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Book Review

Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates

by Gabriella Harrison

The linked stories of "Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates" follow a determined girl’s coming-of-age and romantic pursuits. Dana Jetey’s novel-in-stories "Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates" follows the personal development and choices of... Read More

• #juvenilefiction

Story of the Everything, the Nothing, and Other Strange Stories

by Peter Dabbene

"Story of the Everything, the Nothing, and Other Strange Stories" is Gyula Gábor Tóth’s unusual and whimsical collection of illustrated fables. Made up of interactive, silly, and thought-provoking tales, the book includes entries... Read More

Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

The threat of climate change looms over the short stories of Ashley Shelby’s "Honeymoons in Temporary Locations", resulting in a zesty mix of humor, speculative science fiction, and melancholia. Set in a future wracked by environmental... Read More

Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts

by Joseph S. Pete

Nick Rees Gardner’s scathing short story collection captures lives of not-so-quiet desperation in the Rust Belt. These linked stories vivify Westinghouse, Ohio, an imaginary depressed Midwestern town wherein some people’s only... Read More

Prisms, Veils

by Karen Rigby

In theologian David Bentley Hart’s erudite short story collection, characters from Greek myths and literature have happenstance encounters with scholars and others. Hinting at both focused, rational ways of understanding the tangible... Read More

Balloon Theater

Concerned with interiority and the distances that exist between people, "Balloon Theater" is an evocative literary collection. In the pieces of Steve Moncada Street’s atmospheric literary collection "Balloon Theater", people strive for... Read More

Exile in Guyville

Within its compact length of six stories, Amy Lee Lillard’s collection "Exile in Guyville" packs a major punch with its hard-hitting science fiction that centers women’s perspectives. Sometimes darkly humorous and sometimes just... Read More

Of Fathers & Gods

by N.T. McQueen

Jim Roberts’s gritty short story collection Of Fathers & Gods reconciles ideas of fatherhood with faith. Told from a miscellany of viewpoints, these stories are forceful when it comes to the most challenging parts of being human.... Read More

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Have You Tried Reading a Short Story?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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20 New Must-Read Short Story Collections

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].

View All posts by Emily Martin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 .

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Best short stories and collections everyone should read.

If you are on the lookout for great storytelling but don’t want to commit to a full-length novel, then short story collections are the answer. Whether it’s just before bed, during your commute, or waiting to see your doctor, small chunks of time are perfect for reading short stories.

Here we have gathered thirty-one of the best short stories and collections , from all sorts of backgrounds and sources, to help you grow your “To Be Read” pile.

For your convenience, we've divided this post into two parts: 1. the ten best free short stories to read right now , and 2. best short story collections. Feel free to jump to the section that you prefer!

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great short stories out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized short story recommendation 😉

Which short story should you read next?

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Free Short Stories to Read Right Now

These individual short stories are the best of the best — and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse. From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories for you to read.

1. “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl

While not exactly a philosophical or political tale like our first two examples, this twisty short story from Dahl does delve into some shady moral territory. We are introduced to Mary Maloney: a loving wife and dedicated homemaker. In just a few short paragraphs describing how she welcomes her husband home, Dahl makes us sympathize with Mary — before a rash act turns her life upside down and takes the reader with her on a dark journey.

For those who haven’t read it, we won’t spoil the rest. However, it’s safe to say that Dahl serves up a fiendish twist on a platter.

2. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

A perennial feature in many a high school syllabus, Shirley Jackson’s best-known short story clinically details an unusual ritual that takes place in a small town. There’s not exactly a lot of plot to spoil in The Lottery — but within a few short pages, Jackson manages to represent the mob mentality that can drive reasonable people to commit heinous acts.

3. “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore

Told in the second person point of view , this story from Moore’s debut anthology Self-Help takes an honest look at the inner life of a struggling artist. Through the use of an unusual POV, the author manages to turn her reader into a confidante — making it abundantly clear that the ‘you’ the narrator is speaking about is actually herself.

This story is a standout, but the entire collection is well worth a read for its insight, humor, and disregard for literary norms.

4. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

In the Social Media Age, no short story has gone viral the way this New Yorker contribution from Roupenian has. Arriving at the height of #MeToo, it begins with 20-year-old Margot embarking on the early stages of flirtation with an older man, Robert. As she gets to know more about this man (as well as filling in the gaps with her imagination), the power dynamic in their relationship starts to fluctuate.

Lauded for its portrayal of Margot’s inner life and the fears many modern women face when it comes to dating, it also has its fair share of detractors — many are critical of the central character, some are downright outraged by the story’s success. Still, this story undeniably struck a chord with the reading public, and will likely remain relevant for some time.

5. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, “Cathedral” is today known as one of Raymond Carver’s finest works. When it opens, we meet a narrator whose wife is expecting a visit from an old friend, a blind man. Dissatisfied and distrusting of people not like him, our narrator struggles to connect until the blind man asks him to describe a cathedral to him. 

 “Cathedral” is one of Carver’s own personal favorites, and deservedly so. His characteristic minimalist style is devastating as the story builds up to a shattering moment of emotional truth — an ultimate reminder that no-one else can capture the quiet sadness of working-class people like him. 

6. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

Innocuously titled, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is nevertheless Flannery O’Connor’s bleakest — and most famous — work. It begins unassumingly with a Southern family who’s planning to go on a road trip. Yet the journey is rudely interrupted when their car overturns on an abandoned dirt road — and they are met by an enigmatic group of three men, coming up over the far hill. 

This short story inspired some strong reactions from the public upon publication — and the conversation continues today as to its frank depiction of the nature of good and evil. Again, we won’t spoil anything for you, except to say that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is well worth your time. 

7. “Symbols and Signs” by Vladimir Nabokov

The famous author of Lolita wrote “Signs and Symbols” in 1948. Its premise is seemingly simple: an elderly couple visits their mentally ill son in the sanatorium in America. Yet their background and trials come into sharp focus as the story develops, until an explosive ending disrupts everyone’s peace of mind. 

As you might expect, the somber “Symbols and Signs” diverges sharply from Lolita in terms of both tone and subject — but its ending will keep you awake at night thinking about its implications.  

8. “Sticks” by George Saunders

Not so much a short story as it is flash fiction, “Sticks” is written from the perspective of a young man whose father has an unusual habit: dressing up a crucifix that’s built of out a metal pole in the yard. One of America’s greatest living short story writers, George Saunders explained: "For two years I'd been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story." 

The result is a masterful piece of fiction that builds something out of seemingly nothing — all in the space of only two paragraphs. 

9. “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

If there’s anyone who you can trust to deliver thought-provoking, terrifying science fiction on the regular, it’s Ray Bradbury. In “The Veldt,” George and Lydia Hadley have bought an automated house that comes with a “nursey,” or a virtual reality room. Worried about the nursery’s effect on the kids, George and Lydia think about turning off the nursey — but the problem is that their children are obsessed with it. 

As an ominously prescient prediction of the downside of technology, “The Veldt” is a short and shining example of how Ray Bradbury was an author before his time. 

10. “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes

In this classic short story, we are privy to the journals of Charlie Gordon, a cleaner with an IQ of 68. ("I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me. All my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb.”) Charlie’s luck changes when he is selected for an experiment that purports to turn him into a genius — but everything that goes up must come down in the end. 

“Flowers for Algernon” won the Hugo Award in 1960 for its groundbreaking presentation. Heartbreaking and rich with subtle poignance, it is likely to remain a staple for centuries to come.  

Best Short Story Collections to Devour

If you'd like many short stories at your fingertips all at once, short story collections are where you should look. Here, we've collected 21 of the best short story collections — along with the standout story in each volume.

11. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Standout Story: “A Manual for Cleaning Women”

12. Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar

Standout Story: “House Taken Over”

13. Drifting House by Krys Lee

Standout Story: “Drifting House”

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14. Dubliners by James Joyce

Standout Story: “The Dead”

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

Standout Story: “Riding the Bullet”

16. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Standout Story: “The Garden of Forking Paths”

17. Florida by Lauren Groff

Standout Story: “Above and Below”

18. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman

Standout Story: “The Flints of Memory Lane”

19. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Standout Story: “The Pig”

20. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Standout Story: “Samsa in Love”

21. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Standout Story: “For Esme - With Love and Squalor”

22. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Standout Story: “In a Bamboo Grove”

23. Runaway by Alice Munro

Standout Story: “Runaway”

24. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez

Standout Story: “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”

25. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

Standout Story: “A Man Told Me the Story of His Life”

26. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

Standout Story: “Hills Like White Elephants”

27. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Standout Story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

28. The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

Standout Story: “The Lady with the Dog”

29. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Standout Story: “I’d Love You to Want Me”

30. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Standout Story: “The Thing Around Your Neck”

31. The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

Standout Story: “When Women Love Men”

Ready to write your own short story? Check out these short story ideas for all your inspiration needs.

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A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES

by Gillian Fletcher-Edwards ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 29, 2016

While showing signs of a burgeoning talent, these Welsh tales lack consistency.

A debut collection of short stories speaks of love, vulnerability, and salvation.  

Ten tales are offered here, each geographically tied to Wales. The first and longest, “Marged Evans,” tells of the eponymous heroine, a reclusive archivist set in her ways. Her life changes when she receives an unexpected Christmas card, which leads to a chain of events whereby she begins to reconnect with the world. To mirror her protagonist’s fastidiousness, the author delves regularly into overly scrupulous details, which prove engaging when describing street life but less so when dealing with the mundanities of central heating: “Even the heating of the house was kept at the minimum; central heating had been installed during the seventies, and the boiler, although old, was still functional.” The result is a turgid narrative that needs a ruthless edit. Subsequent stories suffer from the opposite problem: they are too short, underdeveloped, and have weak storylines. “Blue Skies” tells of a student taking her first trip overseas but lacks substance; “The Raindrop” imagines a community in the Western world faced with drought but reveals little other than attitudes change without water; and “The Cottage on the Hill: A Monologue” presents a heavily diluted rebuke of the rat race. Where Fletcher-Edwards truly comes into her own is in “Oi, you!,” the story of a child abused by his parents. To make the reader feel as small and vulnerable as this boy requires masterful skill: “His lifetime of crouching, of holding his pockmarked knees to his quivering chin, had left an indelible stain against the age-old wallpaper—the only thing that had seemed to give solace and refuge from the constant pain.” This is a disturbing, heartfelt, brilliant piece of writing that suggests a gifted author striving for consistency. Tales such as “The Annual Outing,” which features an artist setting up an easel on a headland and watching holidaymakers on the beach, reinforce this notion. The author’s observational skills are excellent here, yet the piece reads like a fragment rather than a complete story: “The colour of the shoreline mellowed from dark yellow, where the waves broke, to a golden hue, where the sun had dried the sand.” While readers with a love of Wales may connect with this book, others will likely lose patience with the collection’s imbalance.

Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6245-5

Page Count: 150

Publisher: AuthorHouseUK

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

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SEEN & HEARD

IN THE NEWS

SIGHTSEEING

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

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Book Reviews

Blindsided by 'the most': this is a superb novel of a marriage at its breakpoint.

Heller McAlpin

Jessica Anthony's new novel, The Most , blindsided me with its power, much like the cunning tennis strategy from which it gets its title. I don't say this often, but this superb short novel, about a marriage at its breakpoint, deserves to become a classic.

The Most takes place in Newark, Del., over the course of a single, unseasonably warm November day in 1957, which we experience from the two spouses' alternating points of view. We gradually learn a lot about this couple — their aspirations, their personalities, their backgrounds, and the infidelities and secrets they've kept, not altogether successfully, from each other.

Kathleen Lovelace Beckett is a former intercollegiate tennis champion who decided to marry a handsome, easygoing University of Delaware classmate after their graduation in 1948 rather than play professionally. When she wakes up "feeling poorly" one Sunday, nine years into their marriage, she tells her husband, Virgil, to take their two sons to church without her.

After they're gone, Kathleen pulls on her worn red swimsuit from college, pleased that it still fits over her expanded middle, and slips into the kidney-shaped pool in the depressing apartment complex where they've been living "temporarily" for six months and counting after moving back to Delaware from Pawtucket, R.I. Despite her disconcerted husband's repeated pleas during the course of the day as their elderly neighbors look on from their balconies, she refuses to get out. "Geez, Mrs. Beckett," Virgil cajoles Kathleen at one point. "Haven't you cooled off yet?"

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With its echoes of John Cheever's "The Swimmer" and its midcentury details, we're expecting a new take on 20th century suburban malaise. But what we get — along with the green wall-to-wall carpet, the ominous launch of Russia’s Sputnik 2 carrying a doomed "Muttnik" named Laika into space, the '57 Buick Bluebird provided by Virgil's new employer, Equitable Life, against future sales that have not yet materialized — is a story about tradeoffs in marriage and life.

Anthony, who was born in Oneida, N.Y., lives in Maine, where she teaches at Bates College. She is the author of several novels, including the political satire Enter the Aardvark . Among its other merits, The Most offers a lesson in tight construction.

Bridges are a recurrent theme in this story about a married couple suspended over (and sometimes literally immersed in) troubled waters. During the course of this unusual Sunday, Virgil recollects a previously suppressed boyhood memory of seeing a veteran of World War I jump to his death off the newly opened Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. Kathleen recalls the summer of 1942, when her parents ("generous with money if not affection") hired 21-year-old Billy Blasko, a serious Czech-born student, to teach their 16-year-old daughter tennis. Billy's family came from a town "remarkable only for being home to a bridge that had been bombed in the first world war and then had been rebuilt" — before being bombed again during WWII. In 1942, he's living in an area dominated by the wealthy duPonts — which translates as "from the bridges" — while his Jewish family is stuck in Nazi-dominated Europe.

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The son of a famous Czech tennis champion, Billy teaches Kathleen what his father taught him. Tennis, he instructs, is "a kind of dance." Billy drills her in the various moves and the many ways to hit a tennis ball while expanding her worldview by talking to her about what he calls " real subjects," including the war, politics and substantive books. Finally, shortly before their lessons come to an end (for reasons I'll leave to the reader to discover), Billy shares a killer move, meant to be used sparingly. He calls it "the most" — which, he tells Kathleen, translates to "bridge" in Czech. It essentially involves trapping your opponent at the net before letting loose a bomb. A bridge, Billy explains, isn't just a passage, but also a trap.

The strategy lends the novel not just its title, but also a tactic for breaking the impasse in which Kathleen and Virgil and their marriage are stuck. Kathleen, adrift in the pool, intends to blow things up, to detonate the status quo. Her deployment of this stratagem is at once a trap — to force Virgil's hand — and a passage, so they can move on together.

With The Most, Anthony has served an ace.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020

Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.

The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously  through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.

Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )

A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.

“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”

Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )

I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.

“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice,  on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”

Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )

Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any  Sehgal review and stop there.

“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”

Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )

Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights  and Jane Eyre  in the Romantic canon.

“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”

Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )

Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.

“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”

Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )

Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.

“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs  was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”

Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )

Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.

“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”

Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )

I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)

“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”

Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )

How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.

“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial  is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”

Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )

Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)

“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”

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Harris' VP options: From Josh Shapiro to Mark Kelly, sizing up the slate's pros and cons

Here's a look at 9 of harris' vice presidential prospects – and the pros and cons for each one as democrats try to maintain hold of the white house..

Democratic leaders are rallying to crown Vice President Kamala Harris their party’s 2024 presidential nominee , raising the question of whom she could choose as her running mate.   

The slate of rising stars said to be in consideration for the coveted role include swing state governors, a battle-tested Biden Cabinet appointee and military veterans. One thing they'd all have in common should they become the No. 2 to the nation's first female president : They could all court pivotal blocs of voters across the country.   

Who has been mentioned as possible VP candidate?

Here’s a look at nine of the top vice presidential candidates Harris is likely considering, along with the pros and cons for each as Democrats seek to hold the White House. 

Andy Beshear | Pete Buttigieg | Roy Cooper | Mark Kelly | J.B. Pritzker | Cedric Richmond | Josh Shapiro | Tim Walz | Gretchen Whitmer

Andy Beshear

• The twice-elected governor of a deep-red state, Beshear has a proven ability to garner support from a wide coalition of voters, including Trump Republicans and moderates. 
• Beshear could counter Sen. JD Vance’s rhetoric about the Appalachian region, which includes portions of Kentucky, to win over Rust Belt swing voters. 
• Beshear, 46, has bipartisan leadership credentials, having worked with a Republican Legislature to lead his state through multiple disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic, tornadoes and floods.  
• Kentucky is a Republican stronghold, and it’s unlikely Beshear would give Democrats an electoral advantage in the state. 
• Beshear has little foreign policy experience. 
• He is also relatively unvetted at the national level and is unlikely to have much name recognition among voters outside Kentucky.  

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Pete Buttigieg

• Buttigieg is already a well-known Democratic figure who has experience campaigning across the country from his 2020 presidential bid and service as a Biden Cabinet member. He also served in the military and can speak to defense and international debate.
• As the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg can speak to the concerns of voters in Rust Belt swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 
• At age 42, he is the youngest contender being considered for the VP slot and is openly gay. He may be better equipped to energize core Democratic base constituencies, including LGBTQ+, millennial and Gen Z voters.  
• Buttigieg’s identity as an openly gay man could hurt Democrats' chances of wooing conservative-leaning independents, especially on a ticket with the first Black female vice president.  
• As transportation secretary, Buttigieg has faced an array of criticism, including his handling of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – a disaster Vance has focused on in the Senate.  
• During his 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Buttigieg struggled to appeal to Black and Latino voters who are key parts of a Democratic path to victory in November. 
• Cooper has won six statewide elections in the key 2024 battleground state of North Carolina, including two governor's races, and could help Democrats carry the Southern swing territory.  
• Harris already has a working relationship with Cooper. They both served as their state’s respective attorney general, and Harris has described the North Carolina leader as a “dear friend.” 
• Cooper is in search of a new job. Unlike some of the other governors on the list, he is in the last year of his final term in office. 
• Cooper, 67, is one of the oldest contenders for the VP post. 
• Republicans have controlled the North Carolina Legislature since Cooper has been in power, which could make it difficult for him to claim full credit for successful policies. 
• Cooper has been criticized for dismissing charges against three Duke University lacrosse players who were accused of sexually assaulting a dancer.  
• North Carolina is in a tumultuous gubernatorial race, so Cooper may want to focus on his home state.
• Kelly won statewide elections for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in 2020 in a special election to finish the term of the late Sen. John McCain and for a full term in 2022. He could give Democrats a boost in the crucial battleground state as VP nominee. 
• He has a background in military service as a naval aviator and as a former astronaut, giving him a platform to attack former President Donald Trump on claims that Trump has mocked veterans. 
• Kelly is the husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head during a 2011 mass casualty event at a Tucson grocery store. Their story could prove powerful as gun violence takes center stage in the 2024 election.  
• Kelly is relatively unvetted on the national stage and is not well known beyond his state. 
• He has served in the U.S. Senate only since 2020 and is among the least-experienced politicians being considered for the VP nomination.  
• Swing state Arizona would hold a special election to fill his Senate seat if Kelly is picked and Democrats win the White House in November. 

J.B. Pritzker

• His progressive record as governor of Illinois, including proposals for a $15 an hour minimum wage and legalizing recreational marijuana, could appeal to the Democratic Party’s left flank.  
• Pritzker is heir to his family's Hyatt Hotel chain and has an estimated net worth of more than $3 billion. 
• One of the most outspoken Trump critics in the Democratic Party, Pritzker isn’t shy about taking on the former president and would be expected to perform well in a debate against Vance.  
• At 59, Pritzker is the same age as Harris and could struggle to reach out to younger generations of voters.  
• Pritzker faced controversy in 2018 for removing toilets from his luxury home in Chicago to lower his property taxes.  
• Illinois is not considered a battleground state, so picking Pritzker would not help Harris carry a swing state. 

Cedric Richmond

• Richmond is a Democratic loyalist who worked in the Biden White House and chaired his campaign.
• He has strong ties to Capitol Hill from his tenure as a congressman, which sets him apart from the governors on the list. Every vice president since 1977 has served in Congress first.
• He knows Harris well from his time leading the Congressional Black Caucus and as co-chair of the Biden transition team.  
• Richmond does not have a large following beyond Washington, D.C. 
• He does not hail from a swing state and would not bring a new constituency of voters to the Democratic ticket.  
• Richmond has served in public office since 2000 and has no military or private industry experience. His current role at the DNC could spur rhetoric from the Trump campaign that he is part of the Washington swamp.  

Josh Shapiro

• Shapiro has the highest gubernatorial rating of any Pennsylvania governor in decades, and he could prove to be important in delivering an electoral victory for Democrats in the must-win swing state. 
• The 51-year-old has gained national name recognition for his quick response to the 2023 I-95 overpass collapse and, more recently, his leadership after the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 
• His experience as the governor of a Rust Belt state and calls for unity after the Trump rally shooting may help Democrats counter Republican messaging that the party is divisive.
• Shapiro has led Pennsylvania for two years and is politically inexperienced on the national stage. 
• Democrats risk the chance that a Republican could take control of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion if he is picked and goes on to win the White House. 
• Shapiro isn’t likely to excite the party’s progressive base, especially given his moderate stance on the Israel-Hamas war. Shapiro has not called for a cease-fire but has expressed support for a two-state solution. 
• Walz has served two terms as Minnesota’s governor and six terms in the U.S. Congress, giving him more nuanced leadership experience than many of the VP contenders.  
• He has spoken openly about his family’s personal experience with IVF treatments and would be a strong champion for reproductive freedom on the campaign trail. 
• Walz is a former teacher and pro-union Democrat who can speak to the concerns of blue-collar workers in Midwestern states.  
• Walz is not well known outside Minnesota, and Democrats could struggle to introduce him to the American people with just three months until the general election.  
• He received backlash for his handling of the riots across Minnesota after the murder of George Floyd and his defense of the protesters who participated. 
• Walz has remained a steadfast supporter of Israel during its war with Hamas, which might not play well with younger, more progressive voters the Harris campaign is trying to reach. 

Gretchen Whitmer

• Whitmer won reelection in Michigan by double digits in 2022 and has broad support in the crucial Midwestern swing state.  
• During her two terms as governor, Whitmer has focused on working across the aisle on issues at top of mind for Americans, including job growth, economic investment and infrastructure. 
• Whitmer is a woman and an outspoken advocate for abortion rights. She could be a strong messenger against Republican rhetoric on reproductive rights, a key issue in the 2024 campaign.  
• A woman has never won the presidency, and a two-woman presidential ticket would be unprecedented. Democrats may fear that it would push some undecided voters away. 
• Whitmer was accused of hypocrisy during the COVID-19 pandemic for traveling out of state and going to a bar while her administration encouraged people not to travel or eat out. She has since admitted she made a mistake.  
• Whitmer does not have foreign policy experience or background working with the deeply divided U.S. Congress.  

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2020—the longest year that has ever been—is almost at an end, and that means it’s time for us to break out the calculators and tabulate the best reviewed books of past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2020, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography;   Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Fantasy ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Graphic Literature; Poetry; Mystery & Crime; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our recommendations this week tilt toward works of fiction, with a new story collection from the incomparable Joy Williams (it’s about Azrael, the angel who escorts dead souls to their final destinations) and novels by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Akwaeke Emezi and Julia Phillips. In nonfiction, we recommend a wide-angle history of Black resistance and a cultural history of the Federal Theater Project, a Depression-era government arts program that fell prey to the politics of the day. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Based on a true story, this novel by the author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble” follows a dysfunctional suburban family decades after the father, a prominent businessman, is kidnapped from his driveway. Now his children are in their 30s and 40s, and laying out the ways they are screwed up by latent trauma, their father’s repression and the wealth that insulates them.

“When Brodesser-Akner dives, she does so without making a splash, seamlessly entering … her characters’ pathological inability to know themselves.”

From Sloane Crosley’s review

Random House | $30

WE REFUSE: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Kellie Carter Jackson

In her compelling and often counterintuitive new book, Carter Jackson, a professor of Africana studies, argues that the usual chronicles of Black resistance are both narrow and watered down. She traces the global influence of the Haitian Revolution, reveals the diverse attitudes of American civil rights activists and warns against the dangers of misremembering the past.

“A broader and more nuanced picture of resistance. … Effective in unearthing the stories of little-known, everyday rebellions, especially from the lives of Black women. These histories have been at best under-told, if not lost altogether.”

From Linda Villarosa’s review

Seal Press | $30

THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War James Shapiro

Shapiro, a leading Shakespeare scholar, offers this timely history of the Federal Theater Project, a short-lived but ambitious Depression-era program that gave work to writers and actors, until opponents tarred its efforts as un-American.

“Piquant and resonant … about how messy and compromised the situation can get for artists when Congress is signing the checks, how cynical the politics can be.”

From Laura Collins-Hughes’s review

Penguin Press | $30

LITTLE ROT Akwaeke Emezi

Emezi’s latest is about a casual evening gone spectacularly awry, following two exes who, in an effort to recover after their breakup, spend a Friday night with friends, only to be sucked into Nigeria’s dark, terrible underworld.

“What gives ‘Little Rot’ its vitality are its overlapping love stories, its characters’ longing, their acts of devotion and tenderness in defiance of a world in which a soft heart is a liability.”

From Chelsea Leu’s review

Riverhead Books | $29

CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF SOULS: 99 Stories of Azrael Joy Williams

In her latest story collection, Williams (the daughter of a Congregational minister) distills much learning — on philosophy, history and religion — into 99 brief tales about Azrael, the angel of death, and his complicated relationship with the Devil. Both characters seem a bit weary, but the author’s wit and brilliance remain undiminished.

“Running almost silently below the loneliness and the silky comedy in these stories is the sense, down on earth, of acidifying oceans, species loss and space junk crashing Muskily down from the cosmos. ... The portents have grown dire.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

Tin House | $22.95

BEAR Julia Phillips

Two sisters barely getting by on a Puget Sound island respond very differently to the appearance of a mysterious grizzly in this slow-burning novel, loosely based on a Grimms’ fairy tale.

“Moody and affecting. … ‘Bear’ ends with a bang, and with the intriguing notion that sisterhood (or sisters?) may be as unknowable and unpredictable as anything else in nature.”

From Jess Walter’s review

Hogarth | $28

• Cast & crew

A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern.

• Halina Reijn
• Nicole Kidman
• Harris Dickinson
• Antonio Banderas
• 1 nomination

Top cast 36

• Intern Rose

• Nude cult member

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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