in hospital units and classrooms and the like, and many were contracting COVID as a result. Over a million have died. And the “burgeoning political movement” Pitlor describes, presumably the far right, as though it were a lack of manners, is authoritarian and fascistic. Strike waves and mass popular opposition to war vanish here. The crisis of the moment is that the  BASS  editor feels “disconnected.” In this orientation to the self, its impressions and feelings, Pitlor speaks for an affluent segment of the population and many in academia and the publishing business.

Lee is the author of the novels  Free Food for Millionaires  (2007) and  Pachinko  (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award. In her introduction to the anthology, she cites the website  Poets and Writers  as reporting that 773 magazines publish fiction (this would be internationally) and rightly argues that almost all literary journals operate on a shoestring budget. She has no critique, however, of the society that produces this circumstance, nor does she suggest any remedy. Nor does it occur to her that writers and small press publishers are not the only ones facing economic disaster. As one of the titles in the anthology has it, “It is what it is.”

Lee goes on to express “a teensy bit of contempt” for people who do not read fiction or poetry. They are not of her “tribe.” Again, there is no historical or social contextualization, no consideration, for example, of the state of education at the moment, let alone why it is in such a state. Only smug self-satisfaction.

In all,  BASS 2023  is a selection of mostly very well-crafted stories, but as a bellwether of the state of fiction—and society—today, it comes up far short. It represents its time primarily as a reflection of a certain obliviousness, and no doubt an element of denial that will not be able to maintain itself much longer.

  • The Best American Short Stories 2022 23 January 2023
  • The Best American Short Stories 2021 : A good deal of talent but little to say 31 January 2022
  • The Best American Short Stories 2020 : The state of mind of a certain social layer 11 March 2021
  • Further signs of life: The Best American Short Stories 2019 21 March 2020

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Author Interviews

Police raided george pelecanos' home. 15 years later, he's ready to write about it.

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Andrew Limbong

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Writer George Pelecanos reads The Washington Post every morning in his home. Keren Carrión/NPR hide caption

Writer George Pelecanos reads The Washington Post every morning in his home.

It was August 2009 when the police raided writer George Pelecanos' home in Silver Spring, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C., with a no-knock warrant.

He was performing his daily ritual of sitting on the couch reading The Washington Post when he saw cars enter the driveway. "I saw these guys wearing black and holding automatic rifles and battering rams," he said in an interview at his home. The police broke down the door overlooking the driveway, and the basement door, too. Pelecanos said they put him on the floor and zip tied his hands.

The police were looking for his then 18-year-old son, Nick. The younger Pelecanos was a part of the robbery of a weed dealer, with a gun involved. So, the cops executed the no-knock warrant looking for evidence of guns or drugs.

After not finding anything, George Pelecanos said the officers started needling him about his liquor cabinet, his watch, his home. "One of the SWAT guys was looking at my books, and he goes 'maybe you'll write about this someday.' And he laughed," Pelecanos said. "And right then I knew that I would write about it. He challenged me."

No knock warrants have been banned in multiple states

Pelecanos is known for his gritty, realistic crime stories. For television, he co-created The Deuce , about the burgeoning porn industry in 1970s New York City, and We Own This City , the mini-series detailing a real-life corrupt police ring in Baltimore. As an author, he's known for his deep catalog of stories set in the streets of Washington, D.C.

His new short story collection is titled Owning Up . And it features characters grappling with events from the past that, with time, fester into something else entirely. There's a story about two guys who knew each other in jail, crossing paths years later. Another has a woman digging into her own family history and learning about the 1919 Washington, D.C. race riots.

collection of short stories books

Many of Pelecanos' crime fiction book are set in Washington, D.C. Keren Carrión/NPR hide caption

Many of Pelecanos' crime fiction book are set in Washington, D.C.

But Pelecanos said he wanted to write about the August 2009 incident because he wanted to further show the effects of no-knock raids. The Montgomery County police department confirmed they executed the warrant but they didn't immediately provide any additional details. Pelecanos did share a copy of the warrant, which states: "You may serve this warrant as an exception to the knock and announce requirement."

The practice of issuing no-knock warrants has been under increased scrutiny since the police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020, and Amir Locke in Minneapolis in 2022. They're banned in Oregon, Virginia, Florida and Tennessee.

"They don't accomplish anything except mayhem and violence," Pelecanos said.

The story "The No-Knock" starts with a journalist named Joe Caruso drinking his coffee and reading the morning paper when the vehicles pull up. The same beats follow — the guns, the zip ties, the pinning down on the floor. Pelecanos writes like he remembers every sensation from that night, because, he said, he does.

It deviates further into fiction from there. Caruso wants to write about it, but he can't. He's too close. He starts drinking heavily, instead. Pelecanos, on the other hand, knew he could write about it, easily. But he waited for over a decade on purpose. He wanted his son's permission, first.

"I wanted my son to grow up," he said. "And so that I could say to you today – he's fine."

Owning Up to the past

"He allowed time for me to grow as a man, and develop myself as a responsible person," said Nick Pelecanos in an interview. He now works in the film industry as a director and assistant director. He got his start working on jobs his dad helped him get. So he's attuned to his father's storytelling style — how he favors details and facts over sepia-toned nostalgia.

"When he writes something, you know that it's technically correct," he said. "And has come to his objective, as non-biased as possible opinion."

collection of short stories books

In Owning Up , Pelecanos writes about a non-knock incident inspired by real events. Keren Carrión/NPR hide caption

In Owning Up , Pelecanos writes about a non-knock incident inspired by real events.

As personal as "The No-Knock" is, Pelecanos calls the title story in the collection his most autobiographical. It's about a kid in the 70s named Nikos who works a job where he gets in with a bad crowd, and eventually gets talked into breaking into a guy's house.

"It's just the way my life was in that era and on this side of Montgomery County," Pelecanos said. "It was about muscle cars, playing pickup basketball, drinking beer, getting high."

Listening to Pelecanos talk about this story, it sounds familiar. You get the sense that history does repeat itself. That the same lessons get taught again and again. But that's O.K., because some lessons bear repeating.

"I got in trouble occasionally," he said. "But I always came home to the warmth of my family, you know? That's all you need."

Meghan Collins Sullivan edited this story for radio and the web.

NZ author Patricia Grace on her new book Bird Child, a collection of short stories

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Acclaimed New Zealand author Patricia Grace has released her new collection of short stories.

Acclaimed New Zealand author Patricia Grace blends mythology and contemporary Māori life in her new collection, Bird Child and Other Stories.

What links the stories in Bird Child and Other Stories? What do they share?

There are three parts to the collection. In part one, the stories connect because they draw on pūrakau, or ancient Māori storytelling . The first story, from which the book gets its title, is inspired by waiata tawhito, whakapapa, oriori and karakia. The remaining pieces are re-imaginings of ancient stories.

Those in part two are based on my own childhood experiences and are set in the 1940s and 50s, depicting experiences of a Māori child in both urban and rural environments.

Part three is made up of contemporary stories. There are a wide range of themes.

Though the stories within each of the parts are linked, between parts they are not, unless we count authorship, and perhaps, birds.

What was it like revisiting some of your previously published stories for this collection? What kind of change did you see between past Patricia and present-day Patricia?

I enjoyed revisiting earlier stories, could even say I rejoiced in them. If I thought any could do with an edit, I did that – but nothing drastic. As the years pass and times change, more and more themes and ideas present themselves, but I haven’t moved away from the source of where ideas come from, which is, from within – meaning that I have lived the experience forming the base of the story, in some way.

Did looking back at your previous works bring anything different to them, the way that you read or saw them?

Nothing different in how I read or saw them. They are what I could do and where I was at, at the time.

Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace,

How did you know what should and shouldn’t go in this collection? In the editing process, are you a tough critic of your work?

Judgement and personal preference. I always want to do the best writing that I can do and work hard to achieve this. In so doing I can feel satisfied that I am respecting the reader, also respecting those to whom the book may be dedicated as well as those who I have acknowledged.

Some of this collection is steeped in mythology. What does myth mean to you? How do you think myth succeeds as a narrative device? Equally, what do you think it affords the storyteller, and those receiving that story?

I find the ancient stories both fascinating and inspiring in their range of characters, their forthrightness, their bold storylines and their language. They hold within them themes for today. I guess that is why they have stood the test of time. Over the centuries these oral histories have been embellished, updated, made to fit the ears, minds, hearts of people of a particular time and place. It is the task of today’s writers to present these in a way that is understandable and interesting to today’s listeners and readers.

You’ve spoken before about how, in your writing, you’re interested in exploring intergenerational relationships and the interconnectedness of people and their environments. What do you think is productive as a writer to examine right now?

All of the above, now more than ever. Examination of past, present and future and our connectedness to this earth, is vital to survival. I believe all good writing needs to be political, or to examine and explain the human condition. In “exploring intergenerational relationships and the interconnectedness of people and their environments” we will deepen the connection with each other, and with Papatuanuku – the earth from which all things come.

All good art needs to do this, to be the conscience, to show us to ourselves, to shine a light.

By writing about these subjects, do you see part of this collection as being educational, in a way that offers another type of learning?

It’s a difficult question to answer because I don’t really know what readers will take from my stories. I think first and foremost, one wants to tell a good story. One would hope that understandings will come from that.

Some of your stories draw on your childhood. Though your stories are fiction, do you think of yourself, in part, as a keeper of histories?

I can’t say I’ve thought about that. But I do think that fiction is as equally important as non-fiction in telling history. It is in fiction that emotional depth and cultural understanding of a particular time and place is able to be explored. Imagination, carefully handled, can reach into both past and future. Oral history and storytelling have an all-important role to play.

As someone who has such a creative family, including daughter-in-law Briar Grace-Smith [director and screenwriter] and grandaughter Miriama Grace-Smith, who created the cover illustration for Bird Child, have you found that other creative forms beyond writing influence your work?

My late husband, besides being an educator was also a carver, visual artist and designer. My family are all involved artistically, whether that be in visual arts, building, woodworking, design, film, video, theatre, photography, programme design, performance, writing, or as instrumentalists, singers and musicians. I grew up with a brother who was an artist. I’ve had great conversations with Briar and really enjoyed my times being ‘on set’ during the making of the film Cousins . I rejoice in the cover of the new book, artwork by my granddaughter, Miriama. All of this is inspirational to me, but also normal.

Describe the feeling you have when you’re writing.

Highs and lows.

Who are your favourite writers currently? Do you have any favourite young writers that you’re particularly inspired by?

I’m reading two books at the moment, not something that I usually do, but for me, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, though I regard it as a must-read, is not a prescription for this middle-of-the-night insomniac. I need to break it up. I’m reading also This Other Eden , by Paul Harding.

I’ve recently read a pre-production copy of Hine Toa by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. It’s brave, it’s amazing.

Mid last year I read The Bone Tree a first novel by Airana Ngarewa. I’ll certainly be looking out for his next book.

What book do you recommend to people the most?

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

How do you know when a story is finished?

When I find myself overthinking, I chop.

Bird Child and Other Stories (Penguin, RRP $37) is on sale now

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Chills and Thrills: Horror Short Stories Collection

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Ivory Jackson

Chills and Thrills: Horror Short Stories Collection Kindle Edition

Step into the shadows and brace yourself for a spine-tingling journey through the twisted corridors of the human psyche. In this collection of horror short stories, darkness reigns supreme as fear takes on many forms, lurking in the darkest corners of the mind.

Each tale is a macabre masterpiece, crafted to elicit gasps of terror and shivers of dread. From haunted houses to cursed artifacts, from malevolent spirits to ancient evils, the horrors within these pages will leave you breathless and begging for more.

Prepare to be drawn into a world of nightmares, where every turn of the page brings you face to face with the unknown. With each story more chilling than the last, you'll find yourself lost in a labyrinth of fear, desperate to uncover the secrets hidden within.

But beware, dear reader, for once you enter the realm of horror, there is no escape. So dim the lights, stoke the fire, and prepare yourself for a journey into the heart of darkness. Just remember, what you find may haunt you long after the final page has turned.

  • Print length 25 pages
  • Language English
  • Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
  • Publication date February 15, 2024
  • File size 154 KB
  • Page Flip Enabled
  • Word Wise Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting Enabled
  • See all details

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CVT3SDZN
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 15, 2024
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 154 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 25 pages

About the author

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Ivory Jackson

Ivory is a stay at home mom in Michigan. With a passion for Mystery, Horror, and Fantasy, she has dedicated her career to crafting captivating stories that sucks readers in and sets their mind ablaze.

Born and raised in Michigan, Ivory draws inspiration from Dean Koontz and Steven King to create immersive worlds and compelling characters. She believes in the power of storytelling to bring imaginations to life.

Ivory's debut novel, Chills and Thrills: Horror Short Stories, explores themes of Horror and fantasy. She is currently working on more collections of short stories of the horror/ mystery genre and is eager to continue sharing her unique voice and perspective with readers around the world.

When she is not writing, Ivory can be found with her family. She also enjoys crocheting and playing with her cats Carrie and Luna. Follow Ivory on Instagram to stay updated on her latest projects and adventures.

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Book review: Stories that are funny and sad at same time

Book review: Stories that are funny and sad at same time

Bridget O'Connor was born in Harrow in northwest London, where there is a thriving Irish community, her father Jim was from Cork and her mother Bridie from Limerick.

  • After a Dance: Selected Stories 
  • Bridget O’Connor 
  • Picador, £13.99 

After a Dance  is a selection from the two volumes of short stories published by London-Irish writer Bridget O’Connor, who died of cancer in 2010, aged 49. 

Born in Harrow in northwest London, where there is a thriving Irish community, her father Jim was from Cork and her mother Bridie from Limerick.

She began her career as a writer in 1991 when her brilliant story, ‘Harp’, won the Time Out Short Story Competition. 

She also wrote plays — The Flags has been compared to the work of fellow London-Irish writer, Martin McDonagh — and she collaborated on film scripts with her husband Peter Straughan, winning a posthumous Bafta and an Oscar nomination for their adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy .

It is an impressive resume, yet I had never heard of O’Connor, even though I have both published and taught short stories (as the Frank O’Connor Fellow at UCC and the Munster Literature Centre). 

With the boom in short story writing in Ireland since 1998, London-based Bridget O’Connor somehow slipped under the radar.

If you use ‘weird’ and ‘quirky’ as terms of praise, then her work will definitely appeal. It manages to be both funny and heart-breakingly sad at the same time. As Roddy Doyle puts it in a generous blurb: “Some of the wildest, most arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I’ve read in a long time.”

The title story has all the ingredients of a William Trevor story, but a William Trevor story gone terribly wrong. 

Its bleak refrain — “She would recall that night often” — punctuates an account of a young girl on holiday being picked up by a boy at a dance. 

He drives her in his father’s car through narrow rural roads to his Uncle’s remote, ramshackle house, which he has a key to. 

He takes her to the damp, dusty bedroom of his recently deceased maiden aunts, and has his way with her — “The bed creaked. It seemed to her, it creaked out of time with their movements. It was not like the promise of it in the dance hall or in the car …” 

Then he falls asleep on top of her, the light still on, leaving her, to her surprise, in tears.

After a cold and sleepless night, the Uncle serves them a fry-up in the kitchen, while the young man teases the dog. It ends, “The Uncle asked was she enjoying her holiday and she said that she was.”

This is the only story set in Ireland and perhaps the least typical.

'Oh boy, holy moly': Cillian Murphy wins best actor at Baftas for Oppenheimer

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    In Stock Online. A semi-autobiographical story collection from Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, Learning to Talk is a poignant book about the defining moments of childhood. Quietly intense, these short stories set in mid-20 th century England find the melancholy beauty in little moments. Paperback $17.00.

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    20 New Must-Read Short Story Collections. Emily Martin Oct 31, 2022. Bloomsbury Publishing. In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover—and in some cases even make and unmake—the various uncharted parts of existence.

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    The power in these stories rests in their veracity, vitality and vulnerability.". -Michelle Filgate ( The Washington Post) 6. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. (Hogarth) 15 Rave 2 Positive. Read a story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed here.

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    Barrett's mastery of the short story form won him the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honor. It's a collection that's striking for its audacity to be a debut—completely assured of voice, of character, and of a setting that is utterly realized.

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    Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. $9 at Amazon. Gaiman's Newberry Medal and Hugo Award-winning collection of stories and poems includes items previously published in other anthologies and magazines. Here, he encourages readers to imagine the otherworldly, offering exciting and disturbing prose with one story even set in the world of.

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    This acclaimed collection of six stories, the first release from Eisenberg in 12 years, is brilliantly droll and crackling with life. Whether dismantling our relationship with money or the lasting ...

  10. 9 Best Short-Story Collections to Read Right Now 2020

    Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath. From $9. Written for Mademoiselle when the poet was a student at Smith College in 1952, the short story was later rejected and published for the first time, in its original, "sinister" form last year. The story of a young girl on a mysterious train ride, it is a quick, suspenseful read ...

  11. The Best Reviewed Books of 2021: Short Story Collections

    5. Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz. (Grove) 17 Rave • 1 Positive. Listen to an interview with Dantiel W. Moniz here. "Mortality is the undercurrent in Dantiel W. Moniz's electrifying debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat, but where there's death there is the whir of life, too.

  12. The Best Short Story Collections Of All-Time

    Pastoralia by George Saunders. Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "graceful, dark, authentic, and funny," George Saunders gives us, in his inventive and beloved voice, this bestselling collection of stories set against a warped, hilarious, and terrifyingly recognizable American landscape. 6 .) Runaway by Alice Munro.

  13. The Best Short Story Collections That Keep You Reading

    The first collection by beloved Mexican author Amparo Dávila to be translated into English, The Houseguest is a collection of 12 short stories touching on themes of obsession, paranoia and fear ...

  14. Short Story Collections, Short Stories, Books

    Hardcover $20.00. QUICK ADD. The Trees Grew Because I Bled…. by Eric LaRocca. Hardcover $17.95 $19.95. Active Page 1. …. Explore our list of Short Story Collections Books at Barnes & Noble®. Get your order fast and stress free with free curbside pickup.

  15. The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2020 ‹ Literary Hub

    December 9, 2020. Nicole Krauss' How to Be a Man, Stephen King's If It Bleeds, Emma Cline's Daddy, and Zora Neale Hurston's Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick all feature among the best reviewed short story collections of 2020. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub's "Rotten Tomatoes for books.". *. 1.

  16. The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Short Story Collections

    1. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. "The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching … an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance 's zest.

  17. 30 Best Short Books to Read in 2024

    Goings, published in 2013, is a collection of 13 witty, slyly subversive stories that tackle relationships with the self, family, friends, and lovers. For fans of his earlier books or of the many ...

  18. Our Favorite Short Story Collections of 2023

    Witness By Jamel BrinkleyFarrar, Straus and GirouxPublished August 1, 2023. Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a finalist for the National Book Award, Jamel Brinkley's sophomore story collection was among the year's most highly anticipated. And it doesn't disappoint.

  19. 130 Stephen King Short Stories: Every Collection in Order

    Eventually, King and his editor decided to publish all four stories together, positioning the book as "something different" — hence the title of the book. 1. "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal". 2. "Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption". 3. "The Body: Fall From Innocence ". 4.

  20. Writing, Compiling, and Arranging Short Stories in a Collection

    Apr 11, 2017. Putting together a book of short stories is like creating an issue of a literary magazine: The writer has to consider each story and the composition of the book as a whole. The difference between writing a single story and compiling them into a collection is significant. ( Tips for Writing and Selling Short Stories)

  21. Book Review: 'Neighbors and Other Stories,' by Diane Oliver

    A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings. ... showcased the short stories of James Baldwin ...

  22. The Best American Short Stories 2023 : A step backward

    The Best American Short Stories 2023 (Mariner Books)) features 20 stories published between January 2022 and January 2023. The stories in this offering of the annual anthology were selected by ...

  23. Crime writer George Pelecanos on 'Owning Up' in his new story ...

    As an author, he's known for his deep catalog of stories set in the streets of Washington, D.C. His new short story collection is titled Owning Up. And it features characters grappling with events ...

  24. NZ author Patricia Grace on her new book Bird Child, a collection of

    Acclaimed New Zealand author Patricia Grace has released her new collection of short stories. Acclaimed New Zealand author Patricia Grace blends mythology and contemporary Māori life in her new ...

  25. Chills and Thrills: Horror Short Stories Collection Kindle Edition

    Step into the shadows and brace yourself for a spine-tingling journey through the twisted corridors of the human psyche. In this collection of horror short stories, darkness reigns supreme as fear takes on many forms, lurking in the darkest corners of the mind.

  26. Book review: Stories that are funny and sad at same time

    With the boom in short story writing in Ireland since 1998, London-based Bridget O'Connor somehow slipped under the radar. If you use 'weird' and 'quirky' as terms of praise, then her ...