A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World
Updated on Dec. 18, 2024
The best short stories are indisputable proof that good things come in small packages! These powerful tales will stay with you long after you've finished them.
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For fans of: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer
Published in 2023, this stunning collection of seven reinvented fairy tales was a finalist for the prestigious Kirkus Prize. Kelly Link’s unconventional stories feature diverse characters, from an old billionaire who must choose his heir with the help of a talking white cat, to a futuristic Hansel and Gretel.
“Kelly Link has long delighted readers with her uncanny and wildly imaginative story collections, including Magic for Beginners and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble,” says Theodore McCombs, author of Uranians and winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award. “But 2023’s White Cat, Black Dog may be the perfect showcase for her genius for modern fairy tales, knitting the wondrous, sinister and dreamlike unrealness of a Scandinavian folk story with the savvy emotional realism of a contemporary novel. These stories are funny, startling, heartbreaking and always a pleasure to read.”
For fans of: Skinship by Yoon Choi and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Pulsing with raw energy and biting humor, Afterparties was So’s debut, but it was published posthumously in 2021. These powerful short stories feature various Cambodian Americans living in Central Valley, California, and focus on the often-overlooked refugee community experience. Through vibrant prose, So masterfully balances lighthearted dialogue and absurd situations with heavier themes like poverty, intergenerational trauma and the Khmer Rouge genocide. It’s no wonder the collection won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, as well as the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction. Afterparties is hands down one of the best new Asian American books of the last few years.
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For fans of: Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation by Adam Resnick
The two youngest-ever comedy writers for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon put their heads together to co-author Naked in the Rideshare (Stories of Gross Miscalculations). The result? More than 30 laugh-out-loud stories and essays that are increasingly ridiculous, absurd and irreverent. The diamond ring on a reality-TV dating show gets to tell its side of the story. Dr. Seuss teaches sex ed. The catchphrase “See you in hell” is taken to the literal extreme, resulting in a bizarre afterlife friendship. This 2023 book caught the attention of actors-slash-executive-producers Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, so snap up a copy and read these original short stories before they’re adapted for the screen.
For fans of: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Short on time but long on love for bestsellers like Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow? You’re in luck, because Towles released this short story collection in April 2024. Table for Two includes six short stories set in New York City, as well as a noir-ish novella set in the Golden Age of Hollywood that’s actually a spinoff of Towles’s Rules of Civility. Themes include chance encounters, modern marriages and the everyday dramas that unfold in the shadow of America’s iconic, stylish cities. And while they’re all compelling, the standout story is “The Line,” the poignant tale of a simple peasant in Soviet Russia who keeps doing the right thing at the right time—resulting in his unintentional immigration to New York City.
For fans of: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
Garnett Kilberg Cohen opens Cravings with a story called “Hors d’oeuvres” and ends it with “Feast.” Each tale digs into a character’s literal or metaphorical craving. In one, a woman inexplicably craves the food that also sparks memories of a tragic moment. In another, a character’s deep, forbidden craving becomes her downfall. This 2023 collection of deeply human stories will stick to your heart, not your ribs, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.
For fans of: The Black Girl Survives in This One, edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell
For fans of Jordan Peele’s whip-smart films Get Out and Nope, this 2023 collection of scary stories—fully titled Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror—offers a hair-raising exploration of both the natural and supernatural horrors that haunt Black Americans. In one story set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, two Freedom Riders attempt to ride a bus to Montgomery but end up encountering a monster in the road. In another story, a Nigerian American woman breaks a cultural taboo at her father’s funeral and keeps a token to remember him by, unleashing sinister events. According to the Guardian, “every piece is strong and memorable, making this not only likely to be the best anthology of the year but one for the ages.”
One thing to note: While Peele curated the anthology and wrote the introduction, he did not write any of the short stories. Contributing writers include Tananarive Due, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin and Rebecca Roanhorse.
For fans of: Your Utopia by Bora Chung
Often compared to the hit dystopian series Black Mirror, this bestselling 2022 collection of speculative fiction that often crosses the line into science fiction was a finalist for the California Book Award. Its subject matter is sometimes dark, but Kate Folk’s sharp voice and dry humor keeps the read fun and engaging.
“Out There is a delightful blend of bizarre, thought-provoking and downright entertaining,” says Lizzy Rolando, owner of Salmonberry Books. “This collection is perfect for anyone who enjoys or is looking for literary fiction with a speculative bent. From artificial men trying to steal women’s identities, to a love triangle developing between patients with a disease that melts their bones overnight, to a person driven to build a scale-model version of the resort where they’re trapped, this collection has plenty of eerie goodness that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book.”
For fans of: Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice and Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams
Many Indigenous legends and lore warn against whistling at night, which is said to summon various forms of evil. A perfect read for spooky season, Never Whistle at Night includes Indigenous-inspired tales that summon spirits, curses and supernatural creatures that’ll satisfy any horror aficionado. A Native girl works a catering gig at a White man’s party in a remote lodge, a perfect opportunity for brutal revenge. An ancient monster is scarce on prey ever since the “Other People” came and took over the People’s land. A man visits his family in search of the scariest story ever but instead learns how important it is to honor elders’ stories. This 2023 collection runs the gamut of horror, from quietly chilling stories to gripping encounters of grisly things that bump in the night, while still addressing themes like colonization, racism and generational trauma.
For fans of: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Lambda Literary finalist SJ Sindu is known for her subversive, evocative and highly original writing—yet her stories are still grounded enough to draw out recognition and empathy from everyday readers. Sindu’s short story collection The Goth House Experiment, published in October 2023, spans a variety of book genres and tackles everything from class to gender and LGBTQ+ identity. The best of the bunch are “Dark Academia and the Lesbian Masterdoc,” which will make you think twice about viral TikTok fame and reactionary politics, and “I Like to Imagine Daisy from Mrs. Dalloway as an Indian Woman,” a concise yet rich reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s marginalized character.
For fans of: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and Redeployment by Phil Klay
Tim O’Brien’s modern classic centers on the Vietnam War, but these are not the traditional war stories told in historical fiction. The author, who based this 1990 book on his own service in Vietnam and its aftermath, not only chronicles the war in these related short stories but also pulls back the curtain on the very act of storytelling and the impossibility of ever capturing the full truth. As the narrator says, “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t.” This deeply moving, profoundly thought-provoking book continues to speak to all generations of readers.
For fans of: The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans and Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan
Published in 2020, Deesha Philyaw’s dazzling debut racked up staggering accolades for good reason. She invites us into the lives of Black Southern women and girls in a way that is intimate, tender and deeply engaging. All nine stories follow women who are caught in between the expectations and restrictions of religion and their own needs and sexual desires. With punchy lines like “My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife,” The Secret Lives of Church Ladies ultimately preaches walking your own path, loving yourself and eating delicious food in between.
For fans of: Rock Springs by Richard Ford
This 2022 short story collection from John W. MacIlroy includes 18 literary fiction pieces in a mere 200 pages. All together, MacIlroy’s stories detail moments—big and small—that signal a change in some way. Some are stories of quiet love, like a man simply hanging a painting according to his wife’s instructions. Others are portraits of grief, such as an Iraq War vet who eats his pastrami sandwich with mayonnaise to honor his best friend who was killed in combat. Crack open this book’s spine “prepared to feel everything,” writes reviewer Elizabeth Robin in Lowcountry Weekly. All the feels, indeed.
For fans of: Zone One by Colson Whitehead and Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams
When Friday Black debuted in 2018, the short story collection became an instant New York Times bestseller, proving everyone should be reading more books by Black authors. Each of the 12 stories are an enraging, urgent call to action, using sci-fi and fantasy elements to satirize current social issues that the world should no longer ignore.
“Before Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel Chain-Gang All-Stars became one of the buzziest books of 2023, Adjei-Brenyah published Friday Black, a stunning short story collection that grapples with capitalism, consumerism, racism and the ways these intersect to harm Black Americans,” says Rolando. “The collection is dark and unnerving, similar in tone to the television series Black Mirror. This is a must-read for those who enjoyed Chain-Gang All-Stars and anyone looking for socially conscious horror or dystopian fiction.”
For fans of: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Carmen Maria Machado burst onto the scene in 2017 with these stories that blend in elements of science-fiction while exploring body image, love, sexuality and violence. She goes all in on topics ranging from bariatric surgery (and the ghost of a former fat self) to prom dresses with awful secrets woven into the fabric. A bracing and necessary collection, Her Body and Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
For fans of: All Fours by Miranda July
Kimberly King Parsons’s stories have a heart as big as her home state of Texas. Long-listed for the National Book Award, her 2019 short story collection, Black Light, features pitch-perfect writing and messed-up but compelling characters who feel as lonely as their rural Texas surroundings. Here’s one example: “When I start dating Tim, an almost-doctor, all the sick, broken people in the world begin to glow.” These stories shine a black light on the weirdness, and sometimes even the ugliness, of human nature, and yet they still manage to treat each character who lives on the margins of society with honest compassion.
For fans of: Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
Stuart Dybek is one of the great chroniclers of the Windy City—in particular, the Eastern European immigrant South Side. And the spare, grittily exquisite stories in The Coast of Chicago don’t waste a single word: “Tonight, a steady drizzle, streetlights smoldering in fog like funnels of light collecting rain.” Highlighting moments of beauty in the poor ethnic enclaves and along the elevated train tracks where Dybek grew up, his 1990 masterpiece has been rightly compared to James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
For fans of: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Argentinian genius Jorge Luis Borges wrote some of the best, most mind-bending and prescient short stories of all time—way back in the early to mid–20th century. For instance, Labyrinths‘s “The Library of Babel” (written long before the age of online algorithms and artificial intelligence) centers on an imaginary library containing every book that was or ever could be written by recombining the alphabet. If you like fantasy or stories as twisty as an M.C. Escher drawing, this 1962 collection of mini masterpieces is for you.
For fans of: Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World, edited by James Thomas, Robert Shapard and Christopher Merrill
Short has a nice, long subtitle: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. Between these covers, you’ll find blink-length works ranging from classic masters (Michel de Montaigne, William Blake, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein and Italo Calvino) to cutting-edge contemporary writers (Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers and Joy Harjo). Published in 2014, this book contains hundreds of stories by writers in 24 Western countries from the last 500 years, making this a creative and diverse collection. Expect fables, a job application, jazz writing, prose poetry and more.
For fans of: Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist and Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III
If you like your fiction Southern—or if you just like it flawlessly precise—dive into National Book Award winner Ellen Gilchrist’s 2014 short story collection, Acts of God. Nine years in the making, it’s described by its author as “a book of praise and wonder.” She adds, “When we are young, we are too self-serving and ambitious to look around and know how marvelous our fellow men and women and children truly are.”
Need more incentive to pick it up? Here’s a sample: “The tornado struck in the middle of the night. It swept across an eight-block stretch of the small town of Adkins, Arkansas, and leveled dozens of houses. At 10 the next morning, four teenagers from Fayetteville, Arkansas, First Methodist Church Youth Group left Fayetteville and headed south and east to Adkins to see if they could help.”
For fans of: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories by Carson McCullers
Celebrated for her famous short fiction, Flannery O’Connor published just two collections. O’Connor died in 1964 at the age of 39, but her unsettling explorations of the Deep South (sometimes classified as Southern Gothic) remain a must-read on many TBR lists. Winner of the 1972 National Book Award, The Complete Stories includes both of her collections and 12 additional stories—truly, some of the all-time best short stories in one bound collection. Many consider the titular story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” to be the best short story of all time; it describes a family road trip gone awry when they encounter an escaped convict called The Misfit.
For fans of: The Scenic Route by Christina Baker Kline
If you’ve ever felt like the only one dealing with the awkwardness and complexity of being human, David Joseph’s 2023 short story collection is here to assure you that you are, in fact, not alone. “The opening story, ‘Fishing,’ places you in the mind of a 17-year-old teen asserting his independence in the age-old struggle of teen versus parent,” says Ted Olczak, publisher of the Independent Press Award and NYC Big Book Award magazines. “I love how unspoken words are so apparent in the interaction between father and son, and the son’s actions represent a silent declaration of self-reliance and a poignant attempt to bridge the generational gap.”
Olczak adds that these short stories “remind us that we have the ability to learn different things from different people in our lives if we are willing to be open to it.” The book is an easy read for young adults, and great for parents who know all too well about the struggles of living.
For fans of: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
Short story writer, novelist, essayist and writing teacher George Saunders is widely acclaimed for the breadth and audacity of his work. His stories—at times bordering on sci-fi or the surreal—are strange but emotionally true. The characters in his 2013 collection, Tenth of December, range from a boy who must decide whether or not to help his ex-friend who gets kidnapped in the story “Victory Lap” to the human subjects in an experimental prison that is developing pharmaceuticals in the story “Escape from Spiderhead.”
The plots will have you debating what you would do in the characters’ situations, while the prose is equally introspective. For example: “Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can’t do the simple things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can’t because you’re balancing a ball on your head.”
For fans of: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Octavia Butler was the first Black woman to win accolades in science fiction, not only blazing a trail for many others but also—as many of the best short stories do—transcending strict definitions of genre. She introduces extraterrestrials as a way of making us think more deeply about ourselves and envisions a future we want to prevent. Her brilliant 1995 collection Bloodchild and Other Stories is no exception, telling the stories about a new social caste caused by a genetic disease, the human settlers of the Tlic planet who are implanted by parasitic Tlic eggs, a world where a mysterious pandemic has eradicated the ability to speak, and more.
For fans of: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Diane Williams is among the most innovative writers alive today. These extremely short pieces, published in 2018, fall somewhere between fierce poetry and story. The 300 stories are neither plotted nor linear; instead, you’ll feel as if you’ve walked into a woman’s inner, astonishing life. Williams’s style has been described as “erudite, elegant and stubbornly experimental,” but don’t let that intimidate you. With lines like “Their infant, who can understand their language better than his own, is listening,” whatever bypasses the mind goes straight to the heart.
For fans of: Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
Grace Paley’s 1974 short story collection about being a wife, ex-wife, mother, daughter and friend in New York City in the new 1950s and ’60s is bursting with life. With her distinctive voice, Paley takes a seemingly ordinary event and turns it into art, and her insights are razor-sharp: “It is like a long hopeless homesickness my missing those young days. To me they’re like my own place that I have gone away from forever, and I have lived all the time since among great pleasures but in a foreign town.”
For fans of: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Published in 2008, Jhumpa Lahiri’s beautiful stories move from Boston to Bombay and center on intergenerational clashes in Indian immigrant families. The secrets and longings of her characters are powerfully real. Starting with the very first sentence of Unaccustomed Earth, she creates an empathetic engagement: “After her mother’s death, Ruma’s father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he’d never seen.”
For fans of: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams by Diane Williams
In her 2018 collection Pure Hollywood, Christine Schutt’s style is masterful and distinctive as she looks deep into the hidden corners of relationships between mothers and daughters, siblings, sisters and couples. “Whatever your literary comfort zone is, the chances are Christine Schutt is outside it,” said the Guardian. The best short stories highlight dark and uncomfortable truths—like dysfunctional childhoods, neglect and death—with wit, and you’ll find yourself both disliking and rooting for Schutt’s flawed yet vulnerable and deeply human characters.
For fans of: Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor
The late Raymond Carver was a master of pared-down stories about working-class people. Case in point: his 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which contains some of the most famous short stories of all time. A tale titled “Why Don’t You Dance?” begins: “In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.”
Novelist and short story writer Ann Hood says that this collection made a huge impact on her when she was younger because its stories contain topics ordinary people can relate to. “Back in the ’80s, when I was trying to become a writer, most of the short stories I read were by writers like John Cheever or John Updike. They were about wealthy suburban couples dealing with infidelity and dissatisfaction—nothing like my life as a blue-collar twentysomething,” she explains. “Then I read Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and its stories filled with people I recognized. I can do this! I thought. Anyone who wants to glimpse real characters struggling to pay their bills, fall in love or just get by will love these stories.”
For fans of: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Bestselling memoirist and novelist James McBride’s recent book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, was named the best book of 2023 on Amazon. And here, in this 2017 collection of funny and moving tales, his manifest talents are on display in miniature. Many of these stories are set in the inner city, but the final standout piece takes place at an imaginary zoo. In the richly allegorical “Mr. P & the Wind,” various animals discuss what their lives were like before they came to the zoo, as well as their observations of humans. McBride looks at race relations and the meaning of masculinity with both humor and honesty.
For fans of: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
The whip-smart, wisecracking stories in Lorrie Moore’s 2014 Bark carry an afterburn, as all the best short stories do. Through beautifully observed characters in often absurd yet very American situations, she reveals the anxieties, longings and conflicting impulses we try to hide from ourselves. A sample: “Ira had been divorced six months and still couldn’t get his wedding ring off. His finger swelled doughily around it—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse and misdirected ambition, he said to his friends.”
For fans of: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson and Revenge by Yōko Ogawa
You might know Dan Chaon for his fiction—American road-trip thriller Sleepwalk or chilling literary suspense masterpiece Ill Will. But before his novels, Chaon wrote this compelling 2012 collection, which might indeed keep you up at night, haunted. In it, Chaon writes astute, suspenseful stories about people whose struggles might be easily overlooked: a young widower who suddenly receives mysterious messages all around her, a boy with night terrors, and a foster child with a dark past, to name a few.
For fans of: Cathedral by Raymond Carver
No roundup of the best short stories would be complete without this poignant 1953 collection. Most readers know J.D. Salinger as the generation-defining author of The Catcher in the Rye, a young-adult novel many of us read in high school. But these nine short stories also showcase Salinger’s brilliance and insight as a writer. One of his most famous short stories, “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” is a heartbreaking account of a shell-shocked sergeant’s meeting with a young orphaned girl during World War II.
For fans of: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link
One of the brightest talents of the 21st century, Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell fills her strange and fantastical tales with humor and imagination. In her 2019 short story book, Orange World, you’ll find ghosts, zombies and a breastfed devil, and while those might sound like horror stories, they’re actually mesmerizing magical realism stories about achingly real people. You can see it in the short story “Orange World,” in which one character says, “My name is Halimah. I had a C-section, and I feel like a library where they misshelved all the books.” You’re in for an adventure of the best kind.
For fans of: The River Why by David James Duncan
The titular story in the 1976 short story collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories is something closer to a novella, and it’s more than worth the price of admission. Norman Maclean turned to writing only after retirement, basing this semi-autobiographical story on his youth in Montana and his relationship with his brother, Paul, who struggled with addiction. “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them,” he writes. Robert Redford turned the novella into a movie—but (you guessed it) the book is better.
For fans of: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is best known for her bestselling novel The House on Mango Street, a modern classic about a young Mexican American girl coming of age in Chicago that remains one of the most crucial books by Latinx authors. That novel is told in short vignettes, so the transition to short stories seems natural. In her witty and heartfelt 1991 short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek, the beloved author writes about various Latina women’s lives on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border as they strive to survive and search for their identities outside of the stereotypes of the virgin, mother and seductress.
For fans of: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Published in 2017, The Mountain‘s six quietly haunting and ethereal stories span the globe and center on people who’ve been dealt losses through war, poverty or displacement. Each character—whether it’s a landmine worker, a morphine-addicted World War II nurse or a factory worker—long for connection, for a place where they belong. Their particularities make these stories immersive, while the underlying emotions are universal.
For fans of: Skinship by Yoon Choi
Some days, it feels like the world is getting smaller. Technology helps us communicate with far-flung family members at lightning speed. Airplanes shuttle hundreds of thousands of people between continents every day. But then, of course, there are times when the world feels too big—especially when you’re missing a faraway home. In Maija Mäkinen’s 2023 debut short story collection, the author explores the stories of immigrants. Immigrants who are missing family and friends. Immigrants grappling with the loss of mother tongues. Immigrants craving comfort food that’s tricky to make in a supermarket full of foreign ingredients. In beautiful, lyrical sentences, she captures what it means to be yourself in a new place.
For fans of: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and Lot by Bryan Washington
For readers who are not part of the Arab American community, Dearborn offers a charming, eye-opening look at the identities, generational conflicts, humor and heart of their fellow Americans. And for Arab Americans, this 2023 collection of short stories might feel like coming home. Omar El Akkad, author of Such Strange Paradise, praises the 10 tragicomic stories for capturing “a vital, underspoken aspect of the Arab American experience, that sense of being not quite from the place you love and not quite loved by the place you’re from.”
Dearborn won the 2023 Khayrallah Book Prize, was a finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award for Debut Fiction and was short-listed for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Our favorite in the collection is the short story “Speedoman,” in which a mysterious Lebanese man dressed in a Speedo appears at a community-center pool and bewilders the husbands and wives there.
Additional reporting by Dawn Raffel.
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