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17 Short Story And Essay Collections For When You Want To Laugh, Cry, Think, Or Swoon
Whether you're in a reading slump or just want to read something different, these collections will revitalize you!
BuzzFeed Contributor
1. Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz
Jill Gutowitz's debut essay collection has solidified her own place in the lesbian canon, which she explores in-depth in one of her essays where she lists vital pieces of it, including oat milk, elderflower syrup, and "Eliza Dushku just existing." If you haven't read Jill's work yet, I don't know what you're waiting for — she is consistently the funniest and best person to follow on Twitter and her Gaylor missives are not to be missed.
Jill's exploration of her own identity is told through era-defining anecdotes, a reminder of just how influential pop culture really is on our lives — which isn't a bad thing, according to Jill. If you love the early aughts-setting of PEN15 , Lindsay Lohan , and folklore , this is the perfect read for you.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound . You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm.
2. Game On: 15 Stories of Wins, Losses and Everything In Between edited by Laura Silverman
This YA anthology is a prime example of the millions of ways a prompt can be interpreted. While the cover may trick you into believing this anthology is all about sports, it's not the case. For instance, Nina Moreno, author of Don't Date Rosa Santos , has an endearing sapphic story about two girls who fall in love playing a farming sim (aka what queer cottagecore dreams are made of). And the first story in the collection, Sona Charaipotra's "Let It Spin," tells of a game of spin the bottle that changed the direction of its MC's life, detailing a devastating friendship breakup . Editor Laura Silverman also has a story in the anthology about sexism and tabletop gaming. And sure, there are sports stories in it, too, ranging from cheerleading to soccer and everywhere in between. There's something for everyone here.
3. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos
A new collection of essays by writer Melissa Febos navigates the relationship between mind and body, how they are less separated than we think, and how our bodies dictate the way we remember and tell stories. A craft book at its core, the ideas presented will invoke thoughts about process for writers, but it's an insightful read whether you're a writer or not.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound . You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm .
4. The Last Suspicious Holdout: Stories by Ladee Hubbard
Ladee Hubbard's collection of 13 short stories offer vignettes of different Black families living in an unnamed "sliver of Southern suburbia" in a time between the beginning of Bill Clinton's presidency to the inauguration of President Barack Obama . Their stories range from funny to sad; always vivid, mostly hopeful, with a strong focus on matters that affect Black families at disproportionate rates: namely the quality and accessibility of education and healthcare, the war on drugs, and the criminal justice system. There is a strong sense of community throughout the stories, told in a world where resilience and hope are the only options, and nothing is taken for granted.
5. Cost of Living: Essays by Emily Maloney
It's no secret that our healthcare system, especially in the US, is beyond broken. This collection of essays from Emily Maloney tells two sides of the story: as a patient and as a healthcare professional, the ways she was wronged and pushed into debt, and the stories of patients she cared for as an emergency room technician. Rather than choosing between a focus on how mental health treatment is not handled properly in this country or a focus on how the smallest of injuries can send someone into massive debt, Maloney explores it all: the different creaks and crevices of the ways the healthcare industry can fail its patients over and over again.
6. New Teeth by Simon Rich
Simon Rich's new collection of short stories is an ode to growing up, which is something we can never have enough of. Wholly imaginative, like a child should be, the stories play up a child's fears and big questions, asking: What if they were true? And rather than just dream up the nightmares, Rich provides the answers, letting every insane scenario end in a place of comfort and certainty, at least to some degree. Whether you're looking to get in touch with your inner child, wanting a voice that hears you as a new parent, or just in need of a laugh, you'll find what you're in search of in New Teeth.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound. You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm.
7. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante ( My Brilliant Friend ) has long established herself as an author to look out for. So much so that she was invited to give a public series of lectures on writing at the University of Bologna, but the pandemic put a halt to those plans. Instead, she compiled those lessons in this book.
While she's well-known for her fiction, and for being an anonymous author, this book of essays allows her to explore nonfiction writing and allows readers to get a closer glimpse into the mind of this mysterious writer. Elena's prose does not suffer in this different medium; if anything, it's as strong and beautiful as ever.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound .
8. Reclaim The Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space edited by Zoraida Córdova
Featuring both new and acclaimed voices in the Latin American writing space, this anthology explores the world of science fiction, magic, and fantasy through different lenses in the Latin American diaspora, divided into sections. From stories with magical space princesses (Anne-Marie McClemore's "Reign of Diamonds") to stories with plant-growing magic (Zoraida Cordova's "Tame the Wicked Night"), underneath all the supernatural forces are stories about love, death, grief, acceptance, family pressure, coming to terms with your sexuality, and much more. You're bound to find a new favorite story or author here.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound. You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm .
9. Dear Damage: Essays by Ashley Marie Farmer
Ashley Farmer's collection of essays on grief are gripping from the start, as she sets the scene of a turning point in her grandparents' marriage. A bad fall paralyzes her grandmother unexpectedly, and trying to do what he thinks is right, her grandfather shoots and kills her shortly after in a "mercy killing." He tries to kill himself, too, but fails. And thus starts the collection of hybrid essays focused on Farmer's grandparents, interspersed with internet comments on the news story, audio transcripts, legal documents, and more, making for a truly unique and fascinating book.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound.
10. Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby
Gwen E. Kirby's debut collection of short stories dares to ask: What if we just let women be their messiest selves? Through this lens, she imagines scenarios women (and men!) may have encountered since the Hellenic times up until today, playing with different structures including a "How To" essay and a scathing Yelp review that has a lot more bubbling under the surface. These hilarious stories use satire to examine real struggles and criticisms of the world and patriarchal standards. If you want to laugh and think, pick this one up.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound. You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm.
11. Up All Night: 13 Stories Between Sunset and Sunrise edited by Laura Silverman
This genre-blending anthology features contemporary stories, romance, horror, and even stories about superheroes, all from acclaimed YA authors such as Nina LaCour, Tiffany D. Jackson, Karen M. McManus, and more. What do these stories have in common? They take place in the wee hours of the night, where the magic happens. With disability rep, queer rep, Black rep, and Asian rep, this diverse collection of stories explores both exciting and painful firsts, like first loves and first heartbreaks, as well as stories about friendship breakups and friendship rekindlings, and poignant lessons in self-discovery.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound . You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm.
12. The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang
Told and translated by a team of female and nonbinary creators, The Way Spring Arrives is a collection of short stories and nonfiction essays centered on underrepresented voices in Chinese science fiction and fantasy. The stories are often existential and sometimes dystopian, exploring deep and dark "what if's" in the real world and other universes, flush with vivid setting descriptions. Aside from the gorgeously translated stories, there are essays on the art of translation that will give you a new appreciation for the intricacies of translation, including some written by critically acclaimed author of The Poppy Wars trilogy, R. F. Kuang.
Get it from Bookshop or through your local bookstore via Indiebound . You can also try the audiobook version through Libro.fm.
13. That Way Madness Lies edited by Dahlia Adler
Whether or not you love Shakespeare, you're sure to love this collection of contemporary reimaginings of some of the Bard's most famous stories, as told by a diverse group of prominent YA authors. There are prom stories based off Twelfth Night (Mark Oshiro's "Shipwrecked"), road trip stories based off Sonnet 147 (Brittany Cavallaro's "His Invitation"), troubled sibling stories based off The Tempest (Austin Siegemund-Broka and Emily Wibberley's "Severe Weather Warning") and so much more, including some spectacular queer and genderfluid rep in quite a few stories, sure to make William himself proud.
14. Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo
This debut collection of short stories from Sindya Bhanoo is a rich exploration of the South Indian immigrant experience, telling varying stories from different characters all detailing the hard and surprising parts of their journeys, reminding readers that these decisions are never easy to make. Raw, honest, and intimate, Bhanoo's gift for storytelling shines in these short stories that paint full pictures and connect with each other, though they take place in different countries.
15. Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho
In Fiona and Jane , author Jean Chen Ho takes advantage of the short story format to freely jump around different eras and shift perspectives while telling the stories of two Asian American best friends who find themselves on opposite sides of the country in their adulthood, recounting their personal and joint explorations of identity, love, sexuality, and ambition. Told in the way two real friends may be telling the same stories with varying perspectives to their kids or partners, the honesty and emotions in Fiona and Jane sheds a beautiful light on the joy of female friendship and how it can shape a person, ground them, and help them see themselves for who they really are.
16. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
A collection of stories that are horrifying and fantastical, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is more than just stomach-churning imagery of bugs and other creatures. With unique perspectives, the stories explore the monsters hiding in plain sight — the effects of technology, the aftermath of grief, the pain of growing up, the trouble that is being a part of a family. As unsettling as the stories may be, they are often relatable, too, and at the very least, thought-provoking.
17. A Manual For Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
I couldn't write a list of short stories without including this posthumous, must-read collection from the late Lucia Berlin. With a haunting and poignant voice, Berlin weaves tales about alcoholism, tainted love, motherhood, grief, and more, set across a number of settings across the United States. Painfully honest, every emotion explored by Berlin is palpable. An unforgettable collection of stories that belongs on everyone's bookshelf.
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100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections
A round-up of the best contemporary short story collections published this century, covering literary fiction, horror, fantasy, and more.
Liberty Hardy
Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty
View All posts by Liberty Hardy
This list of must-read contemporary short story collections is sponsored by Random House’s Buzziest Short Story Collections of 2018
From New York Times bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld’s dazzling first collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It , to National Book Award winner Denis Johnson’s final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden , there’s something for every book lover from Random House.
Carmen Maria Machado raves of Anjali Sachdeva’s exhilarating collection, All the Names They Used for God ; “completing one [story] is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.”
All are available in Spring 2018 from Random House, wherever books are sold.
Of all of the 100 must-read lists I have done so far, this was probably the easiest because there are so many amazing contemporary short story collections. Story collections are such a gift: a whole bunch of different stories in one convenient place! What fun! The following list is made up of the first 100 collections that popped into my head. I have read and loved each of them. (And I probably have enough titles to do a sequel—stay tuned!) And by “contemporary” I mean “published this century.” (Which still gave me eighteen amazing years to choose from!)
I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary short story collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them…Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.”
War by Candlelight: Storie s by Daniel Alarcón
“Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. War by Candlelight is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people—a devastating portrait of a world in flux—and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.”
The Water Museum: Stories by Luis Alberto Urrea
“From one of America’s preeminent literary voices comes a new story collection that proves once again why the writing of Luis Alberto Urrea has been called ‘wickedly good’ ( Kansas City Star ), ‘cinematic and charged’ ( Cleveland Plain Dealer) , and ‘studded with delights’ ( Chicago Tribune) . Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning ‘Amapola’ and his now-classic ‘Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses,’ which had the honor of being chosen for NPR’s ‘Selected Shorts’ not once but twice.”
In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar
“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.”
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah
“A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home…Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.”
North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud
“Nathan Ballingrud’s Shirley Jackson Award–winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud’s intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.”
Young Skins: Stories by Colin Barrett
“Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars…In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence. Told in Barrett’s vibrant, distinctive prose, Young Skins is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a singular new voice in contemporary fiction.”
There Are Little Kingdoms: Stories by Kevin Barry
“These stories, filled with a grand sense of life’s absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners . The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year in The Irish Times , the Sunday Tribune , and Metro , There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.”
We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories by Clare Beams
“The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality…As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Clare Beams’s rare and capacious imagination—and yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.”
Welcome Thieves: Stories by Sean Beaudoin
“Black humor mixed with pathos is the hallmark of the twelve stories in this adult debut collection from a master writer of comic and inventive YA novels…Beaudoin’s stories are edgy and profane, bittersweet and angry, bemused and sardonic. Yet they’re always tinged with heart. Beaudoin’s novels have been praised for their playfulness and complexity, for the originality and beauty of their language.”
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead: Stories by Chanelle Benz
“The characters in The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead , Benz’s wildly imaginative debut, are as varied as any in recent literature, but they share a thirst for adventure which sends them rushing full-tilt toward the moral crossroads, becoming victims and perpetrators along the way. Riveting, visceral, and heartbreaking, Benz’s stories of identity, abandonment, and fierce love come together in a daring, arresting vision.”
Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
“Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collides with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can’t be denied.”
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
“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.”
Things that Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier
“Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeier’s richly imagined Things That Fall from the Sky views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens…Achingly beautiful and deceptively simple, Things That Fall from the Sky defies gravity as one of the most original story collections seen in recent years.”
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter relationships can be lifelines, anchors, or they can sink a woman like a stone.”
Honeymoon and Other Stories by Kevin Canty
“Honeymoon is a book about love, about lovers and would-be lovers exploring unlikely alliances, all of them toeing a certain eventful edge, a decision between rational restraint and something altogether different…Revealing the hidden longings and quirky needs of both men and women with a tough sensitivity and deep, sometimes biting humor, Honeymoon presents a masterful writer purely at home in his form, yet continuing to push himself and his stories to their limits with enthusiasm and daring.”
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington
“Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.”
Among the Missing by Dan Chaon
“In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.”
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
“What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven’s other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang.”
The Ladies of Grace Adieu: and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke
“Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time embroidering terrible fates or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice. The heroines and heroes bedeviled by such problems in these fairy tales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell : Strange himself and the Raven King.”
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories by Kathleen Collins
“Now available in Ecco’s Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker—a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley—whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim. Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins’s stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues—race, gender, family, and sexuality—that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.”
Mary and O’Neil: A Novel in Stories by Justin Cronin
“Justin Cronin’s poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O’Neil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and O’Neil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of O’Neil’s parents, Mary’s long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, O’Neil’s sister’s battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and O’Neil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.”
We’ve Already Gone This Far: Stories by Patrick Dacey
“In this stunning debut, Patrick Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers. Here, in small-town Massachusetts, after more than a decade of boom and bust, everyone is struggling to find their own version of the American dream: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor’s veteran son, a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television, a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town, a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged.”
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
“From remote Australian settlements to the snows of Siberia, from Colorado to Cumbria, restless teenagers, middle-aged civil servants, and Quaker spinsters traverse expanses of solitude to reveal the secrets of the human heart. Written with raw and rigorous prose, charged throughout by a prickly wit, the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike remind us how little we know of the lives of others.”
The Shell Collector: Stories by Anthony Doerr
“The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr’s debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties—metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts—conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.”
Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due
“Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence bestselling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness.”
The Wilds by Julia Elliott
“In her genre-bending stories, Elliott blends Southern gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities, sci-fi speculations with fairy-tale transformations. Teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, Elliott’s language-driven fiction uses outlandish tropes to capture poignant moments in her humble characters’ lives. Without abandoning the tenets of classic storytelling, Elliott revels in lush lyricism, dark humor, and experimental play.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander
“These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.”
A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
“A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.”
Half an Inch of Water: Stories by Percival Everett
“For the plainspoken men and women of these stories—fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians—small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar… Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.”
A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford
“Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor’s daughter’s exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain’s head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker’s dozen of exhilarating visions.”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories by Ben Fountain
“The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught—to both disastrous and hilarious effect—in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain’s prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.”
Ayiti by Roxane Gay*
“From New York Times –bestselling powerhouse Roxane Gay, Ayiti is a powerful collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. Originally published by a small press, this Grove Press paperback will make Gay’s debut widely available for the first time, including several new stories.”
*Originally published in 2011, being reissued by Grove Press on June 12
Dead Girls and Other Stories by Emily Geminder
“With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.”
Gutshot: Stories by Amelia Gray
“A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot , where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. A master of the macabre, Gray’s work is not for the faint of heart or gut: lick at your own risk.”
Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories by Lauren Groff
“Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif—sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur; they’re in every story—love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme—Groff’s women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.”
You Should Pity Us Instead by Amy Gustine
“You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.”
Madame Zero: 9 Stories by Sarah Hall
“From one of the most accomplished British writers working today, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Wolf Border , comes a unique and arresting collection of short fiction that is both disturbing and dazzling…In this collection of nine works of short fiction, she uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul.”
You Are Not a Stranger Here: Stories by Adam Haslett
“In these unforgettable stories, the acclaimed author of Imagine Me Gone explores lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them. The impact is at once harrowing and thrilling…Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.”
Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny
“For the commitment-averse women in the eleven sublime stories of Single, Carefree, Mellow, falling in love is never easy and always inconvenient…The women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.”
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernández
“Assimilation is founded on surrender and being broken; this collection of short stories features people who have assimilated, but are actively trying to reclaim their lives…Poignant by way of funny, and philosophical by way of grotesque, Hernandez’s stories are prayers for self-sovereignty.”
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
“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…”
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
“Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves.”
Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson
“In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retelling The Tempest as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders.”
Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua
“In this powerful debut collection, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none. These stories shine a light on immigrant families navigating a new America, straddling cultures and continents, veering between dream and disappointment.”
Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter
“Lindsay Hunter tells the stories no one else will in ways no one else can. In this down and dirty debut she draws vivid portraits of bad people in worse places…A rising star of the new fast fiction, Hunter bares all before you can blink in her bold, beautiful stories. In this collection of slim southern gothics, she offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read.”
Knockout: Stories by John Jodzio
“The work of John Jodzio has already made waves across the literary community. Some readers noticed his nimble blending of humor with painful truths reminded them of George Saunders. His creativity and fresh voice reminded others of Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . But with his new collection, Jodzio creates a class of his own.”
Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson
“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.”
All Aunt Hagar’s Children: stories by Edward P. Jones
“Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City , Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city’s power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar’s Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones’s masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.”
After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones
“The fifteen stories in After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones explore the horrors and fears of the supernatural and the everyday. Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print narratives, as well as a few ‘best of the year’ inclusions.”
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
“These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers, Unaccustomed Earth exquisitely renders the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.”
Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson
“Nodding to the Southern Gothic but channeling an energy all its own, Virgin and Other Stories is a mesmerizing debut from an uncannily gifted young writer. With self-assurance and sensuality, April Ayers Lawson unravels the intertwining imperatives of intimacy—sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire—eyeing, unblinkingly, what happens when we succumb to temptation.”
Back Talk: Stories by Danielle Lazarin
“Through stories that are at once empathetic and unexpected, these women and girls defiantly push the boundaries between selfishness and self-possession. With a fresh voice and bold honesty, Back Talk examines how narrowly our culture allows women to express their desires.”
The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards, the renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.”
Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee
“Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels…Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it’s impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they’d expected.”
We Come to Our Senses: Stories by Odie Lindsey
“For readers of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Redeployment , a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South. Lacerating and lyrical, We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war.”
Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
“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.”
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser (Editor), Katrina Dodson (Translator)
“Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives—and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.”
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
“With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings , taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories …Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.”
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce
“Set in Japan, Luce’s playful, tender stories—reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Aimee Bender—tip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love. The award-winning narratives in this mesmerizing debut trace the lives of ex-pats, artists, and outsiders as they seek to find their place in the world.”
Half Wild: Stories by Robin MacArthur
“Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.”
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
“In Her Body and Other Parties , Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.”
Music for Wartime: Stories by Rebecca Makkai
“Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House , have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.”
Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken
“In Elizabeth McCracken’s universe, heartache is always interwoven with strange, charmed moments of joy—an unexpected conversation with small children, the gift of a parrot with a bad French accent—that remind us of the wonder and mystery of being alive. Thunderstruck & Other Stories shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers.”
Heartbreaker: Stories by Maryse Meijer
“In her debut story collection Heartbreaker , Maryse Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensemble—a feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophile—who share in vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. Meijer deals in desire and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood, crafting a landscape of appetites threatening to self-destruct. In beautifully restrained and exacting prose, she sets the marginalized free to roam her pages and burn our assumptions to the ground.”
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
“Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship.”
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories by China Miéville
“The fiction of multiple award–winning author China Miéville is powered by intelligence and imagination. Like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility, employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative, unexpected ways.”
I Was a Revolutionary: Stories by Andrew Malan Milward
“Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I Was a Revolutionary capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas.”
Runaway by Alice Munro
“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.”
After the Quake: Stories by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (Translator)
“The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.”
You Are My Heart and Other Stories by Jay Neugeboren
“From the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships. In works that are as memorable, engrossing, and exciting as they are gorgeously crafted, Neugeboren delivers on his reputation as one of our pre-eminent American writers.”
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
“With the same incisiveness as in The Sympathizer , in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration.”
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls: Stories by Alissa Nutting*
“Throughout these breathtakingly creative seventeen stories spread across time, space, and differing planes of reality, we encounter a host of women and girls in a wide range of unusual jobs…Wickedly funny yet ringing with deep truths about gender, authority and the ways we inhabit and restrict the female body, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a brilliant commentary on the kaleidoscope of human behavior and a remarkably nuanced satire for our times.”
*Originally published in 2011, being reissued by Ecco on July 3
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator)
“Sinister forces collide—and unite a host of desperate characters—in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor …Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the last page.”
Salsa Nocturna by Daniel José Older
“A 300 year-old story collector enlists the help of the computer hacker next door to save her dying sister. A half-resurrected cleanup man for Death’s sprawling bureaucracy faces a phantom pachyderm, doll-collecting sorceresses and his own ghoulish bosses. Gordo, the old Cubano that watches over the graveyards and sleeping children of Brooklyn, stirs and lights another Malaguena. Down the midnight streets of New York, a whole invisible universe churns to life in Daniel Jose Older’s debut collection of ghost noir.”
The Bigness of the World: Stories by Lori Ostlund
“In Lori Ostlund’s award-winning debut collection, people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind. In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, The Bigness of the World contains characters that represent a different sort of everyman—men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign.”
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
“Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination ‘both physical and emotional’ of a generation of Japanese Americans…Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.”
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
“With penetrating insight that belies her youth—she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story—ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance—fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.”
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman
“In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.”
I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro
“Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Quatro’s stories upend and shake out our views on infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with fractured marriages, mercurial temptations, and dark theological complexities, and establish a sultry and enticingly cool new voice in American fiction.”
You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Storie s by Mary Rickert
“Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.”
The Republic of East LA: Stories by Luis J. Rodriguez
“From the award-winning author of Always Running comes a brilliant collection of short stories about life in East Los Angeles. In these stories, Luis J. Rodriguez gives eloquent voice to the neighborhood where he spent many years as a resident, a father, an organizer, and, finally, a writer: a neighborhood that offers more to the world than its appearance allows.”
The Girl of the Lake: Stories by Bill Roorbach
“These moving and funny stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and memorable as Bill Roorbach’s novels. He has been called “a kinder, gentler John Irving…a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style” (the Washington Post ), and his work has been described as “hilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wise” ( Parade magazine), all of which is evident in spades (and also hearts, clubs, and diamonds) in every story in this arresting new collection.”
Telling the Map: Stories by Christopher Rowe
“There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novella The Border State Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded story The Voluntary State . Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the border…into Tennessee.”
All the Names They Used for God: Stories by Anjali Sachdeva
“Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime, and find themselves looking not just to divinity but to science, nature, psychology, and industry, forgetting that their new, logical deities are no more trustworthy than the tempestuous gods of the past. Along the way, they walk the knife-edge between wonder and terror, salvation and destruction. All the Names They Used for God is an entrancing work of speculative fiction that heralds Anjali Sachdeva as an invigorating, incomparable new voice.”
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
“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. Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December —through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should ‘prepare us for tenderness.'”
Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell
“Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.”
Ambiguity Machines: and Other Stories by Vandana Singh
“Singh’s stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and oft reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.”
The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories by Christine Sneed
“Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in—and often the source of—both abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.”
The Unfinished World: And Other Stories by Amber Sparks
“Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.”
Monstress: Stories by Lysley Tenorio
“A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines, Monstress heralds the arrival of a breathtaking new talent on the literary scene: Lysley Tenorio. Already the worthy recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Stegner Fellowship, Tenorio brilliantly explores the need to find connections, the melancholy of isolation, and the sometimes suffocating ties of family in tales that range from a California army base to a steamy moviehouse in Manilla, to the dangerous false glitter of Hollywood.”
Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories by Kanishk Tharoor
“With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today’s refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.”
Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade
“With intensity and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths…Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade’s characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save each other.”
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us: Stories by Laura van den Berg
“Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg’s rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane…Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching—for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.”
Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins
“In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region’s vast spaces, winning redemption despite—and often because of—the hardship and violence they endure.”
Children of the New World: Stories by Alexander Weinstein
“ Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.”
Honored Guest: Stories by Joy Williams
“With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways—comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.”
Diving Belles: And Other Stories by Lucy Wood
“In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall’s ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives—if only we can let ourselves see it.”
The Mountain: Stories by Paul Yoon
“Hailed by New York magazine as a ‘quotidian-surreal craft-master’ and a ‘radiant star in the current literary firmament’ by The Dallas Morning News , Yoon realizes his worlds with quiet, insightful, and gorgeous prose. Though each story is distinct from the others, his restrained voice and perceptive observations about violence—to the body, the landscape, and ultimately, the human soul—weaves throughout this collection as a whole, making The Mountain a beautiful, memorable read.”
Sour Heart: Stories by Jenny Zhang
“Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint . A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.”
What are your favorite contemporary short story collections?
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A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Mackenzie McGee
“Speculative fiction at its best is outlandish at first glance, but ends up feeling immediate. That challenge is often what gets me writing—I want to take an absurd premise and see how deep it can go.”
Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is the fifth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote. Submissions for the 2022 awards are open now .
Mackenzie McGee is a writer and poet. She is the recipient of a Walton Family Fellowship in fiction and a Lily Peter Fellowship in poetry. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, where she is at work on her first novel. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, the poet Landon McGee.
“Re: Frankie” was originally published in Porter House Review. Find a brief excerpt below:
Subject: CONSUMPTION WARNING Dear Valued Customer, We recently received a bill showing unusually frequent usage of your home ReJuve Total Self Regeneration™ Unit. In order for your ReJuve to continue producing the highest quality of care, it is crucial to limit your use to THREE CYCLES per seven-day period. Here are some tips for preventing overuse: – Consume a balanced diet and engage in regular exercise – Avoid stimuli that may provoke a hysteric episode, such as excessively sentimental books, movies, music, and people – Utilize less invasive Revitalization Technology, such as the DeepBreathe™ Oxygen Mask or DeepDive™ Bubble Bath – After the onset of hysteria, wait one day before using your ReJuve, as hysteria may subside on its own – Confirm that a hysteric episode is genuine by consulting the Quick Hysteria Questionnaire on the side of your ReJuve Unit We at ReJuve are committed to women’s health and well-being. Should you notice any repair or maintenance issues, please contact myself or another Biowaste Professional with details. Sean Rasmussen Biowaste Management
Where did you find the idea for this story?
I’ve been a fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a long time, ever since I read it at an arguably too-young age, so I had been carrying around that fascination for a while. I’m always thinking about power dynamics, especially from a woman’s perspective, and that’s how the idea of a female monster came about. I also was living away from Minnesota, where I grew up, so I wanted to incorporate that landscape into the story too. All of these ideas were pretty abstract until I landed on the epistolary form. Everything sort of clicked when I read George Saunders’ stories “Semplica Girl Diaries” and “Exhortation.” I was awestruck by the way a story’s structure could evoke horror by leaving things off the page. The chilling feeling that something truly terrible is happening just beyond the narrative’s scope felt like the right way to capture the monster’s plight.
How long did it take you to write this story?
It depends on what you consider the start of the writing process. I wrote the first draft of “Re: Frankie” in October of 2017, but I came up with an early concept for the ReJuve systems in January of that year. I’m definitely someone who plans a lot before I start writing. If I don’t know why the world needs this story, who it could speak to, then why am I writing it?
From that point, it was a relatively quick turnaround. I had a final draft by December because that was when MFA applications were due. The story as it appears in the anthology is definitely sharper, thanks to edits from Sam Downs at Porter House Review and Sarah Lyn Rogers and Yuka Igarashi at Catapult .
The epistolary style you use in “Re: Frankie” is incredibly impactful. In a story about blatant disregard for women’s physical and emotional pain, we only get to read Sean’s relentless emails, which receive no response from Julie. How did you settle on this form, and how does it help shape the story?
Part of what drew me to the form was the notion that the person telling the story is not the most figure person in the story. There’s a really productive tension there—Sean definitely isn’t the most interesting person on the page, but he’s completely unable to see things from anyone else’s perspective. This constrained perspective forced me to be more creative about how I gave information, which is how I came up with the automated emails from ReJuve, notifications, and the like.
I did try to write a few emails from Julie’s perspective early on, but ultimately I found the story more powerful when we don’t get to hear from her. Her absence is a gaping hole in the narrative, and a massive indictment of Sean’s character. I hope her “haunting” this story calls more attention to her plight than a few strongly-worded messages from her could.
“Re: Frankie” is a whirlwind of a story that feels futuristic but also, rather uncomfortably, like the present day. It is creepy, funny, and absurd, but not so far off from what feels possible. Sean’s emails, too, swing between being pining, with dashes of adoration and familiarity, to spiteful and angry (“I don’t give a shit if you block my phone number, my personal email, my goddamn good vibes, I’m gonna keep emailing you from Biowaste until you respond”), which so perfectly captures the toxicity of how some men respond to women rejecting their harassment or unwanted advances. How did you juggle these competing moods during the writing process? Did you start out with a specific tone in mind, or did it change over drafts?
Speculative fiction at its best is outlandish at first glance, but ends up feeling immediate. That challenge is often what gets me writing—I want to take an absurd premise and see how deep it can go. To me the world of “Re: Frankie” is a bright and shiny future, but because our same social problems persist, there’s something deeply insidious about it. The idea that we could come so far technologically and still rely on unjust power structures is terrifying, but isn’t that how corporate America does business? You play into people’s insecurities and ugliest beliefs with a TV spot that convinces them your product will change everything. This terrifying sense that what you’re being sold isn’t the panacea it’s meant to be is really what drove the tone in the ReJuve emails. In some ways, writing Sean’s emails was a relief, because at least he’s a real person.
In a way, the employee Sean and the corporation Biowaste Management are both symptoms of the same disease. Both of them want to believe that their actions have positive outcomes, but are uninterested in imagining a different power structure, and so they perpetuate the same hurt over and over again. I think this tone evolved over the course of a few drafts, with the corporate machine and Sean’s hurt feelings informing each other as I wrote them. It was definitely a creative challenge to get into the head of the “nice guy” character, but I think I learned a lot about guys like Sean as a result.
How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?
In a word, it was affirming. I’ve gotten to work with some incredible editors and meet my supportive cohort of 2021 winners. Especially since I’m still in my MFA program, it’s easy to feel like publishing and readers and all of the things that make writing “real” are so far away, but this experience has reminded me that they’re close at hand. I’m so excited to keep growing as a literary citizen!
What are you working on now?
I’m in the middle of two big projects right now, which is a perfect storm of working on one to avoid the other. I’ve almost finished the first draft of a short story collection, and my MFA thesis is a novel-in-progress called Another Castle .
What is the best or worst writing advice you’ve received, and why?
The best writing advice definitely comes from my first creative writing teacher, Arna Hemenway. He would always say you can break any rule, so long as you do it well. I love the way that saying prioritizes the agency and desires of the writer.
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Best Debut Short Stories 2022
The pen america dau prize, yuka igarashi & sarah lyn rogers.
On Sale: 09/20/2022 | $16.95
On Sale: 09/20/2022 | $11.99
Book Description
The essential annual guide to the newest voices in short fiction, selected this year by Deesha Philyaw, Emily Nemens, and Sabrina Orah Mark
This anthology celebrates the most recent winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes twelve writers who have made outstanding fiction debuts in literary magazines. This year’s selections were made by Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw.
The stories in Best Debut Short Stories 2022 explore the dangers and possibilities of protest in Multan, Pakistan, in 1978; in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Melbourne, Australia, at the end of the millennium; and in the outskirts of Ramallah, Palestine, in the present day. They describe toxic homes and precarious lives and refuge sought in unlikely places: a bowling alley, a work affair, a noisy club, a neoclassical sanatorium, a school-turned-hostel near a flooded brownfield. They feature a pork bun made with a perfect spiral of dough, a bucket of eggs swarmed by crows, a drink made of chilled chicken blood and rose water, and a pale pink worm with five hearts who lives at the edge of the universe.
Each story is accompanied by a letter from the editor who first published it, providing insight about what’s new and exciting in fiction today and recognizing the vital work of literary journals in nurturing new voices in literature.
About the Authors
Deesha Philyaw is the author of the short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Emily Nemens is a writer, illustrator, and editor. Her debut novel, The Cactus League , was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in February 2020 and released in paperback by Picador in 2021. From 2018 to 2021, Emily served as the editor of The Paris Review , the nation’s preeminent literary quarterly. During her tenure, the magazine saw record-high circulation, published two anthologies, produced the second season of its acclaimed podcast, and won the 2020 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Award for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird (Tarumoto Prize winner), Esquire , n+1 , The Iowa Review , Hobart , and The Gettysburg Review . Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the book-length poetry collections The Babies (2004), winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize chosen by Jane Miller, and Tsim Tsum (2009), as well as the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales from Woodland Editions. Her collection of stories, Wild Milk , was published by Dorothy in 2018. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. HAPPILY , her collection of essays on fairytales and motherhood which began as a monthly column in The Paris Review , is forthcoming from Random House.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times -bestselling author of Friday Black . Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review , Esquire , Literary Hub , The Paris Review , Guernica , and Longreads . He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Kali Fajardo-Anstine is a National Book Award Finalist and the author of Sabrina & Corina , winner of an American Book Award, finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize and The Story Prize, and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Sabrina & Corina was also awarded the 2020 Reading the West Award in Fiction from the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association and has been shortlisted for the 2020 Saroyan International Prize. Fajardo-Anstine is the 2019 recipient of the Denver Mayor's Award for Global Impact in the Arts. Her writing has appeared in ELLE , O, the Oprah Magazine , The American Scholar , Boston Review , Bellevue Literary Review , The Idaho Review , Southwestern American Literature , and elsewhere. Kali has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Tin House, and Hedgebrook. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming and is from Denver, Colorado. Her work has been translated into multiple languages. Beth Piatote is a writer and scholar, and the author of The Beadworkers . She is Nez Perce from Chief Joseph's Band and is an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is currently an associate professor at UC Berkeley. She lives in the Bay Area with her two children.
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Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau PrizeThe annual—and essential—collection of the newest voices in short fiction, selected this year by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote. Who are the most promising short story writers working today? Where do we look to discover the future stars of literary fiction? This book will offer a dozen answers to these questions. The stories collected here represent the most recent winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes twelve writers who have made outstanding debuts in literary magazines in the previous year. They are chosen by a panel of distinguished judges, themselves innovators of the short story form: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote. Each piece comes with an introduction by its original editors, whose commentaries provide valuable insight into what magazines are looking for in their submissions, and showcase the vital work they do to nurture literature’s newest voices. Series Overview: Each year, Best Debut Short Stories: The Pen America Dau Prize celebrates twelve outstanding stories by today’s most promising new fiction writers and the literary magazines that discovered them. There are no customer reviews for this item yet. Classic Totes Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more! Shipping & Pickup We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail! Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club! Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly.  Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore © 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected] View our current hours » Join our bookselling team » We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily. Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual. Map Find Harvard Book Store » Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy » Harvard University harvard.edu » 
Scan barcode Seattle Public Library Adult Book Bingo 2023 - hosted by crossbun Debut essays or short storiesAll books added.  Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want Ruby Tandoh 248 pages • first pub 2018 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781781259597 Format: Hardcover Language: English Publisher: Serpent's Tail Publication date: 01 February 2018 nonfiction essays food and drink health informative medium-paced nonfiction essays food and drink health informative medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You WantRuby Tandoh 248 pages • first pub 2018 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781781259597 Format: Hardcover Language: English Publisher: Serpent's Tail Publication date: 01 February 2018 Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made.  Rainbow Rainbow Lydia Conklin 256 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781646221011 Format: Hardcover Language: English Publisher: Catapult Publication date: 31 May 2022 fiction lgbtqia+ short stories medium-paced fiction lgbtqia+ short stories medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Rainbow RainbowLydia Conklin 256 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781646221011 Publisher: Catapult Publication date: 31 May 2022  Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays Jill Gutowitz 227 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781982158507 Format: Paperback Language: English Publisher: Atria Books Publication date: 08 March 2022 nonfiction essays lgbtqia+ memoir emotional funny reflective medium-paced nonfiction essays lgbtqia+ memoir emotional funny reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Girls Can Kiss Now: EssaysJill Gutowitz 227 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781982158507 Format: Paperback Publisher: Atria Books Publication date: 08 March 2022  How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures Sabrina Imbler with Simon Ban (Illustrator) 263 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780316540513 Format: Digital Language: English Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Publication date: 06 December 2022 nonfiction essays lgbtqia+ memoir race science emotional informative reflective medium-paced nonfiction essays lgbtqia+ memoir race science emotional informative reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea CreaturesSabrina Imbler with Simon Ban (Illustrator) 263 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780316540513 Format: Digital Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Publication date: 06 December 2022  Girls of a Certain Age Maria Adelmann with Taylor Meskimen (Narrator), Erin Bennett (Narrator), Tessa Netting (Narrator), Christine Lakin (Narrator), Priya Ayyar (Narrator), Avi Roque (Narrator) 6 hours, 42 minutes • first pub 2021 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781549108204 Format: Audio Language: English Publisher: Little, Brown & Company Publication date: 28 April 2021 fiction short stories reflective medium-paced fiction short stories reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Girls of a Certain AgeMaria Adelmann with Taylor Meskimen (Narrator), Erin Bennett (Narrator), Tessa Netting (Narrator), Christine Lakin (Narrator), Priya Ayyar (Narrator), Avi Roque (Narrator) 6 hours, 42 minutes • first pub 2021 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781549108204 Format: Audio Publisher: Little, Brown & Company Publication date: 28 April 2021  Life Ceremony Sayaka Murata with Pun Bandhu (Narrator), Eunice Wong (Narrator), Emily Woo Zeller (Narrator), Jeena Yi (Narrator), Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator), Natalie Naudus (Narrator), Nancy Wu (Narrator) 5 hours, 54 minutes • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9798212188289 Format: Audio Language: English Publisher: Blackstone Publishing Publication date: 26 July 2022 fiction contemporary horror literary short stories dark reflective medium-paced fiction contemporary horror literary short stories dark reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Life CeremonySayaka Murata with Pun Bandhu (Narrator), Eunice Wong (Narrator), Emily Woo Zeller (Narrator), Jeena Yi (Narrator), Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator), Natalie Naudus (Narrator), Nancy Wu (Narrator) 5 hours, 54 minutes • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9798212188289 Publisher: Blackstone Publishing Publication date: 26 July 2022  Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Jia Tolentino 303 pages • first pub 2019 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780525510543 Format: Hardcover Language: English Publisher: Random House Publication date: 06 August 2019 nonfiction essays feminism challenging reflective medium-paced nonfiction essays feminism challenging reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-DelusionJia Tolentino 303 pages • first pub 2019 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780525510543 Publisher: Random House Publication date: 06 August 2019  Cost of Living: Essays Emily Maloney 240 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781250213297 Format: Hardcover Language: English Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. Publication date: 08 February 2022 nonfiction health memoir challenging informative reflective medium-paced nonfiction health memoir challenging informative reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Cost of Living: EssaysEmily Maloney 240 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781250213297 Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. Publication date: 08 February 2022  The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Marina Keegan 256 pages • first pub 2014 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781476753911 Format: Paperback Language: English Publisher: Scribner Book Company Publication date: 14 April 2015 nonfiction essays short stories inspiring medium-paced nonfiction essays short stories inspiring medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and StoriesMarina Keegan 256 pages • first pub 2014 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9781476753911 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Publication date: 14 April 2015  Shit Cassandra Saw Gwen E. Kirby 274 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780143136620 Format: Paperback Language: English Publisher: Penguin Books Publication date: 11 January 2022 fiction contemporary historical literary short stories dark funny reflective medium-paced fiction contemporary historical literary short stories dark funny reflective medium-paced to read Expand dropdown menu read currently reading did not finish Toggle book page action menu and links mark as owned buy Bookshop US Bookshop UK Blackwell's The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. The StoryGraph is an affiliate of the featured links. We earn commission on any purchases made. Shit Cassandra SawGwen E. Kirby 274 pages • first pub 2022 ( editions ) ISBN/UID: 9780143136620 Publisher: Penguin Books Publication date: 11 January 2022 By using The StoryGraph, you agree to our use of cookies . We use a small number of cookies to provide you with a great experience. Find out more  Three Short Story Writers On Publishing and Crafting Their Debut Collections Ada Zhang, Nishanth Injam and Alexandra Chang discuss their writing processes and literary lineages The short story is an entirely different pleasure than the novel. For writers, the form demands precision and intense scrutiny of craft choices. The short story is constrained by its brevity but remains limitless in the opportunities it presents to challenge notions of craft. The short story collection, then, is an art form in and of itself. In conversation, stories produce something new and thrilling. We are let in to linger and marvel at the writer’s world, to listen to its chorus of voices telling us something urgent. This interview features three writers who published their debut short story collections this year: Ada Zhang, the author of The Sorrows of Others ; Nishanth Injam, the author of The Best Possible Experience ; and Alexandra Chang, the author of Tomb Sweeping . I called Zhang, Injam, and Chang to learn about their writing processes, relationships with the short story form, and experiences publishing their first collections.  Ada Zhang: The Sorrows of Others is a deep, long glance into other people’s lives. It’s playing with this idea of what the other is in relation to who we are and in what ways we are others to people. There’s this unknowability to each person and I think language and storytelling help us mitigate those gaps and bring us closer, but even they can never really take us all the way. We’re all on our own little islands and this book was my attempt at reaching out. I think imagination is powerful in the way that it can build our muscles when it comes to connecting. The point of the stories isn’t whether or not the characters are successful in connecting. I try not to make any judgments about that. But I think that in writing these stories, it was me trying to grapple with the essential loneliness of being a person. How are we supposed to move forward? It can feel really damning. Through writing these stories, I was able to comfort myself and hopefully comfort readers. Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak to your relationship with the short story and the particular joys and challenges that come with it? AZ: I love a big novel as much as anybody else but there is something about the short story that is just ungraspable. There are so many ways to write a short story and innovate within the form. I think that the form is actually really flexible. It allows for a lot of play. Everybody has taken and made the form their own and put their own fingerprint on it. I think that’s ultimately the goal. My favorite short story writers have all re-imagined what the form can do—and the form can do a lot. I think that a good short story transcends the form and transcends craft altogether. Craft helps us talk about writing in terms of point of view, character, or plot, but I think any true work will always go beyond craft to a point where these words start to dissolve. What is point of view, is plot, is character? People talk about the short story tradition sometimes as though there is one aesthetic but I don’t think that there is. BJC: When thinking about what you want to write about or who you want to write for, how do you think the story form enables you to do that? AZ: I think that the main constraint of the short story is that it’s short. It’s not long like a novel. I say this to my students a lot: constraints in writing are a really good thing. That’s why people like prompts. It gives you a framework to work in and if you go for it, you can subvert that constraint, challenge it, flip it on its head and make it work for you. I have noticed that because of this inherent constraint, the fact that the short story is short and therefore somewhat contained, I try to glimpse the end at the beginning. It is important to me to be able to see what the ending is going to be at least halfway through the story, even if what I “see” is just a feeling and even if I don’t quite reach it in the first draft. There’s always revision! Still, I never know how I’m going to get to the end. I have to write toward that image or feeling. I really think that the ending is not tricksy; it shouldn’t be a punchline or a bow, and I’m suspicious of a big reveal. People will often think, how am I supposed to end? I think the ending is not separate from the story. It’s just part of the story. It should be able to pass as just another detail, just another line, just like any line from the middle or beginning of the story. It’s like what I think about time. What is plot? In any story, it’s just time and the way it moves and the way we experience time is linear; we have one day, the next day, the next day, until we march right up to death. But time is actually cyclical. We are always living in the present and because of memory, we also are always in the past, and because of imagination, we are always in the future. So the way we experience and move through time is linear, but time is actually not. Being able to glimpse the ending early demonstrates my view of time. BJC: How do you know when a story is done? AZ: When you start a story, the whole story already exists. You’re the one who’s going to pull it out of the ether and put it onto a page and share it with other people. The story is out there, independent of you, that’s how I think of it. The moment a story begins is terrifying because just one paragraph in, you’ve already set some rules and expectations for the reader and therefore for yourself which means you’ve already determined in a certain sense how things are going to end. So I think it just helps to have the ending in your mind. Not what it is, but that it exists and is waiting for you. In terms of knowing when a story is done, I keep returning to what I heard a writer say once. I was young at the time and he said that the work is never finished, only abandoned. At a certain point, it is about letting go. When you can see the piece objectively and see why someone would think it’s a good story and also why someone might overlook it, and you’re okay with both outcomes, it’s a complete story. You know that this is a story for someone out there and maybe it’s not for others. I imagine that’s what it’s like with one’s children. They teach you a lot about yourself and you hope that they find people who are going to love them but you also know that you can’t protect them. They’ve got to go out there and find their people. A lot of it is letting go. In my first drafts, it’s very clear what tools I’m using to make things happen. In the later drafts, I try to leave craft behind and journey the last leg alone. You have character, point of view, and place, all the great fiction angels, guarding you, marching with you into the story, but you have to be willing to leave them behind at some point. Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back. The real constraints are the ones that are unique to you, unique drafting problems that you have, that you have decided to face in the story. If you do that, that’s when your story becomes unlike anybody else’s story. BJC: Beyond writing individual stories, can you talk about how you approached assembling them? Do you think your work lands differently when put together? AZ: You know what? I actually do. I didn’t think that they would have a cumulative effect but that was naive of me because every time I’ve read a story collection, that’s what has happened to me. With individual stories, it’s like dropping singles and then the collection is the album. The most pronounced way that I felt this was when I listened to my audiobook. Of course the performances were incredible and the experience made me realize that the whole is something different from its parts. It’s greater, bigger. The story is a form, and the collection is a form in and of itself, which is great because your story gets to be itself and also be part of a family. Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back. I was rereading my collection to refresh myself. “The Subject,” the first story, was my attempt to up the ante for reading the rest of the book. I realized it was actually the last story I drafted. That makes sense to me because by then I’d written quite a number of stories about Chinese immigrants, Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans… There’s always discourse on representation and I started to feel a responsibility to engage in this conversation. I have my thoughts but I didn’t want to just shoot some tweets out into the world. All my questions about what we owe people we’re making art about live in that first story. It’s the last one I wrote because I had done all this work but began to question whether I had a right to be writing about these people. I don’t think there are definitive answers here, which is why I think we should let our stories do that rigorous and deeply imaginative work. That’s how “The Subject” came to be first in the collection. At one point, we wondered if “Compromise,” the last story in the collection, should be first but I think that would’ve changed the tone. BJC: I’ve heard you talk about Chekhov, William Trevor, and Yiyun Li as sources of inspiration. Were there any books you found yourself returning to while writing your collection or any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Who have you learned from and how have you been influenced when creating your own aesthetic? AZ: Influences while writing the book: Mavis Gallant, Edward P. Jones, William Maxwell, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Denis Johnson. And all the names you mention. I love these writers. I guess what I’ll say about lineage is that by learning about your tradition you also learn how to break free from that tradition, meanwhile carrying the best parts of it forward. This might also be true of life.  Nishanth Injam: I wasn’t much of a reader or a writer when I was in India. It wasn’t until after I moved to the States and worked a tech job that the idea of writing occurred to me. I had moved to this new country where I didn’t know anybody and I had this keen sense that I was going to live a pretty narrow imitation of life. It felt like a deep loss. I was extremely lonely. I couldn’t switch my job and just hated it. I had all these obligations back home so I couldn’t quit. And I was desperate to create an alternative world in which I could be more in touch with myself, with the past and the person that I was before I had come to the States. I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense. When I started writing, it wasn’t necessarily to achieve something. It was purely to help me live. It also helped that I found out about MFA programs around then. I saw that they usually workshopped stories and I was trying to get better at my craft so it seemed like stories would be easier, but I was so wrong. Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak more to the pleasures and difficulties of the form? NI: The pleasure is that you could be done quickly and you can take on a voice that might not be immediately accessible to you. For instance, I could take on the voice of a tailor, even though I’ve never worked as a tailor or have significant experience being in close proximity to one. I can become this person who mimics somebody’s consciousness and their patterns of behavior enough for the length of the story and still make it convincing. Whereas, I think that inherent lack of knowledge comes through in the span of a novel because it’s too many pages for you to keep up that pretense. The other thing that I like about the short story is that you can really play with structure. With the novel, I think, because you have more room, the structure matters less. Then there are pleasures of language. You have less space so you can make every sentence count. With the novel, I think readers are less likely to spend time rereading a sentence. You always want to keep moving within the space of a novel. As for disadvantages, there are difficulties with the form as it has traditionally been practiced in North America. If you’re coming at it from a different culture, it might be challenging to get your story to fit into the general perception of how a short story should work. BJC: Can you elaborate? NI: One general working definition of a short story is that a good short story should have two stories. There’s an over-story and there’s an under-story, and then both of them meet at the end. You think the story’s about X all along and then the story turns out to be about Y. Another definition is that a short story should be like a pinprick that you feel at the end of an injection. When you are being injected and then take out the needle, that’s when the emotions should have you writhing in pain. The other definition is that an ending of a good short story should always result in complexity of afterthought. I have issues with almost all of those. I think the form itself has been so contaminated by the world we live in and by capitalism that it seems weird to expect pleasure or a release of emotion only at the end. You can compare it to a masculine orgasm where it’s only pleasure when the man comes at the end. It’s also the sense that emotion is permitted at certain expected hours and any unmanageable or uncontrollable emotion is only seen as irrational or not valid. It’s also very capitalistic. It’s a value system that rewards atomization. Because thoughts by themselves are not as dangerous. You can construct a story with a point in mind and bring it out at the end, and that mode of storytelling is very safe. There are other forms of storytelling. For instance, there are many oral storytelling cultures within India, in which there is no expectation for a short story to end in a certain way with everything neatly tied together. There’s no pressure to make every single sentence accounted for. It can be this loose thing but it can still have its own power and be its own thing. Growing up, I remember reading short stories which were like tiny novels. They didn’t have all these formal constraints. So when I moved here and encountered those definitions, I was shocked to see all these perceptions, which were actually held by people practicing the form and not clearly stated anywhere. I think that’s an experience many writers of color have. We are usually told that our stories are not correct in terms of craft. Matthew Salesses does a wonderful job of showing all the ways in which our writing gets marginalized in his Craft in the Real World . BJC: I read that this collection was your MFA thesis during your time at Michigan. How do you think you changed as a writer during your time there? NI: Before the MFA, when I wrote the initial drafts of these stories, the heart of the stories was there, but there was much to improve formally and linguistically. You have to know that when I started writing, I couldn’t even hold tense and had absolutely no idea what the past perfect was. I struggled with grammar. I used to write sentences with ellipses because I didn’t know what a sentence was, functionally or otherwise. I went from that to writing sentences that people were calling lyrical and beautiful. When I got into the MFA, I became more conscious of how every word choice contributes to the meaning of the story. This is not something that people usually talk about because a lot of writers are writing in their first language. People sometimes read a sentence and judge if you are any good. If you are able to write a really good sentence, does that make you a better writer than someone who’s gutting their heart on the page? My opinion is that you don’t exactly know where a writer is on their journey, and those kinds of judgements are silly. Even if you are somebody who grew up with English, you are still writing from your subconscious where you’re trying to find words. There is always an effort to translate the unsayable. The MFA gave me the space to read and write and see how my work was being perceived by others and the ways in which I was falling short. The community and the friendships I formed there are invaluable. The MFA gave me friends I would trust with my life. If you can find friends whose work you can be excited about and who can similarly be excited about yours, then you can all grow together. That’s really the best thing you can hope for. BJC: What do you want the readers to leave the collection with? I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense. NI: When I read a book, I don’t always want to be just entertained. I want nourishment, something that will help me live a richer, more meaningful life. There are so many collections that come out every year and so many good books that are out there already. Why am I spending all this time trying to add something? Why am I contributing to this massive pile of good literature? Why do I write? Why do I think that I have the right to say anything? Finding my answers for those questions was challenging. When I arrived at my own particular answer, I knew I had a book. I wanted to tell stories, not for entertainment or pleasure. But to move me along in the path of greater love. I wrote the stories as a way of making meaning and holding onto and transforming the love that I have. I think a lot of that is in the title story. BJC: When writing this collection, were there any books that you found yourself returning to or any that you wanted to be in conversation with? NI: When I started writing short stories, I googled what the best short story collection of all time was and one of the answers was James Joyce’s Dubliners . I still stand by this when I say that when I wrote my collection, I was writing to be in conversation with James Joyce. It’s crazy, but it’s true. We have this Western canon, of thinking and art, and I’m just a small individual from a faraway place, leading a nondescript life, and trying to make meaning from it. Who should I look up to for instruction? Obviously, I’m going to be looking at all the greats and seeing what I can learn from them. I’m really interested in epiphanies. Nobody believes in epiphanies these days because nobody learns anything the first time. You have an epiphany but you keep making the same mistake. Sometimes, that epiphany is something that holds after multiple times. My sense of epiphany is different. It comes from transcendence, from trying to move out of limbo. I’m trying to elevate myself to a better place, to being a better person. I’m naturally attracted to books in which there’s a similar strain. I see that in Dubliners . If you are sitting there in Dublin a hundred years ago, writing these stories, trying to be artful and truthful to your vision of life in Dublin that you want to present, why shouldn’t I be, in my own small way, be similarly truthful, similarly artful?  Alexandra Chang: Tomb Sweeping is a collection that follows characters who are going through some sort of transition or dealing with loss. It’s a slice-of-life collection that focuses on the ordinary grief that ordinary people tend to experience, and the deeply affecting and moving moments in their day-to-day lives. The collection likely started when I started writing short stories and thinking more carefully about short stories as a form. The oldest story is from nine years ago. That became the title story. At the time, I did not realize that it was going to be a collection because I was such a baby writer that I wasn’t really thinking in terms of books or even the possibility of publishing. I was thinking: What are stories? How do I want to write stories? And also, how do story writers I love do what they do? What resonates with me and how can I take what I learned and apply it to my own version of this form? Brandon J. Choi: How has your relationship to the story form changed over time? AC: We have this exposure to very canonical work, like Hemingway, Cheever, Carver… There are so many things happening in these stories that are moving, but maybe don’t necessarily reflect what I want to do as a writer. In an undergrad workshop (that I took after undergrad, when I was a staff employee at Cornell), I was exposed to flash fiction for the first time. I read Lydia Davis. I read a lot of very weird stories. My professor was J. Robert Lennon, and he is also a very strange and fun and experimental short story writer. That really opened up the possibilities of the short story for me. There are incredible things that you can do with structure and such a short amount of space, like two, three pages. The emotional effect can be huge. That really changed what I understood a short story could be and the limitlessness of a short story. BJC: You have spoken about constraints in past interviews. Can you elaborate on what your writing and editing look like when working with constraints? AC: Constraint is basically a way into a story, because for me, there are limitless ways to approach a story. To me, that is both exciting and very daunting. Having certain constraints like, for example, committing to writing a story in vignettes, helps. Or, for example, I’ll have a story take place in only one month of time or only one day. I wrote this one story that didn’t make it into the collection, but it had very long sentences to capture a tiny amount of time—the constraint being that I had to expand time as much as possible. Those kinds of directives/prompts/constraints—whatever you want to call them—can give me a lot of creative energy. They give me a sense of direction and a path to go down with a story that I may previously have felt paralyzed by. BJC: It’s something to push on versus free falling in nothing. AC: That really is how it feels, because there are just so many ways to do a story. Which, I mentioned, is also why I love stories. That there are so many ways to approach a story, but without constraint, I don’t know that I would necessarily finish very much. That’s why I find novels so hard, too. Talk about a form that’s incredibly capacious and very flexible. There are no constraints on it in terms of length or anything. BJC: I want to talk more about revision. I imagine your stories with their various structures and constraints were very different to write but also very different to edit. Can you speak to your editing experience for this collection? AC: It was hard, not only because each story has its own mechanisms that I recognize and want to honor, but also because my relationship to each of the stories was so different. Some of them felt very old and then some of them still feel extremely fresh to me. One thing that I hadn’t really considered before I started actually putting all the stories together was ordering. How does a story move into another in terms of what it’s about, or even an emotional state? What would I want to leave a reader with as they enter a new story? That definitely took up a lot of time for me, more time than I probably needed to spend on it. Still, even with the older stories, it was exciting to re-enter each and see something new I wanted to change in it, even if it was as small as wanting to change a comma to an em dash or changing a word like “home” to “house.” Those small moments as a writer can breathe a lot of new life into a story and give a writer a new relationship to it. And then, of course, there were the huge revisions. “Cure for Life,” for example, was told in a completely different perspective before. It goes back to a sense of play for me. I want to write about stuff that is important and moving, at least to me. But in the writing itself, I also want to remain playful. With each new revision, I approached it open to discovering something new about the story that I hadn’t seen before. BJC: Though this is your debut story collection, this is not your debut book. How is the experience of editing a story collection different from that of a novel? AC: I have this new analogy for writing and editing a short story collection versus a novel. Writing the novel felt like having this huge, open expanse of land and thinking, what do I want to build here? It can be any kind of building. It can be a corral for horses. It can be a skyscraper. Whatever. The beginning is just this empty plot of land. Because of that, the novel was a very lengthy and difficult process because I just had no idea what I was doing. But it was also kind of exciting because I had no idea what I was doing. It was a lot of constructing and then destroying and reconstructing and tearing down again. I think I wrote 50,000 words across two summers and then immediately cut 30,000 when I started revising. Stories feel more like stepping into an empty room and thinking, what do I want to put into this room? The stories in this analogy feel more like stepping into an empty room—but it’s already a room that’s there—and thinking, okay, here are these four walls and a floor and a ceiling to work with. Or maybe it’s a circular room. I’m stepping into a space and now I’m thinking, how do I decorate this particular space? What do I want to put into this room? Now rearrange the furniture and the decor I’ve put in there. It felt more manageable to write each individual story and it felt lower stakes in the sense that I could experiment and play and it wasn’t ever going to be a waste of time if it didn’t work out. With the novel, after spending so much time writing, writing, and writing all these words, I felt like I had to stay committed to the project. The novel also took a lot more of me in a shorter amount of time. The stories were these fun things that I was working on over a longer period of time. I was following whatever impulses I had. I think short stories are where a lot of writers really learn to be writers. And because of that, there’s so much love and respect for the form. I don’t think that I could ever let go of writing short stories. There are definitely writers who only write novels, but there are so many of us who are deeply invested and tied to the short story. BJC: When writing Tomb Sweeping , were there any books you found yourself returning to, any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Thinking in terms of literary lineage, I am curious who influenced you and your aesthetic. AC: Some of my stories are in direct conversation with specific writers and stories that, after I read them, inspired me to write. That’s something that I need to constantly remind myself of too: reading other writers is a huge source of inspiration. If you’re feeling blocked or down on writing for whatever reason, return to these story writers who you love, who have inspired you before. Some examples: Maile Meloy, Stephen Dixon, Lucia Berlin. I think I carried A Manual for Cleaning Women around with me for two years. Yiyun Li. I’ve read every single one of her books. I read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl when I first started writing stories, and Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger . There are so many new writers I feel in conversation with as well, like Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors and Shruti Swamy’s A House is a Body . Shruti talks about writing stories that are deeply feminine and emotional, almost in opposition to this very canonical male, everything-is-subtext, minimalist style. Shruti’s stories are so dreamlike and disorienting, but in a way where you can tell that she’s very purposefully taking you on this journey. I really admire her work and it inspires me to write in new ways. Take a break from the newsWe publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LITEnjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here. ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT  Celebrating What We’ve Accomplished in 2023Contribute to our year-end campaign to start 2024 strong Dec 8 - Halimah Marcus ReadMore like this.  3 Debut Novelists Reveal How Their First Books Came TogetherSantiago Jose Sanchez, Uchenna Awoke, and Yasmin Zaher on the highs and lows of the writing and publishing process Jul 17 - Kyla D. 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In this list we've selected more than 30 of the best debut novels written by a wide selection of names, including literary greats you know and love to modern authors that absolutely need to be on your TBR pile if they aren't already. Maybe you'll find your new favourite book, or maybe you'll find it fascinating to chart the journey authors embarked upon from their debut to the present day. Best debut novels 1 . The Hobbit - J.R.R Tolkien (1937)"In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit." The words that kickstarted one of the biggest fantasy book and, in turn, movie franchises of all time. Despite the book's popularity, paper rationing brought on by wartime conditions and not ending until 1949 meant that the book was often unavailable during this period. Subsequent editions in English were published in 1951, 1966, 1978 and 1995, however, and it's been translated into over forty languages. Tolkein even designed the original book's dust cover (pictured). Props.  2 . To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1960)Imagine having just one book published, it winning the Pulitzer-Prize before being voted "Best Novel of the Century" in 1991 a poll by the Library Journal. You might be tempted to call it a day there. With the exception of a few short essays, Harper did just that. And fair play to her.  3 . One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (1962)Kesey's devastating debut novel was born of his experiences working on CIA-funded drug trials. While a student at Stanford, he volunteered as a medical guinea pig in the secret service's study into the effects of psychoactive drugs. This experience altered Kesey, personally and professionally and, while working as an orderly at the psychiatric ward of the local veterans hospital, he began to have hallucinations about an Indian sweeping the floors. When chatting with them Kesey did not believe that the patients at the hospital were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to behave. All this prompted him to write the spectacular One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which was an instant hit and spawned the Oscar-winning film.  4 . Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818)In 1816, Shelley spent a summer with Lord Byron. Sitting around a log fire Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to sleep, Shelley got to it: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," she recalled. "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." She began writing what she assumed would be a short story, but became her first novel, Frankenstein regarded as one of the first genuine science fiction novels it still speaks to – and spooks - readers nearly 200 years on.  5 . Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (1961)In 1953 Heller thought of the first line, "It was love at first sight." and within a week, he had finished the first chapter, and sent it to his agent. He did no more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. When it was one-third finished his agent sent it to publishers who purchased it and gave him $750, promising him another $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. Heller missed his deadline by almost five years but, after eight years of thought, delivered the most significant work of postwar protest literature in the history of mankind and changed the English lexicon forever. Worth the wait.  6 . The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson (2005)When published posthumously Brooding Scandi-noir genius Larsson’s psychological thriller caused a global sensation. Shortly before his death in 2004, he submitted the third volume in his "Millennium trilogy" to his publisher, but not a single book had been printed. Today more than 63 million copies of the trilogy have been sold with Dragon Tattoo being our pick of the bunch.  7 . Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (1952)Immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Ellison's audacious and brutal Invisible Man changed the shape of American literature by tackling bigotry, head on. Bottom line? If you're human, and chances are you are, you need to read this at some stage in your life.  8 . The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (1984)A 1997 poll of over 25,000 readers listed The Wasp Factory as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century, while The Times called Banks "The most imaginative novelist of his generation" and the FT described the novel as "A gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality... Quite impossible to put down." This book will live with you long after you're done, but it's wide berth territory for animal lovers.  9 . A Study In Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)Conan Doyle introduced us to Holmes and Watson in November 1887, but the story, and its main characters, attracted little public interest when it first appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual. Only 11 complete copies are known to exist, in fact. Despite the slow uptake it was a classic mystery tale which went on to spawn 56 short stories featuring Holmes, and three more full-length novels in the original canon.  10 . The Time Machine - H.G. Wells (1895)You've got to doff your cap to a man who is generally credited with the popularisation of the concept of time travel. The Time Machine was an instant success and Wells went on to produce a series of science fiction novels which pioneered our ideas of the future. None would top his debut success, however.  11 . The Catcher In The Rye - J. D. Salinger (1951)J. D. Salinger's coming-of-age tale captured the very essence of disenchanted youth. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year with total sales of more than 65 million books. It was included on Time 's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Need we say more?  12 . Carrie - Stephen King (1974)Stephen King's books have sold more than 350 million copies. He has published fifty-five novels and has written nearly two hundred short stories and it all started - at least in getting published terms - with Carrie. It was written in two weeks on a portable typewriter (the same one on which he wrote Misery) that belonged to his wife. It began as a short story, but King tossed the first three pages of his work in the garbage. His wife fished the pages out and encouraged him to finish it. King eventually quit his teaching job after receiving the publishing payment for Carrie but the hardback sold a mere 13,000 copies. The paperback, released a year later? Sold over 1 million in its first year.  13 . The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz - L. Frank Baum (1900)L Frank Baum failed as an actor, failed as a salesman, failed as a chicken breeder then started writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Smart move. Full distribution of Oz occurred in September 1900 and by October, the first edition of 10,000 had already sold out and the second edition of 15,000 copies was nearly depleted. By 1938, over one million copies of the book had been printed. Less than two decades later, in 1956, the sales of his novel grew to 3 million copies in print. Nice work if you can write it.  14 . The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (2003)Hosseini almost never finished the novel. He started by writing a short story in 1999 then, in his words: "The short story sat around for two years. Then I went back to it in March 2001. My wife had dug it up. I found her reading it, and she was kind of crying, and she said, "This is really a nice short story. She gave it to my father-in-law, and he loved it. He said, "I wish it had been longer." So then I said maybe there's something in the story that's really touching people. Maybe I should think about going back to it and see if there's a book in it." There was. The novel sold more than 4 million copies in three years.  15 . Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh (1993)Rumour has it Welsh wrote Trainspotting in the breaks while writing his thesis at Heriot-Watt University's Library. The book prompted The Sunday Times to call Welsh "the best thing that has happened to British writing for decades" and he continues to be just that.  16 . The Picture Of Dorian Gray - Oscar WildeIn the preface to his debut and only novel Wilde writes: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim." Odd then that the book boasts very obvious echoes of Wilde's own life. Perhaps that's why there was no second novel. Still, the one he did write remains enduringly popular and William Butler described it as "a wonderful book."  17 . Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone - J.K.Rowling (1997)In 1990 Rowling wanted to move with her boyfriend to a flat in Manchester and in her words, "One weekend after flat hunting, I took the train back to London on my own and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head... A scrawny, little, black-haired, bespectacled boy became more and more of a wizard to me... I began to write Philosopher's Stone that very evening. Although, the first couple of pages look nothing like the finished product." Then Rowling's mother died and, to cope with her pain, Rowling transferred her own anguish to the orphan Harry. Rowling spent six years working on the novel after which critics compared her to Jane Austen, Roald Dahl and even to the Ancient Greek story-teller Homer.  18 . A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - James Joyce (1916)In 1998, the Modern Library named A Portrait third on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (Joyce topped the very same list with Ulysses while The Great Gatsby came second). In 1917 H. G. Wells wrote that "one believes in [Joyce's fictional alter ego] Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction." With W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound also championing the work, it clearly carries serious literary clout.  19 . Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (1847)Charlotte's first manuscript, The Professor, did not secure a publisher, although she was heartened by an encouraging response from Smith, Elder & Co., who expressed an interest in any longer works she might wish to send. Charlotte responded by finishing and sending a second manuscript in August 1847. Six weeks later Jane Eyre: An Autobiography was published and it revolutionised the art of fiction. Since then Brontë has been called the 'first historian of the private consciousness'. Exploring themes of classism, sexuality, religion, and proto-feminism, there's a lot going on in Jane Eyre, but never at the expense of enjoyment.  20 . The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time - Mark Haddon (2003)It won a raft of awards including, rather delightfully, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize after it was published simultaneously in separate editions for adults and children. However, it was perhaps what it didn't win that caused the biggest stir. The Curious Incident was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and "many observers were surprised that it did not advance to the shortlist." said John Carey, chairman of the Booker panel of judges. "We have several clashes of opinion among the judges but I found Haddon's book about a boy with Asperger's syndrome breathtaking."  21 . Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk (1996)We the love story behind the conception of Palahniuk's ground-breaking debut novel. When he attempted to publish Invisible Monsters, publishers rejected it for its disturbing content. So he wrote Fight Club in an attempt to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him. Publisher loved it, career exploded.  22 . Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe (1719)The book was published on 25 April 1719. Before the end of the year, this first volume had run through four editions. By the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese) than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 alternative versions. Well played, Daniel. Well played.  23 . Sense And Sensibility - Jane Austen (1811)In 1811, the Military Library publishing house in London accepted the manuscript for publication, in three volumes. Austen paid for the book to be published and paid the publisher a commission on sales. The cost of publication was more than a third of Austen's annual household income! She made a profit of £140 (almost £8,000 in 2014 money) on the first edition, which sold all 750 printed copies by July 1813.  24 . The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (1963)It's hard to judge the brilliance of Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and deeply emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity without factoring in her tragic suicide just one month after it was published, in the UK. Perhaps we shouldn't have to. A truly haunting classic.  25 . The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens (1836)Dickens announced his outrageous talent with this genuinely funny, not just laughing because we're supposed to, set of comic episodes that befall ‘gentleman of leisure’ Samuel Pickwick, Esq. The book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, joke books, and other merchandise surrounding it.  26 . Other Voices, Other Rooms - Truman Capote (1948)Both Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical it's a powerhouse of a piece due to its erotically charged photograph of the author, risque content, and the fact that it debuted at number 9 on the New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for nine weeks. Brilliant.  27 . Less Than Zero - Brett Easton Ellis (1985)In the words of the author himself Less Than Zero "[isn't a] perfect book by any means... [But] it was pretty good writing for someone who was 19." Nineteen! We can't argue with that. Plus the novel was almost universally praised by critics and sold well, shifting 50,000 copies in its first year.  28 . The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (1970)Written while Toni Morrison was teaching at Howard University and raising her two sons on her own, it's about a year in the life of a young black girl who develops an inferiority complex due to her eye color and skin appearance. "I imagine if our greatest American novelist William Faulkner were alive today," reviewed The Washington Post "He would herald Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit... Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures."  29 . Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (1957)Due to its independent minded stance on the October Revolution, Doctor Zhivago was refused publication in the Soviet Union so Pasternak sent several copies of the manuscript in Russian to friends in the West. In 1957, Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli arranged for the novel to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published an Italian translation. So great was the demand for Doctor Zhivago that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which humiliated the Communist Party.  30 . Last Night in Montreal - Emily St. John Mandel (2009)Emily St. John Mandel has become known for her most recent books, including Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, but her first book is well worth a read as well. Last Night in Montreal is a tense and thought-provoking book about Lilia, who can't remember her childhood and is haunted by a mysterious shadow. The less said about the plot the better, but even though this was St John Mandel's first book, it's beautifully written with wonderful character development. Like her later books, it's almost impossible to put this one down.  31 . The Secret History - Donna Tartt (1992)Published in September 1992, The Secret History is the epitome of the "dark academia" book trend. It's set in New England and follows the story of a very closely knit group of students who are enrolled at a small and elite liberal arts college in Vermont called Hampden College (although it's based on Bennington College, which Tartt attended). It's an inverted detective story that explores how the death of a student has rippling consequences even years later.  32 . Adam Bede - George Eliot (1859)Immediately recognised as a significant literary work Charles Dickens, no less, lavished it with praise: "The whole country life that the story is set in, is so real, and so droll and genuine, and yet so selected and polished by art, that I cannot praise it enough." No point in us trying, then.
SOMETHING MISSING FROM OUR SHORTLIST? Best free books for Kindle: classics to read for free 15 Things You Probably Don't Know About Catcher In The Rye Banned books list: books so controversial they were bannedRelated reviews and shortlists.  The best short books under 100 pages and quick to read The best subscription boxes for the ultimate recurring gifts The best comedy audiobooks: fantastic funny stories to listen to The best audiobooks in 2023: great reads to listen to today Classic books to read before you die: bucket list novels 34 of literature's greatest opening paragraphs
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 The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2021Featuring haruki murakami, brandon taylor, elizabeth mccracken, kevin barry, lily king, and more.  Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the 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 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction. Today’s installment: Short Story Collections . Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”  1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco) 22 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed “The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read … The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are mainly built around conditions of youth—vexed and tender relationships with parents, awkward romances, nebulous worries about the future. But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age. The stories are great fun to read—brimming over with life and energy and comic insight and deep feeling.” –Deborah Eisenberg ( New York Review of Books ) 2. Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead) 19 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Brandon Taylor here “Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we’re trained to expect … The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous; it is senseless without being pointless. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in Anne of Cleves that my breath hitched … Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue; Taylor’s gift is perfect tempo. In a band of writers, he’d be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. And as a plotter, he doesn’t rely on gasp-inducing reveals … Taylor’s superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph – sometimes just a sentence … I’ve come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it … He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.” –Ian Williams ( The Guardian )  3. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (Knopf) 13 Rave • 17 Positive • 7 Mixed • 5 Pan “… a blazing and brilliant return to form … a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories … there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. The stories echo with Murakami’s preoccupations. Nostalgia and longing for the charged, evocative moments of young adulthood. Memory’s power and fragility; how identity forms from random decisions, ‘minor incidents,’ and chance encounters; the at once intransigent and fragile nature of the ‘self.’ Guilt, shame, and regret for mistakes made and people damaged by foolish or heartless choices. The power and potency of young love and the residual weight of fleeting erotic entanglements. Music’s power to make indelible impressions, elicit buried memories, connect otherwise very different people, and capture what words cannot. The themes become a kind of meter against which all the stories make their particular, chiming rhythms … The reading experience is unsettled by a pervasive blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, dream and waking … Most of the narrators foreground the act of telling and ruminate on the intention behind and effects of disclosing secrets, putting inchoate impulses, fears, or yearnings into clear, logical prose … This mesmerizing collection would make a superb introduction to Murakami for anyone who hasn’t yet fallen under his spell; his legion of devoted fans will gobble it up and beg for more.” –Pricilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe ) 4. That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry (Doubleday) 13 Rave • 10 Positive •1 Mixed “There’s not a bad story in the bunch, and it’s as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written … Barry does an excellent job probing the psyche of his diffident protagonist, and ends the story with an unexpected moment of sweetness that’s anything but cloying—realism doesn’t need to be miserablism, he seems to hint; sometimes things actually do work out … Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws; in just 13 pages, he manages to make Hannah and Setanta come to life through sharp dialogue and keen observations … Barry proves to be a master of writing about both love and cruelty … Barry brilliantly evokes both the good and bad sides of love, and does so with stunningly gorgeous writing … There’s not an aspect of writing that Barry doesn’t excel at. His dialogue rings true, and he’s amazingly gifted at scene-setting—he evokes both the landscape of western Ireland and the landscape of the human heart beautifully. His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is his understanding of the ways our collective psyche works; he seems to have an innate sense of why people behave the way we do, and exactly what we’re capable of, both good and bad.” –Michael Schaub ( NPR ) 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. A lot of collections consist of some duds, yet every single page in this book is a shimmering seashell that contains the sound of multiple oceans. Reading one of Moniz’s stories is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing. 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 “There’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering—at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan … Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity … Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children—those who are ordinarily powerless—who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls … If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax … To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.” –Chelsea Leu ( The New York Times Book Review )  7. The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco) 13 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Elizabeth McCracken on savoring the mystery of stories here “Elizabeth McCracken’s The Souvenir Museum begins with one of the funniest short stories I’ve read in a long time … I had to stop reading ‘The Irish Wedding’ several times to explain to my husband why I was laughing so hard. I kept thinking: I wish I were reading a whole book about these people … they’re all beguiling … This tale, like much of McCracken’s work, captures the mixed bag that characterizes most people’s lives … McCracken’s writing is never dull. She ends this fantastic collection with a second English wedding and its aftermath, nearly 20 years after the first, delivering happiness tempered by sobering circumstances—and a satisfying symmetry.” –Heller McAlpin ( NPR ) 8. Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf) 13 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from Wild Swims here “How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams … The stories are vivid the way a flash of immobilizing pain is vivid … Perhaps because they’re so very short and because they mostly sketch slight interior shifts in her characters, Nors’s stories all feel a little bashful, a little tender. Surely this is intentional … Most of her stories are too short to linger deeply in time or consciousness; the characters spin back into their silence almost as soon as they emerge on the page. Nors is a master at portraying female rage, but here there is also no violent explosion outward, instead a sort of inner collapse; her characters assiduously resist confronting their fury until it rises up against them and attacks their bodies … The sense of simultaneous, furious upwelling into text and retraction into shame or reticence gives the stories a powerful undercurrent, as if they were constantly wrestling with themselves. Inherently self-contradicting, they wobble interestingly on their axes, pulled between outraged individualism and the restrictive Janteloven.” –Lauren Groff ( The New York Review of Books ) 9. Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti (Graywolf) 12 Rave • 1 Mixed Read an interview with Nana Nkweti here “The pure energy of the words strikes first, the thrumming, soaring, frenetic pace of Nana Nkweti’s expression … None of these stories end with a miraculous healing. Even where revelations occur, they never erase scars. Nkweti uses genre tropes to subvert our expectations. She employs the zombie story, the fairy tale, and the confessional in order to invert conventions … The levity of Nkweti’s writing can make even passing descriptions a delight … Occasionally the writing veers into the overwrought … But the sheer speed of Nkweti’s expression allows for correction in midair, and her keen descriptive eye provides more pleasures than missteps … Her inventiveness dazzles.” –Lee Thomas ( Los Angeles Review of Books ) 10. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (Henry Holt) 9 Rave • 4 Positive 1 Mixed Read Jocelyn Nicole Johnson on how writing “vengeful fiction” can make you a better person, here “Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses history to spectacular effect in her debut fiction collection … What makes My Monticello particularly resonant is that it does not stray far from life as we know it today. In the near future conjured by Johnson, there are the heat waves and wildfires that bring climate change into view. There is fallout from a fraught election. There is the vile replacement theory rhetoric of the right wing. But the lives of Johnson’s richly drawn characters—their personal stories—are always in focus. And, because of it, the storytelling is propulsive, as we follow these refugees along a harrowing journey, with danger ever at their heels. My Monticello is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it.” –Anissa Gray ( The Washington Post ) Our System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
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Literary HubCreated by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature Sign Up For Our Newsletters How to Pitch Lit Hub Advertisers: Contact Us Privacy Policy Support Lit Hub - Become A Member Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books MatterFor the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.  Become a member for as low as $5/month  Join Discovery, the new community for book loversTrust book recommendations from real people, not robots 🤓 Blog – Posted on Sunday, Jun 17Best 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?Discover the perfect short story for you. Takes 30 seconds! Free Short Stories to Read Right NowThese 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 DahlWhile 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 JacksonA 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 MooreTold 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 RoupenianIn 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 CarverFirst 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’ConnorInnocuously 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 NabokovThe 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 SaundersNot 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 BradburyIf 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 KeyesIn 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 DevourIf 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” Looking for something new to read?Trust real people, not robots, to give you book recommendations. Or sign up with an email address 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. Continue readingMore posts from across the blog. How to Find Kindle Unlimited Audiobooks (And 20 of Our Favorites)We all love reading, but with more people working from home than ever before and screen time at all time high, giving your eyes a break is extra important — and that’s where audiobooks come in. The 30 Best Sci-Fi AudiobooksWhen you’ve got a good audiobook piped into your earbuds, time takes on a different texture — sometimes it zips along, impelled by laughter, or slows to an ooze thanks to suspense. Either way, audiobooks keep your brain engaged with a good story even if your hand... 25 Amazing Books for Teens You Don't Want to MissA handpicked list of the 25 best books for teens, covering everything from fantasy to horror to romance. 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Bring your short stories to lifeFuse character, story, and conflict with tools in Reedsy Studio. 100% free. Stack Exchange NetworkStack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Q&A for work Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Should I start writing my novel or first learn on short stories?As a new writer, Is it okay to dive on my idea of a long story (a novel) or to first try short stories? I am very excited to start on my concept but am not sure if it is better to first try smaller projects to gain confidence. 
6 Answers 6There are different answers to this question. Mine may be off putting, but it's not meant to be. You're basically asking if you should start with the marathon. The short answer is that unless you are extremely unique and talented to the point of abnormalcy, your first book is going to be rough. It's probably going to be bad. But it's ultimately practice. You'll be good after four or five books. Which is to say, you're going to want to approach this with the right mindset. First, try something manageable. Try to stick to one POV. Finish your book no matter what. Figure out what the healthy habits for you look like. Make sure that you are writing something fun. If you pick a shorter arc that will give you a novella, you'll be perhaps in a better position. (Google is your friend for word counts here). You also are going to want to know the answers to these questions:
The biggest recommendation I have is that you listen to season 10 of the podcast Writing Excuses . It's supposed to be a master class for writing your first book. Also when you inevitably hit your low point, listen to the episode about writing for fun. It's a huge pick-me-up. Think of it as your second wind. Yes, go write your first book. But pack your camping supplies first. You're in for a long haul. Aside, I'm a hypocrite. I'm doing a large, complicated, 3 POV novel right now. But I think I've packed my pack right. But, I'm constantly stressed about the what ifs. You could go down my road, but it's a hard one. Update: finished said book and an now with alpha readers. It's currently too long to publish and needs to be cut in half; but it was and will be good practice. While it's out with alpha I'm starting up a new project. It was the book I needed to write at the time, but I'm pretty sure it's going in the trunk. I would caution anyone starting a book with the intention of selling to heed the advice of staying a bit closer to the ideal word count for your genre. 
It depends. For me, writing short stories feels like a waste of time and I can't stop myself from creating connections that can transform the short idea into a long, far more interesting (for me) tale. However, if you do dive in with the long one, you must be prepared to get to the end and re-write almost everything. If you think short-stories will make you feel satisfied, by all means, do so first. It may give you ideas to improve the concept for your novel. If you want to develop your writing style, you may want to consider writing snippets. For example, imagine you want to practice how to describe characters: choose a photo of a person from a magazine (someone you don't know, preferably) and describe them from the most exaustive to the most minimalist; from the most static (no action at all, just description) to the most active (mostly action and just one or two references to the most striking physical features); and seen by different people (seen by a lover, a parent, an enemy, an envious friend, ...). These snippets may even focus on the characters of your project (if you're the impatient type and want to get started as soon as possible). It will give you a good feel for the characters before you start writing. You can also do this for important places in the novel or, rather than write snippets, you can write short scenes. Try action scenes from diffeernt POVs or written from the very descriptive to the very fast. Contrast using short sentences, long sentences or a mix. Remember that these exercises don't need to be used in the novel, you're just stretching your muscles. 
On the one hand, writing something short is clearly less time investment than writing something long. When people decide to learn carpentry, they usually start with a birdhouse or bookends and not with a 30-room house. On the other hand, writing a short story is very different from writing a novel. A novel is not just a short story stretched out to fill 300 pages. At least, a good novel is not. Likewise a good short story is not a summary of a novel. If I wanted to learn auto mechanics, I wouldn't start with Hot Wheels cars because those are smaller. So I think my advice would be: If you have an idea for a novel, and also an idea for a short story, start with the short story. But if you have ideas for novels and short stories just aren't what you're interested in writing, then start work on a novel.  One possible approach: Think of a "season" for a television show. There are a fixed number of episodes, which run once per week. Each show has a few common characters, and a few common locations. Each week, there will be guest performers who establish the topic of the week's episode. So, each episode is like a short story. But they are not entirely self-contained, since it is assumed that the viewer knows something about the continued characters and location. There the analogy ends: A show's season has a finite number of episodes, but rarely do they connect as part of a larger plot, and rarely is the final show an "ending" (because there may be another season). Yet it can be done. So, I suggest you write short stories with common characters and locations. Arrange them so that what happened in one story has an influence on what will happen in a later story. Then, you are on the road to a novel. The difference between that, and just writing a novel? You do not need to start out with a plot for the whole thing. See what happens in the individual stories, then knit them together later. Do what you enjoy. It cannot be true that both 'writers must write x numbers of books before being publishable' and also 'having something on the page is better than nothing.' If you want to write the novel do so. The success (or not) must depend on what you bring to the effort. It simply must. Perhaps you are older, or younger. Perhaps you have written in other formats. Or not. Perhaps you have had many creative writing courses, and many assignments and prompts geared towards story arcs and characters and you have a driving need. The numbers vary widely anyway. Also, we do have the internet these days which was not true when the 'five books of unpublishable' was first put out. Also, we have options now. This opens up new avenues. A book can be published traditionally, marketed, and so on. Or published independently. Or shared for free on the internet. I would imagine Bill Gates could write anything he wanted, make it free on the internet, not suffer at all, and still have a decent readership of said writing. Not true thirty years ago. Those of us who want traditional publishing and wide reach face a different set of issues than those of us writing memoirs for our children.  If you are planning to write practice is key. A short story can be part of a larger one. Try using the snowflake method to fill out your story Basically start with a paragraph summary of your story, then break it into 3 parts writing a paragraph for each. The repeat the process adding detail as you go through the process with each card https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/ Some great blog posts with (almost) a template you could try as an exercise I would love to summarise this, but it would take all day! http://www.betternovelproject.com/blog/master-outline/ And online free tools like http://www.wavemaker.co.uk might help structure It also has some info on the Snowflake method 
Your AnswerReminder: Answers generated by artificial intelligence tools are not allowed on Writing Stack Exchange. Learn more Sign up or log inPost as a guest. Required, but never shown By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy . Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged novel or ask your own question .
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Blogs / Crime, Horror, and Thriller / 50 Horror Story Ideas and Scary Writing Prompts Craft the Perfect Crime50 horror story ideas and scary writing prompts. Feeling brave? Well, step right up to the literary house of horrors. We’ve got a smorgasbord of terror just waiting to tickle your dark fancy. Fifty fear-inducing prompts are lurking in the shadows, ready to jumpstart your next nightmare-on-paper. From whisper-quiet creeps to full-blown bloodbaths, we’ve got it all. So grab your favorite writing weapon, find a nice dark corner, and let’s dance with the devil, shall we? Fair warning: side effects may include insomnia, paranoia, and an irresistible urge to check under the bed. Enter at your own risk, and remember—in here, the monsters are all in your head. Or are they? Horror Writing PromptsHorror goes for the jugular. It’s visceral, often graphic, and aims to shock and disturb. Think buckets of blood, unspeakable monsters, and that feeling in your gut that says, “I shouldn’t be watching this, but I can’t look away.” These stories often involve supernatural elements like ghosts, monsters, or dark forces, but they can also be about more human dangers, like serial killers. Think of classic slasher movies or haunted house tales where something goes bump in the night, and you can’t help but peek around the corner in suspense. Ready for some horror writing prompts? Here’s a list that’ll make your skin crawl and your imagination run wild:
There ya go, a smorgasbord of spooky scenarios to sink your teeth into. Any of these tickle your terror bone? Or should we keep fishing in the lake of nightmare fuel? Scary Story IdeasScary is horror’s slightly tamer cousin. They’re designed to make you feel frightened, but not always in a deep, emotional way. They might be about anything from a jump scare to a creepy situation that gives you the shivers. Scary stories can be quick and to the point, like a campfire tale meant to spook you for a moment rather than leave a lasting sense of dread. In scary stories, it’s all about that build-up of dread and those jump-out-of-your-skin moments. Scary stories are the ones that make you want to pull the covers over your head but leave one eye peeking out. Let’s dial it back a notch and cook up some scary stories that’ll give you the heebie-jeebies without sending you into therapy. Here’s a fresh batch of fright-lite for your campfire chronicles:
There you have it—ten tales to tingle your spine without melting your brain. These are like horror’s gateway drug—just scary enough to get your heart racing, but not so terrifying you’ll need to sleep with the lights on… probably. Shall we creep on to the next stop on our fear tour? Spooky Writing PromptsSpooky stories are more about atmosphere than outright terror, relying on eerie vibes and things that go bump in the night. They’re like walking through a foggy graveyard at night—chilling, mysterious, and maybe a little eerie, but not necessarily terrifying. Spooky tales often have a ghostly or magical element to them and are more likely to give you goosebumps than nightmares. Think of Halloween stories with witches, ghosts, or things that go “bump” in the night but don’t actually harm anyone. Here are ten spooky writing prompts, focusing on atmosphere, mystery, and eerie chills:
So, feeling sufficiently spooked? Or should we keep channeling the spirits of storytelling past for more ethereal inspiration? Maybe it’s time to turn up the heat and dive into those psychological horrors that’ll really mess with your melon. Psychological Horror Story IdeasPsychological Horror is like the quiet one in the corner who’s actually the most disturbing of them all. This is where things get deep. This bad boy gets inside your head, making you question reality, sanity, and whether that shadow in the corner just moved. Instead of relying on gore or monsters, psychological horror stories focus on mental fear—paranoia, anxiety, and confusion. The real horror is often what’s happening inside the characters’ heads. You’re left wondering what’s real and what isn’t, which can make it even scarier. These stories often explore themes of madness, obsession, and the fragility of the human mind, leaving you unsettled long after you’ve finished the story. Ready to have your brain turned inside out?
So, feeling a little unmoored from reality yet? Maybe checking over your shoulder to make sure your reflection isn’t watching you? Good—that means we’re on the right track. Remember, in psychological horror, the real monster is usually… you. Sweet dreams! Short Horror Story IdeasAlright, let’s cut to the chase and serve up some bite-sized terror. Short horror stories are like jump scares in text form—they hit you fast, leave you breathless, and stick with you long after you’ve finished reading. These puppies are perfect for those nights when you want a quick fright without committing to a full-blown horror novel. Think of these as the horror equivalent of a shot of espresso: small, potent, and guaranteed to keep you up at night. Ready to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? Let’s go:
These little nightmares are like potato chips; bet you can’t write just one. They’re short, sharp shocks to the system that’ll leave your readers checking under the bed and side-eyeing their mirrors. Tips For Using Horror Story StartersAre you getting into the spirit of things yet? You’ve got the seeds of terror in your hot little hands, but how do you nurture them into a forest of fear? Then let’s talk about how to take these creepy kernels and grow them into full-blown nightmares. Here’s the down-and-dirty guide to turning prompts into pulse-pounding horror stories:
Now, armed with these tips and those prompts, you’re ready to unleash holy horror. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility. Try not to traumatize your readers too much, okay? On second thought, go ahead and traumatize ’em. That’s what they’re here for, right? |
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Discover the diverse and imaginative stories by new writers in 2023. From Bangkok to space, from dystopia to reality, these collections explore the complexities of the world and the human condition.
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Book Bingo NW 2023: Debut Essays or Short Stories by SeattleBookBingo - a staff-created list : Here are some suggestions for your Summer Book Bingo NW 2023 category: Debut Essays or Short Stories. Book Bingo is our annual adult summer reading program presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Annotations from Kirkus, unless otherwise attributed.
That challenge is often what gets me writing—I want to take an absurd premise and see how deep it can go." Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is the fifth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world.
Deesha Philyaw is the author of the short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church ...
Debut Essays or Short Stories. All books added. All Boys Aren't Blue. George M. Johnson with George M. Johnson (Narrator) 5 hours, 12 minutes • first pub 2020 ISBN/UID: 9781250247896. Format: Audio. Language: English. Publisher: Macmillan Audio . Publication date: ...
About Best Debut Short Stories 2024. The essential annual guide to the newest voices in literature, selected by Sindya Bhanoo, Ayşegül Savaş, and Sidik Fofana Best Debut Short Stories celebrates the most promising short story writers today. Selected by a panel of distinguished judges, these twelve stories are the 2024 winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers ...
A list of the most critically-acclaimed short story collections of 2022, based on reviews from over 150 publications. See the rankings, ratings, and excerpts of books by Ling Ma, George Saunders, Colin Barrett, and more.
Details. Author Yuka Igarashi (Edited by), Sarah Lyn Rogers (Edited by), Publisher Catapult. Publication Date 2021-08-24. Section New Titles - Paperback / Anthologies. Type New. Format Paperback. ISBN 9781646220793. The annual—and essential—collection of the newest voices in short fiction, selected this year by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ...
Debut essays or short stories. All books added. Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want ...
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station(2011) "Poetic," as a description, is rarely intended to connote humor. This is a shame, because in my experience, poets write some of the most subtly hilarious novels around. Take Leaving the Atocha Station, a novel by and about a poet.
Praise for Best Debut Short Stories 2020 "Another slate of outstanding stories from emerging writers of short fiction . . . An anthology full of promise." —Kirkus Reviews Remarks from the Judges "The stories and writers here represent a wide range of voices at the levels of ethnicity, gender, and style.
This interview features three writers who published their debut short story collections this year: Ada Zhang, the author of The Sorrows of Others; Nishanth Injam, the author of The Best Possible Experience; and Alexandra Chang, the author of Tomb Sweeping. I called Zhang, Injam, and Chang to learn about their writing processes, relationships ...
Discover more than 30 of the best debut novels by famous and lesser-known authors, from The Hobbit to The Wasp Factory. Learn about the stories behind the stories, the challenges and the triumphs of writing a first book.
Browse All Our Lists, Essays, and Interviews. See What We're Reading > Books To Read if You Love Gilmore Girls. Read More > Audio . Popular. New Releases. Award Winners ... About Best Debut Short Stories 2021. The annual—and essential—collection of the newest voices in short fiction, selected this year by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, ...
Debut Essays or Short Stories by BALRef - a community-created list : Adult Book Bingo 2023
A list of the most critically-acclaimed short story collections of the past year, based on reviews from over 150 publications. Find out which authors made the cut and what critics had to say about their stories.
Discover the best short stories for all types of readers, from classics to new releases. Whether you love horror, humor, romance or literary fiction, you'll find a book to suit your taste and mood.
Discover thirty-one of the best short stories and collections from various genres and sources, including free online stories by Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, and more. Whether you want to read a classic, a twisty tale, or a modern masterpiece, this list has something for you.
On the one hand, writing something short is clearly less time investment than writing something long. When people decide to learn carpentry, they usually start with a birdhouse or bookends and not with a 30-room house. On the other hand, writing a short story is very different from writing a novel. A novel is not just a short story stretched ...
Spooky Writing Prompts. Spooky stories are more about atmosphere than outright terror, relying on eerie vibes and things that go bump in the night. They're like walking through a foggy graveyard at night—chilling, mysterious, and maybe a little eerie, but not necessarily terrifying. ... Short Horror Story Ideas. Alright, let's cut to the ...