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Book Review

Exile in Guyville

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

Of Fathers & Gods

by N.T. McQueen

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

The Forgetters

by Bella Moses

Greg Sarris’s short story collection "The Forgetters" is a triumphant testament to the power of storytelling. Answer Woman and Question Woman sit perched on a fence rail atop Sonoma Mountain. Answer Woman remembers all the stories but... Read More

How to Make Your Mother Cry

by Elaine Chiew

Sejal Shah’s intrepid short story collection "How to Make Your Mother Cry" is a polysemous encounter connecting auditory and visual modes. Interspersed with ephemera—memory-photographs, childlike drawings, Indian dance notations, a... Read More

Displaced Persons

by Jeff Fleischer

In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted... Read More

Reuniting with Strangers

by Eileen Gonzalez

In the short stories that make up Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio’s novel "Reuniting with Strangers", women from the Philippines try to make places for themselves halfway across the world. For many Filipinas in the collection, the only way... Read More

Madcap Dogs

by Ben Linder

Dogs are the catalysts for human tenderness and daring in the warm short story collection "Madcap Dogs". In Ron Chandler’s endearing short story collection "Madcap Dogs", canines bring the best out of their human companions. In these... Read More

Penny Bloods

by Michele Sharpe

Edited by Nicole C. Dittmer, "Penny Bloods" collects sensational tales of “monstrous women” from the penny newspapers of the nineteenth century. The stories are arranged in chronological order and are complemented with historical... Read More

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100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections

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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Blog – Posted on Sunday, Jun 17

Best short stories and collections everyone should read.

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

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

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

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

Which short story should you read next?

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Free Short Stories to Read Right Now

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

1. “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl

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

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

2. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

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

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

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

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

4. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

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

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

5. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

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

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

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

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

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

7. “Symbols and Signs” by Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

8. “Sticks” by George Saunders

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

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

9. “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

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

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

10. “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes

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

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

Best Short Story Collections to Devour

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

11. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Standout Story: “A Manual for Cleaning Women”

12. Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar

Standout Story: “House Taken Over”

13. Drifting House by Krys Lee

Standout Story: “Drifting House”

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14. Dubliners by James Joyce

Standout Story: “The Dead”

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

Standout Story: “Riding the Bullet”

16. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Standout Story: “The Garden of Forking Paths”

17. Florida by Lauren Groff

Standout Story: “Above and Below”

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

Standout Story: “The Flints of Memory Lane”

19. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Standout Story: “The Pig”

20. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Standout Story: “Samsa in Love”

21. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

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

22. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Standout Story: “In a Bamboo Grove”

23. Runaway by Alice Munro

Standout Story: “Runaway”

24. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez

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

25. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

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

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

Standout Story: “Hills Like White Elephants”

27. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

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

28. The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

Standout Story: “The Lady with the Dog”

29. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

30. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Standout Story: “The Thing Around Your Neck”

31. The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

Standout Story: “When Women Love Men”

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

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The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story review – from Blair to Brexit

A collection of short fiction from the past 20 years, edited by Philip Hensher, pushes the limits of taste more than form

W ith many books and hundreds of thousands of words of journalism to his name this past decade, the tag “writer and critic” already sounded limp in the face of Philip Hensher’s industry, even before he took on the improbable sideline of sifting 300 years of British short stories to edit, in 2015, a two-volume showcase running from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith via majestically obscure figures such as T Baron Russell, the so-called “Zola of Camberwell”.

Now he’s back with an extra 30 stories he didn’t have room for last time. Starting in 1997, the new volume’s Blair-to-Brexit timeline pays homage to VS Pritchett , “the greatest of all British short-story writers”, who died that year. While Hensher, speculating darkly on the internet’s deadening effect on literary style, stops short of saying Pritchett’s socially grounded realism is the only game in town, his picks do tend to be in that vein, which, if not innovative, at least ensures this is an excellent book for curling up with.

Among the treasured names providing tender, bittersweet comedy are Helen Simpson, Tessa Hadley and Jackie Kay, whose joyous story Physics and Chemistry shows two female teachers coupling up against the odds.

Hensher lets us sample the best of the younger writers working in this style, too: Thomas Morris’s All the Boys narrates a stag do in the future tense, signalling seen-it-all-before weariness without sneering, while Lucy Caldwell’s Poison, about a schoolgirl getting her teacher sacked, wears its moral complexity lightly.

Odder things come from China Miéville , whose Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia is a gothic yarn in which language is literally infectious, and Helen Oyeyemi, of whose Angela Carter-ish story Hensher says: “We hardly know what to think of anything that happens or anyone involved.” You sense this stuff gives him the heebie-jeebies; he’s almost condescending when he says Eley Williams , author of last year’s sleeper hit Attrib. and Other Stories , works best when, “against the writer’s best intentions”, she deals with “rich social interaction”.

Hensher seems happier pushing limits of taste, not form. Witness his inclusion of Irvine Welsh’s fable about a homophobe condemned to “walk the Earth as a homosexual ghost buggering your old mates”, or Martin Amis’s post-9/11 satire The Unknown Known, in which a terrorist named Truqbom is involved in a plot to flood an American city with rapists. This “superb examination” of how “the commissars of public utterance have produced rules about words and literary forms” is, for Hensher, “one of the most thought-provoking statements about what may be said about Islamist terror”, even if, analytically, it seems on a par with Boris Johnson saying jihadis aren’t getting laid.

Clearly there’s a bit of bullishness about Hensher’s business here. But does he sometimes box himself in? When he picks stories from Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero and Mark Haddon’s The Pier Falls – two of the best collections of recent years – it’s hard not to wonder if he ignores their standout tales (Hall’s Evie, Haddon’s Bunny) because they have already been anointed by high-profile short-story prizes, blasted in the introduction for having “actually destroyed the readership of short stories” by crowning fiction devoid of merit.

Hensher’s point, combatively put, is that the true test of a story is how well it goes down with readers; prizes, judged by “provincial dons”, can’t fill the vacancy for, say, a British equivalent of the New Yorker putting new short fiction before a newsstand audience once a week.

Amen to that. But when he flourishes his argument’s smoking gun – the fact that the winner of the 2016 BBC national short-story award, KJ Orr’s Disappearances , contains the redundant phrase: “I think to myself” – it seems madly intemperate: is he really saying this single inelegance altogether strips Orr’s story of value and prizes too?

After the legwork he’s put into these volumes, though, perhaps Hensher can be forgiven for being trigger-happy; having foraged 2,000 pages of tales for our delectation, it could just be he wants a break from short stories now, like a weary host ready to clear away the feast.

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The 10 Best Short Story Collections of the Decade

And then some.

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels of the decade , and now we’re back with the best short story collections of the decade—or to be precise, the best collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Claire vaye watkins,  battleborn 2012.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection—which includes a sixty-page novella that takes place during the 1848 Gold Rush and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s involvement in the Manson Family during the late ’60s—is as starkly beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert frontier through which its stories roam. There’s an enviable fearlessness to Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look away from the despair that lies within the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy trajectories or tidy resolutions. Her landscapes are exquisitely drawn, full of lush sensory detailing and characters stalked by the sorrows and violence of their pasts, the parched desperation of their presents. In one particularly aching story, a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash, and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-sided correspondence with their owner, onto whom he superimposes the identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. In his reverie he remembers how nature marked the season it happened: “Late that Spring, a swarm of grasshoppers moved though Beatty on their way to the alfalfa fields down south. They were thick and fierce, rolling like a thunderstorm in your head.” It’s remarkable to come across a debut collection in which the voice, the vision, is so fully formed, so assured, but that’s what Watkins has achieved with this exceptional work. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Alice Munro, Dear Life 2012

Well, this one’s not really fair. I mean, any Alice Munro collection published in any given period of time has to automatically be on the list of best collections of said period. (I guess what I really mean is that it’s not really fair to other writers that Munro is such a goddamn genius.) Most of the stories in Dear Life were previously published in The New Yorker , Harper’s , and Granta ; they all display Munro’s uncanny ability to take a lifetime—or even generations of a single family—and shrink it into a thirty-page text—not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering a character so textured, and a series of moments so precise, that we can’t help but feel we know all about them. These stories and characters are not flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept; it’s simply that Munro knows people, and represents them so accurately, so wisely, and so humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. This is despite the fact that, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out, with age, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of the common man. “Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.” The collection also includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”—we are told. She writes: “I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.” They too are wonderful.

Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the publication of Dear Life , in 2013; the Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

George Saunders, Tenth of December 2013

It can be hard to tell what historical era you’re actually living through, as its happening. Is this the post-9/11 era or the Trump era? Or maybe we’re really in what will one day (I hope) be labeled the Misinformation Era. Honestly, though, this is probably the “we had a chance to save the planet but did nothing” era, in which case, there probably won’t be historians around in 200 years to call it anything… How ever you choose to see the last decade of life on Planet America, it is likely some version of it appears in George Saunders contemporary classic, Tenth of December .

This collection is as remarkable for its range of emotional registers as it is for its formal variety. From the aching, class-conscious pathos of “Puppy,” in which two families intersect around the possible purchase of a dog, to the grim, neo-futurist allegory of “Escape From Spiderhead,” in which clinical drug trials go way too far, Saunders sets his characters down in a series of bespoke narrative dioramas, a wry and loving god forever suspicious of the disappointments his creations engender, yet unable to resist setting little boobytraps to see how they’ll react. With a tenderness and generosity that catalyzes satirical clarity rather than the cloudiness of sentimentality, Saunders lets his characters puzzle their way through the confines of their own fictional lives, as wounded and joyous and magnificently broken as any among us, the living.

It is a dark timeline, in which reality has outpaced satire, but at least it is a world we have seen before, in the short stories of George Saunders.  – Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, ed. Benjamin Moser, The Complete Stories 2015

It’s complicated to include a “complete stories” collection in our list for the best of the decade, not least because Clarice Lispector has been considered Brazil’s greatest writer more or less since 1943 when her revolutionary debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart , was first published (she was 23). But in 2012, publisher New Directions began releasing new translations, from four different translators, of Lispector’s novels, a concerted effort to bring her remarkable work to the attention of an English-speaking readership. In 2015, the novels were followed by these “Complete Stories”—86 in all, originally published between 1952 and 1979. Translated by Katrina Dodson, the collection received dazzling reviews, establishing Lispector firmly in America’s consciousness as one of the preeminent writers of the last century.

A Clarice Lispector story is not easy to describe; they are feminist and absurdist, charting familial drama, love affairs, and existential surrealism, wheeling through the preoccupations and modes of twentieth century literary experimentation with a disorientating facility—and disorientation is the point. “Coherence is mutilation,” a character reflects at one point, “I want disorder”—an urge that Lispector understands and brings to life with more power than almost any writer I can think of, and perhaps with more relevance and urgency in these times than in any other in the four decades since her death.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Lucia Berlin, ed. Stephen Emerson, A Manual for Cleaning Women 2015

Is it all that remarkable that a short story collection by a writer who died in 2004 should, in fact, be one of the best collections of the decade that followed? Aside from the earthy brilliance of Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women itself, the fact of its phenomenon—at least among those who consume multiple story collections a year—speaks to a great gap in our literary culture. It won’t ever be possible to fully account for the stories and novels that went unheralded and untaught in a literary culture geared toward canonizing the anxieties and insights of well-to-do white guys, but at least in Berlin’s posthumous collection—and its frank rendering of women’s lives—we have a small correction to the record.

When Berlin writes of last-chance bus depots or cheap borderland hotels or third-rate nursing homes she does so minus the literary tourist’s appropriative bravado, that triumphalist wild boy tick that seems to define so much of the fiction of her male contemporaries. For Berlin, these are not places we pass through, to mine for epiphany or authenticity, but rather the locations in which life happens: as one reviewer put it, the stories in this collection are “all beginnings and middles with no ends,” and one only wishes Berlin had lived long enough to see the beginning of her own renaissance.   – Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Colin Barrett,  Young Skins 2015

I first read Colin Barrett’s stories when I worked at The Stinging Fly magazine and press in Dublin. The editor had been working with Barrett for a couple of months on a few stories, and we were publishing one in an upcoming issue. I distinctly remember finishing the copy edit and turning to the editor and simply saying, “Holy shit.” When we put out Colin’s collection Young Skins in 2013, it wasn’t long before Grove Atlantic picked it up in the US, and it was published here in 2015. In the vein of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, its seven stories all take place within the limits of the fictional town of Glanbeigh on the west coast of Ireland. Barrett’s characters live hard lives in the aftermath of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years, an economic boom time that happened to other people but the effects of whose abrupt end are felt everywhere. There is drink and there are drugs and moments of shocking violence. There is the steady inescapability of failure and loss, and every so often there are moments of soaringly lyrical writing. Barrett’s mastery of the short story form won him the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honor. It’s a collection that’s striking for its audacity to be a debut—completely assured of voice, of character, and of a setting that is utterly realized. Thus, we’re calling it one of the best short story collections of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie 2016

“Whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me,” Ken Liu writes in the preface to The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories , a collection in which metaphors are fully unwound into tangible corollaries. The Paper Menagerie gathers some of Liu’s most celebrated stories, summaries of which do little to convey the scope of his imagination. Take, for example, “State Change,” a bleak office rom-com set in a world where people’s souls are physical objects—an ice cube, a cigarette pack, a beech tree branch—that must be protected from mundane things like hot weather and nicotine addiction. “Good Hunting” begins as a folktale about a demon-hunting father-son duo in a small Chinese village and ends with a critique of British colonialism and modernity in Hong Kong, as well as a surprising reversal of misogynistic narrative tropes. The titular story, which won Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, shows Liu in top form. The protagonist, born of a Chinese immigrant mother and white father, grows up loving the origami animals that his mother brings to life with her breath, only to spurn his Chinese heritage as he grows older. Though not all the stories here are quite as moving as this one, The Paper Menagerie cemented Liu as one of the decade’s most inventive (and popular) short story writers, adept at infusing his shapeshifting work with a touch of Charlie Kaufman-esque hyperreality and Eastern Asian folklore. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Lesley Nneka Arimah,  What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky 2017

Lesley Nneka Arimah calls herself a pessimist . Thus unfolds her collection of short stories, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky , most of which are set in Nigeria and utilize dystopian themes to reveal the bleak consequences of humankind’s ruthlessness towards the natural world as well as fellow humans. The title story, for example, is about a world ravaged by climate change, where a group of scientists try, by the creation of a “formula,” to undo what has been done and make it so the human body can defy gravity. The flaws in this hubristic, quick-fix mindset are immediately revealed when the eponymous man falls from the sky. Another story in the collection “What Is A Volcano?” reflects a similar human urge to play god, drawing on myth and literally presenting feuding gods who argue over each other’s primacy. Arimah blends magical realism and fable into her narratives to illuminate as she says, the “baser instincts” of humankind, to watch humanity “turn grotesque.”

Arimah tackles the pressures of womanhood, familial relationships, and Nigerian culture, including its religious and social expectations. “Glory” is about a girl of the same name, bearing the pressure of her family to achieve greatly; “Who Will Greet You At Home” is about a woman so desperate for a child and her mother’s blessing that she risks weaving one out of hair: “Everybody knew how risky it was to make a child out of hair, infused with the identity of the person who had shed it. But a child of many hairs? Forbidden.” Despite the variety of its incarnations, this collection portrays a variety of hauntings, often literal in the form of ghosts or dolls coming to life, and others figurative, as in a father’s fear for his daughter out in the world. Underlying all of Arimah’s narratives ultimately though, is emotion: the ways in which we show or suppress love and affection and display vulnerability. Being as we are each an entire mind away from another, grief accompanies not only big events but even everyday instances of a missed chance at getting across to someone we care about what we really mean and want. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 2017

“[P]erhaps you’re thinking,” the narrator of “Resident,” a short story by Carmen Maria Machado in Her Body and Other Parties , muses, “that I’m a cliché—a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.” The reference to being in a gothic story is intriguingly apt. On the one hand, “Resident” deliberately conjures up a gothic atmosphere of dread that feels like it could have been taken from many other stories in the genre; on the other, though, it says something about Machado’s haunting collection as a whole. Many of the stories in Her Bodies and Other Parties contain echoes of the images and themes that so often constellate gothic literature and “the gothic” as a mode or atmosphere of writing: ghosts, beheadings, violence, trauma, claustrophobic environments, a pervading sense of unease or uncertainty. But while many classic tales of gothic literature—with a few exceptions—have portrayed women as tropes at best and monsters at worst, Machado’s stories beautifully and poignantly focus on what it means to be a woman, to inhabit a woman’s body, in a gothic landscape that, for all its ghosts and mysterious plagues, feels all too terrifyingly, traumatically like the world we live in. Women are harassed in the stories, as much by people as by the unsettling atmospheres around them. From the title itself, Machado makes it clear that collection will focus on women’s bodies–and her deployment of the dispassionate-sounding “parties” as the title’s second half suggests the cool detachment with which male harassment, for instance, so often involves equating women’s worth to their bodies. Yet “parties” can also suggest festivity, and her women, for all the horror around them, have moments of happiness and release, too. Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful reimagining of what the gothic can do and be, creating a world in which the tremendous weight of being a woman is chillingly palpable throughout nearly all of the stories. It’s a powerful collection that surprised me in the best of ways, and I think it will continue to for a long time to come. –Gabrielle Bellot, Staff Writer

Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World 2017

Even before Ottessa Moshfegh had published her first book, people were calling her “the best writer of our generation.” I know this for a fact, because one of those people was me, and I was sure of it based on the short stories she’d been publishing in The Paris Review , including the wonderful (and frequently horrifying, in the best way) “ Bettering Myself ,” the opening story of Homesick for Another World , which won the Plimpton Prize in 2013.

Most of the stories in Homesick for Another World were originally published in The Paris Review —though a couple are from The New Yorker and Vice , one each from Granta and The Baffler , one original. They are all basically realist, if dark, psychological portraits, but there’s something fabulistic about them—Moshfegh pushes humanity to its logical extension, and the results are grotesque and poignant. It’s not quite surrealism—maybe I would call it slime-coated realism. She has a sharp, ironic eye, and a flat affect, which contributes to the sense of irreality, but she’s doing more than just rolling her eyes at her—often horrible—characters; she’s getting into the muck with them, and pulling us along for the ride.

It may not be my actual favorite, but the story I think about most often from this collection is “ The Beach Boy ”—which may be because, as a committed hypochondriac, I am in constant fear of dying the way Marcia does in this story, but also because of the expert unspooling of her husband once she’s gone. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove 2013

The title short story of Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove is my favorite short story of all time, but the collection itself is mesmerizing. A friend, a fellow English teacher at the high school where I used to teach, first shared a copy with me when I had my seniors read Dracula , and I read it at my desk, towards the end of the day. I discovered that it’s a book that doesn’t so much draw you in as creep up on you. You don’t glide through it, you’ll burrow into it; you’ll start reading it, and by the time you’re finished, the lights in the department office will be out, dusk will have fallen outside, and all your colleagues and some passing students will have stood in front of you trying to get your attention and wave goodbye before giving up and walking out. You don’t simply finish this book, you are released from it. Materially speaking, anyway. It’ll still haunt you after you’re done. This might be because its stories are so tender, so perfectly painful—another reason might be because that they can be so genuinely creepy, so softly scary that you’ll find yourself rereading parts over and over, trying to experience the section more deeply to make sure that what you think is happening is really happening. And then, when it is finally done with you, you’ll walk yourself home in the dark, and it’s a good thing you’ll know the route by heart, because you won’t be able to think about where you’re going. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Diane Cook, Man V. Nature 2014

When I first read this collection, during graduate school, I remember having to stop in the middle and take a break. The collection was making me feel bad, and almost panicky. It was just too good. It was so good that I felt confident there was no reason for me to ever write another word; Diane Cook had already done everything I was trying to do and more. Eventually, I got over it (the writer’s ego being a slippery but unquenchable fiend) and finished this surreal and glorious book of stories.

I mean, what to say: in “The Way the End of Days Should Be” one of the last survivors of what is apparently a watery apocalypse tries to keep out invaders as the seas rise around their (Doric columned) home: “This man in the nice suit asked for food and water, then tried to strangle me, choked back tears, apologized, asked to be let in, and when I refused, tried to strangle me again. When I managed to close the door on him, he sat on my veranda and cried.” Did I mention Diane Cook is hilarious? Especially at her darkest, she is a comedic genius. The title story is equally funny and equally bleak; it also involves water as an adversary, and also the men who used to be your friends. At least one of them, anyway.

In closing: where is the next book from Diane Cook? I’ve been waiting for years; it’s starting to feel unfair. Who knows what a woman might do without one? –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Hassan Blasim, tr. Jonathan Wright, The Corpse Exhibition 2014

It’s rare for a conflict to go on for so long that witnesses may begin to record its history before the conflict is over, and yet that is what has happened as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, and publishing does its duty to bring suffering into print. Hassan Blasim was a vocal critic of Saddam Hussein’s government, in exile in Finland for much of his literary career, so it makes sense that his story collection would explore the Iraqi expat experience as well as crafting stories immersed in the war itself; several stories are stranded between judging and defending those who have gotten out and who then, refuse to return. Whether Blasim is writing about the war itself or its many rippling effects, he brings a sardonic sensibility to his stories, parodying the language of bureaucracy and always pointing to the violence common to both order and chaos. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand both the war and the ongoing attempts to process the conflict through literature, and a necessary complement to the wide array of fiction by American veterans released over the past few years. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Dorthe Nors, Karate Chop 2014

Karate Chop was the first of Dorthe Nors’ books to be available to the English-speaking world (translated from the Danish). It was pressed into my hands by the amazing Julie Buntin (author of Marlena ) when she was my internship supervisor, back in 2014. She told me it was a perfect gem of a collection, and that I was going to love it. Boy oh boy was she right! Karate Chop is a compact powerhouse, with fifteen pithy stories (no more than a few pages apiece!) that pull back the curtain on everyday life to reveal something much more odd and sinister. (A few notable examples: after his wife goes to bed, a man obsessively falls down the online rabbit hole of female serial killers; two hunters agree to kill each other’s dogs in an exploration of male friendship; a young woman leaps from thought to thought, trying very hard to avoid thinking about something traumatic that’s happened. I could go on!) Dorthe Nors writes with such a dry, biting specificity. Her matter-of-fact tone makes you trust her. And then she pulls the rug out from under you in the best way! The situations she throws her characters (and her readers) into could only be conjured up by her. (The story about the hunters that hatch a plan to kill their dogs? It’s also a story about a failing marriage. But in a Dorthe Nors story, it has to be tangled up in this amazing way. Just surrender to the logic.) In a lot of ways, this is a collection about the ways we fail to connect to one another, and the mental and emotional acrobatics we partake in to avoid hurt. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Phil Klay, Redeployment 2014

Redeployment is a classic exploration of the veteran’s experience, going back and forth between stories immersed in the moment of trauma and those exploring the dislocating experience of return to a peacetime world after the disruptions of war – my favorite story in the collection details a philosophical confrontation between a veteran at college on the GI Bill and a student activist who feels threatened by him (and whom he, in turn, feels threatened by). Their attempt to understand each other is one of the best dialogue sequences I’ve ever come across, and symbolic of the book’s larger message of humanism, although some stories embrace a bleaker message of the dark comedy of errors and bureaucracy that is war. I’m including this on the list as the first of many works to be written by returning veterans – the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have had the dubious honor of being long enough for an entire generation to have returned home, enrolled in MFA programs, and published novels en masse as the war continues. If fiction is the first step in processing trauma, than perhaps this means we’re getting a head start—or perhaps, there’s just too much suffering in the world to wait for a thing to end before writing books about it. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Amelia Gray,  Gutshot 2015

In my former life as a bookseller, this one made its way around the story with hushed whispers and bated breath, furtively paged through and softly recommended in brief lulls between helping customers, perused at the registers as we yawned and waiting for the store to close, on the quiet second floor in the early hours of a Saturday morning, or in the deathly quiet of the children’s section in mid-week to a soundtrack of Muzac radio and the booms and thuds of near-by construction. You have to read this , we said to each other; s tart with the story in the middle , we commanded to friends and colleagues; don’t talk to me until after you finish reading it , we mock-warned to those who appeared on the fence about finishing.

What makes this one so special, in a sea of collections that each try their hardest to capture some kind of zeitgeist with sentences beautiful enough to guarantee that the era their contents define will be remembered? Amelia Grey is the grand-guignol heiress to Angela Carter, crafting grotesque body horror and immersed in the violence of everyday life, full of more blood, sugar, sex, and magic than a 90s-era record store. Although perhaps, given the matter-of-fact way her characters accept their bloody, inglorious fates, I should describe her as Angela Carter meets Etgar Keret, whose story collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God ushered in a new era of magical realism grounded in the everyday, ordinary, and mundane. If art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, then Amelia Grey’s Gutshot is very high art indeed. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Kelly Link,  Get In Trouble 2015

I am here for literally everything Kelly Link writes (have you heard she’s writing a novel ?)—after all, she is an official genius whose work combines fairy tale archetypes, horror tropes, pop culture references, and surrealist play with some of the finest literary writing around. I know, this isn’t as uncommon as it once was, but Link is the OG short story irrealist, and she’s also the best. People who haven’t read Kelly Link can’t really understand that they need Kelly Link in their lives, but they do. This is part of why I always think of her work as being a secret, like something only my friends and I know about and reference and pass around to one another and try to copy, a kind of shibboleth for a certain type of writer.

However, when I think this, I am wrong: not only did Link win a MacArthur, but her most recent collection, Get In Trouble , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and widely and well reviewed . The secret’s out. And well, fine, because I want (most) people to be happy. Like every Link collection, Get In Trouble is full of classics: all killer, no filler, as the kids—maybe once, one time, used to—say. “The New Boyfriend” is like something out of Grimm’s My So Called Life , “The Summer People” is mysterious, atmospheric masterpiece, and “Valley of the Girls” is a story that I do not fully understand, and never will, but that I read again every year and think about all the time. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Kirstin Valdez Quade,  Night at the Fiestas 2015

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut collection, Night at the Fiestas , came out almost five years ago now, in early 2015, and it’s not overstating to say that it managed on a first reading to expand my conception of American literary fiction, what it could do, what a story collection could do, and the kinds of stories that could and should be told. Returning to the stories in the time since—especially to the visceral, driving “Five Wounds” and the haunting “Nemecia”—has only confirmed that feeling, that Valdez Quade is one of the most talented storytellers at work today. New Mexico—its landscapes, its cultures, its families—is the setting for her work, and the majority of the stories center around people dealing with the weight of everyday life, spiritual striving, and the deep, complex connections that bind them. In “Five Wounds,” a man reenacts the Passion of the Christ; in “Nemecia,” two girls reckon with a dark family legacy. Throughout the collection, the strange textures of sin, blood, and relations arise again and again. The stories are intense, finely observed works of realism, but they pulsate with a special kind of energy that seems to allow for an enhanced reality, another plane of possibility. A religious feeling, in short. It’s rare to find that kind of power or preoccupation in contemporary fiction. When you do, it’s a reminder of why we tell stories in the first place, of the kind of communal reckoning we’re undertaking when we explain our stories, our families, our pasts. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles (2015)

I’m a little perplexed as to why more people haven’t read this book. Or, if they have, why it seems to have all-but disappeared from the Best Books of the Twenty-First Century conversation (despite having won the National Book Award for Fiction less than five short years ago). Perhaps the rapturous reception that greeted The Orphan Master’s Son , the grimly absurdist novel for which Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize three years previous, served to drown out his quieter follow-up. Perhaps it’s the fault of the book’s cheery cast of characters, which includes an uncomfortably sympathetic child-porn addict, an unrepentant former Stasi prison guard, a young mother with cancer, a pair of North Korean defectors, a hologram of a recently-assassinated US president, and a woman with advanced Guillain-Barré syndrome. Or perhaps it’s that every one of these six lengthy tales—dark, disquieting, and all the more unsettling for their subtle infusions of tenderness—leaves an indelible, but rarely pleasant, mark on the reader’s consciousness. As Lauren Groff wrote in her New York Times review: “Each of these stories plants a small bomb in the reader’s head; life after reading Fortune Smiles is a series of small explosions in which the reader—perhaps unwillingly—recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own.” This is not an uplifting collection. It will illicit chuckles only as a means to further devastate. It will not make you feel good about yourself, about technology, about our ability to successfully navigate life’s random cruelties. But it will exhilarate. It will suck the breath from your lungs. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night 2015

I’ve never understood why Stephen Millhauser isn’t more widely read (at least in the United States—apparently he’s big in France, which makes sense, because the French tend to appreciate the finer things). Maybe it’s because his “most famous” book— Martin Dressler , which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997—is his least interesting. Listen, I love Millhauser, and I can easily imagine someone reading Martin Dressler , thinking “hmm, okay,” and then forgetting all about him forever. But no one should do this. Because Millhauser’s stories , on the other hand, are wonderful, weird things, steady and fantastical at once, as if Raymond Carver had developed a thing for ghosts and girls who die of laughter.

This latest collection contains some of my favorite stories from Millhauser’s long career, including the opener, “Miracle Polish,” which I won’t describe, but will tell you that I return to it regularly, and am moved every time. If you find that more frustrating than intriguing, I’ll tell you that at the beginning of We Others , Millhauser’s 2011 collection of new and selected stories (also considered for this list, naturally), he writes: “What makes a story bad, or good, or better than good, can be explained and understood up to a point, but only up to a point. What’s seductive is mysterious and can never be known. I prefer to leave it at that.”

So I’ll leave it at this: these stories are better than good. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Helen Oyeyemi,  What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours 2016

Helen Oyeyemi’s writing is woven with imagination, complexity, and such fierce intelligence that I have always been thoroughly amused and fascinated with anything she writes. In her collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours , Oyeyemi showcases this talent by planting keys, hidden rooms, puppets, ghosts, magical libraries, and secret gardens which the reader follows, as if they were breadcrumbs, hoping they will lead to answers. Admirably, equal to Oyeyemi’s appetite for adventure is her commitment to attaining truth. In that way, she reminds me of storytellers like Angela Carter, Ursula Le Guin, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Embracing a voice uniquely her own, however, Oyeyemi toys with the reader with titles like “if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think.” Then, she infuses that wryness with piercing emotion, as in the story “is your blood as red as this,” in which the narrator, uninhibited, observes a character at a party, “you had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting.” The narrator continues, “Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore.” A signature of Oyeyemi’s creative talent is that she can begin a story from somewhere, drag the reader by the hand and then suddenly drop them into unknown territory.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours deserves a place on this list because each narrative is immersive, a complete universe onto itself. Each story flaunts a whole cast of diverse characters imitating life in the many comings-and-goings of people; it delves into historical moments, like the Spanish saint’s day, The Day of the Book and the Rose, just to tell the obscure story of some character affected by this moment in time. Though curiosity may launch an Oyeyemi story, the ultimate joy of it is that it’s all about connection, forged under unexpected circumstances by moments of pure synchronicity. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Samantha Hunt,  The Dark Dark 2017

This is Samantha Hunt’s first short-story collection, though her fourth book. She’s an eccentric, imaginative creator and a candid storyteller, often presenting slightly fantastical, vaguely supernatural scenarios frankly and unblinkingly. She can make the most far-flung ideas seem very real. The Dark Dark dials this tendency back down. The most common site of magic in these stories is actually the female body, which, she points out, always transforms itself and has the power to make life and to kill parts of itself and can turn women into endless new versions of themselves. The Dark Dark is about women, mostly, and about fear, loneliness, being a parent, losing a parent, becoming someone else, realizing you’re losing yourself. Despite the lack of literal magic, these stories are still shivery, still eerie, and still, when they need to be, dreamy. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010)  ·  Brad Watson, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010)  ·  Patricia Engel, Vida (2010)  ·  Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (2011)  ·  Charles Baxter, Gryphon (2011)  ·  Colm Toíbín, The Empty Family (2011)  ·  Can Xue, tr. Karen Gernant, Vertical Motion (2011)  ·  Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More (2013)  ·  Aimee Bender, The Color Master (2013)  ·  Susan Steinberg, Spectacle (2013)  ·  Rebecca Lee, Bobcat (2013)  ·  Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born (2013)  ·  Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth  (2013)  ·  Rivka Galchen, American Innovations  (2014)  ·  Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, Baboon (2014)  ·  Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (2014)  ·  Stuart Dybek, Paper Lantern (2014)  ·  Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air (2014)  ·  Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege (2015)  ·  Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals (2015)  ·  Jen George, The Babysitter at Rest (2016)  · Rion Amilcar Scott, The Insurrections (2016) · Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations (2016)  ·  James McBride, Five-Carat Soul (2017)  · Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (2017)  ·  Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018)  ·  Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man (2018)  ·  Lauren Groff, Florida (2018)  ·  Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies (2019)  ·  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black  (2018)  ·  Karen Russell, Orange World  (2019), Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside (2019).

Emily Temple

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Books: A true story

Book reviews and some (mostly funny) true stories of my life.

Book Review: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

October 23, 2014 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 35 Comments

The Story of My Life

An American classic rediscovered by each generation,  The Story of My Life  is Helen Keller’s account of her triumph over deafness and blindness. Popularized by the stage play and movie The Miracle Worker, Keller’s story has become a symbol of hope for people all over the world.  This book–published when Keller was only twenty-two–portrays the wild child who is locked in the dark and silent prison of her own body. With an extraordinary immediacy, Keller reveals her frustrations and rage, and takes the reader on the unforgettable journey of her education and breakthroughs into the world of communication. From the moment Keller recognizes the word “water” when her teacher finger-spells the letters, we share her triumph as “that living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” An unparalleled chronicle of courage,  The Story of My Life  remains startlingly fresh and vital more than a century after its first publication, a timeless testament to an indomitable will.

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller is a beautiful memoir about the power of love, language, and learning.  It was sad and humbling to hear Helen describe how desperate she was to communicate with people.  Since Helen was deaf and blind, she would go into a rage after being so frustrated that no one could understand her.  That really struck home with me.  In college, I babysat a 5 year old boy who couldn’t talk because he had cerebral palsy.  He could answer yes or no to my questions by shaking or nodding his head.  There were times when I asked every question I could think of and he would break down in tears of frustration – just like Helen Keller described.  It was heartbreaking to see.  When the boy I babysat went to school and learned more complex sign language, he lit up.  I still remember the first time he was able to tell me a story.  He was absolutely glowing with joy.  Helen Keller’s story of learning was very touching to me since it similar to the experience that the boy I knew had.

How she was able to learn language was very interesting to read about since she was old to enough to remember the experience of understanding words for the first time.  Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, used a method of teaching with Helen that had never been done before.   The pedagogy behind how Annie taught language to someone who couldn’t hear or see was fascinating.  She had to break down and really think about how kids normally learn language and translate it into the senses that Helen had access to.  She realized that kids acquire language through imitation and through hearing it all day long every day.  So Annie would spell words into Helen’s hand all day long about everything they were doing even though Helen didn’t know what the words meant yet.  Helen learned that words represented the things that she could touch.  It was a bittersweet moment when Annie tries to teach Helen what love is and Helen can’t understand why her teacher won’t show it to her.

…how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart. -Helen Keller, in a letter written to Rev. Phillips Brooks, June 8, 1891.

Before reading this, I had never realized how important books would be to Helen Keller.  They were a huge part of how she experienced a world that she couldn’t see or hear.   She talked about books as if they were her friends.

I have not shown how much I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears. Indeed, books have meant so much more in my education than in that of others … – Helen Keller, The Story of My Life , Chapter 21

There was a huge list of books that she read.  You know me.  Of course I wrote them all down.

Books Helen Keller Read

• As You Like It By William Shakespeare
• Speech on Conciliation with America by Edmund Burke
•  Life of Samuel Johnson by Thomas Macaulay
• Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens
• The Arabian Nights
• The Swiss Family Robinson
• The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Robinson Crusoe
• Little Women
• Treasure Island
• Jungle Book

Because reading had such an influence on her, she often described things the way that someone could see would.  She would describe trees as green even though she had never seen the color green because that’s what books described them as.  That being said, I noticed that a lot of her descriptions – especially of nature – centered on their scent and feel.   Also, I want to write book reviews the way that Helen Keller does.

The “Iliad” is beautiful with all the truth, and grace and simplicity of a wonderfully childlike people while the “Aeneid” is more stately and reserved. It is like a beautiful maiden, who always lived in a palace, surrounded by a magnificent court; while the “Iliad” is like a splendid youth, who has had the earth for his playground. – Helen Keller, in a letter to Mrs. Laurence Hutton, October 23, 1898

Helen desperately wanted to go to college but practical things made it extremely difficult.  She struggled with being able to even take tests since they had to be dictated to her.  Books weren’t available in braille quickly enough and she would fall behind in classes. Lectures had to be written down in advance for her to follow along.  It makes me appreciate not only my education but the technology today that allows equal access to books for people with disabilities.  I just wanted to travel back in time and make her books because they were so hard to get in braille!  As much as Helen loved books, she hated tests.  Like really, really hated them.  She describes the feeling of forgetting an answer on a test perfectly.

You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top—you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge—revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss—where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. – Helen Keller, The Story of My Life , Chapter 20

She talks about the administration of the school and how they sometimes unintentionally made things even more difficult for her.  But instead of letting it frustrate her, she felt accomplished that not only had she gotten an education but she had overcome the challenges in getting one as well.

Overall, it’s an amazing story of overcoming difficult trials and making the best of what is given to us.

Content Rating : None. Clean read.

This post contains affiliate links and I receive a small percentage of sales made through these links. 

About Helen Keller

Helen Keller would not be bound by conditions. Rendered deaf and blind at 19 months by scarlet fever, she learned to read (in several languages) and even speak, eventually graduating with honors from Radcliffe College in 1904, where as a student she wrote The Story of My Life. That she accomplished all of this in an age when few women attended college and the disabled were often relegated to the background, spoken of only in hushed tones, is remarkable. But Keller's many other achievements are impressive by any standard: she authored 13 books, wrote countless articles, and devoted her life to social reform. An active and effective suffragist, pacifist, and socialist (the latter association earned her an FBI file), she lectured on behalf of disabled people everywhere. She also helped start several foundations that continue to improve the lives of the deaf and blind around the world.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• Classics Club
• eBook Challenge 2014
• TBR Pile 2014

October 23, 2014 at 12:26 pm

I remember stumbling upon this book when I was reading the “www” trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer. The protagonist is blind and Helen Keller is an inspirational figure to her. At the time, I check “The Story of my Life” at the library and read the few first pages. I liked it. I really need to find time to read it all!

October 23, 2014 at 2:14 pm

Wow, what an amazing book. I would also love to write book reviews the way Helen Keller did. So beautiful.

May 1, 2020 at 12:51 am

yes this book change my life one day i am also riting a book about my life thank you helen keller to give this beautyful book to us…….

October 23, 2014 at 5:11 pm

I love this book!

September 25, 2017 at 10:45 pm

I just loved the book , it inspire me to a great extent I will always thank helean keller for inspiring me…..

May 20, 2018 at 2:40 am

October 25, 2014 at 4:48 pm

I love the list of books she read! So awesome! I read this when I was in middle school but it would be fun to read again!

June 5, 2015 at 9:43 am

i luv the way of describing the nature and how helen struggled in her life.the book was jst awsm that i ever read………

June 4, 2016 at 8:30 pm

And I’m read is book for my school project.

June 6, 2015 at 2:18 am

i have read this book this book is very infuensive .helen keller have influnced many like her

June 6, 2015 at 5:54 am

Well! I had an project of english on review of “the story of my life” just before i was thinking oh! Such a boring novel because i was not having an idea but i don’t know how but the way i started reading ,my eyes filled with tears because i have a elder sister who is deaf , i can understand how ridiculous how tough the life is when you are not even able to listen . And so, i so damn love this novel , :)

June 9, 2015 at 6:11 am

I like this book so much…..!!!!!

June 24, 2015 at 2:38 am

I love this book. Its amazing.

June 30, 2015 at 6:42 am

I read this book with pleasure and I have fall in the love of story and its help in English project

August 9, 2015 at 2:07 pm

it is an awesome book!

October 26, 2015 at 9:03 am

My favourite book

January 13, 2016 at 10:51 am

This was such an inspiring novel……it taught me that we need to be optimstic!!

May 28, 2016 at 10:36 pm

I had read this book and I love this book very much

June 4, 2016 at 8:27 pm

This novel was inspiring. This novel was awesome and it is my favorite book.

June 14, 2016 at 6:22 am

THIS BOOK IS VERY INSPIRING. I LOVE THIS BOOK.

June 21, 2016 at 4:53 am

Its too interseting ……i love this book…

June 29, 2016 at 5:44 am

i just love it…..

June 30, 2016 at 7:25 am

Nice book which touch my heart

July 17, 2016 at 6:04 am

Love this book ..

August 16, 2016 at 5:03 am

Good and awesome novel!!!!

August 16, 2016 at 7:35 am

Its one of my fav books

September 8, 2016 at 5:15 am

this is a so beautiful book. i like it.

October 21, 2016 at 7:45 am

This is very best

January 31, 2017 at 9:12 am

awesome…….

June 10, 2017 at 5:41 am

It’s a very nice book

June 11, 2017 at 6:53 am

I love the way of describing the nature and how Helen struggled in her life. The book was just awesome and I can read it every time……

September 23, 2017 at 4:51 am

awsome book for the future generations

May 18, 2018 at 2:36 am

I love this novel

June 20, 2018 at 12:40 am

July 4, 2018 at 3:05 am

I like this book so much….

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This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Naomi Wood: An excellent collection

In the concise art form of the short story, the author only seems to make our modern world appear stranger and more incomprehensible.

In her latest collection of short stories, Naomi Wood subtly and swiftly switches in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses to give us clipped glimpses of their inner and outer lives

In Lesley, in Therapy, from Naomi Wood’s first collection of short stories, the titular character is returning from maternity leave. She is attending compulsory “Group Therapy for Returning Parents’. Lesley would rather get straight to work, and she quickly becomes frustrated with the therapist’s insights. The therapist tells Lesley, in another precise aphorism, trauma is not something that can be simply stated or expressed in language. Lesley’s response? To throw a pen at the therapist’s forehead. It’s a response that arguably provides evidence to the therapist’s claim: it’s difficult to talk about our feelings.

Throughout Wood’s collection, we often see characters struggling with their feelings. In Flatten the Curve, while managing work and parental duties, Deborah claps for carers and watches the Covid-19 death toll rise. Like we all did, Deborah undertakes ritualistic and communal behaviours that appear laden with meaning and a greater sense of purpose but ultimately engender hopelessness. There isn’t a metaphor big enough to explain the pandemic, Deborah repeats to herself, unable to find the language to conceptualise her experience.

Lesley, Deborah and several other characters are mothers. For Claudia in Hurt Feelings, she is contending with memories from the miscarriage of her second child while pregnant with her third. A sad and tragic irony laces this story: she’s developing patient testimonials for analgesics as she battles with her own psychological trauma and pain no drug can easily wipe away. Our society looks for quick fixes. Togetherness and space for people to articulate, and potentially overcome, what troubles us is what her characters really need.

The story is a little axiomatic – there’s a knowingness to the characters’ dialogue too obviously rebounding against the story’s themes – but this is an otherwise excellent collection (which also contains the BBC Short Story Prize winner, Comorbidities). Wood subtly and swiftly switches in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses to give us clipped glimpses of their inner and outer lives. In the concise art form of the short story, Wood only seems to make our modern world appear stranger and more incomprehensible.

IN THIS SECTION

Claire keegan wins prestigious german award, openings by lucy caldwell: enlightening and enriching collection of stories that closes a loose triptych, oisín mckenna on his intoxicating debut novel: ‘i thought of it as writing in a big key, the way a pop song might be’, ukrainian author tanja maljartschuk: ‘our national memory is a mass grave ... no one was ever punished for all these crimes’, ireland’s beautiful ruined buildings and abandoned architectural grandeur, man shot dead in drimnagh gang-related violence was facing cocaine-dealing charges, eurovision semi-final: euphoria for ireland as bambie thug qualifies for saturday’s final, ‘that was the day the world stopped turning’: andy cash given three life terms for murder of his siblings, rival gang clash on dublin street suspected after gun murder of josh itseli (20), man charged after woman rescued from river in co carlow, latest stories, martyn turner, e-gate technical problems cause chaos at heathrow and five other uk airports, fall in support in ireland for direction in which european union is going, bruce springsteen in belfast: can i still buy tickets, how to get to boucher fields, set lists, weather forecast and more, nationality overtakes sexual orientation as factor in hate-based crimes in republic.

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Book Review Writing Examples

Examples: learn from the efforts of others.

Learning how to write strong reviews takes time and not a little effort. Reading the reviews others have done can help you get a feel for the flow and flavor of reviews.

If I Never Forever Endeavor Review by Hayden, age 4, Southeast Michigan Mensa

This book was about a bird who didn't yet know how to fly.

The bird has to decide if it will try to fly, but it was not sure if it wants to. The bird thought, "If I never forever endeavor" then I won't ever learn. On one wing, he worries he might fail and on the other wing he thinks of how he may succeed. He worries that if he tries, he may get lost in the world. That makes him want to stay in his nest where he's safe.

I think this book would help other children to learn that trying new things can be scary, but sometimes when we try, we can find things that make us happy too. And this book will help others know that mistakes are okay and part of learning.

My favorite part is that the bird tried and learned that she could fly. I also liked that I read this book because it gave me a chance to talk to mom about making mistakes and how I don't like making them. Then I learned they are good and part of learning.

Boys and girls who are 3 to 8 years old would like this book because it teaches about trying a new thing and how it's important to get past being scared so you can learn new things.

I give the book 5 stars since I think it's important for other children to learn about courage.

Flesh & Blood So Cheap Review by Umar B., age 8, Central New Jersy Mensa

I liked this book. People who are interested in national disasters and US history as well as immigration will most probably be interested in reading this book.

Readers can gain knowledge of what it was like to work in New York City in the early 1900s. One of the things that was especially interesting was that there were no safety laws at work. Also, there was a big contrast between the rich and the poor. Some people may not like this book because it is very depressing, but it is an important event in history to remember.

This book was very well written. It has black and white photos along with descriptions of the photos. These photos give us a better idea of what people's lives were like. This book is suitable for 9-20 year olds.

I give this book 5 stars.

Galaxy Zach: Journey to Juno Review by Young Mensan Connor C., age 6, Boston Mensa

Journey To Juno is the second book of the Galaxy Zack series. It is just as good as the first one. It's awesome!

Zack joins the Sprockets Academy Explorers Club at school. They fly on a special trip to Juno, a new planet no one has ever visited. Zack gets paired up with Seth, the class bully, and that's dreadful but Zack is excited when he finds a huge galaxy gemmite. A gemmite that large had not been found in 100 years! Kids will love this book!

Boys and girls will both like it. It's an easy chapter book with pictures on every page. I love the illustrations. I think ages 6-8 would like this but younger kids would like the story being read to them.

My favorite parts are the galactic blast game (it is similar to baseball except there are robots playing), recess at Zack's school where everything is 3-D holographic images, the rainbow river in a crystal cave on Juno, and the galaxy gemmite that Zack finds on Juno. I also loved when a life-size holographic image of his Earth friend appears in Zack's room because he calls him on a hyperphone. I give this book one hundred stars! There is a "to be continued" at the end so you have to read the next book see what's in store. I can't wait to find out what happens!!!

I Capture the Castle Review by Lauren W., age 17, Mensa in Georgia

Dodie Smith's novel I Capture the Castle is a journey through the mind of a young writer as she attempts to chronicle her daily life. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain has recently learned to speed-write, and she decides to work on her writing skills by describing the actions and conversations of those around her.

Cassandra lives in a fourteenth-century English castle with an interesting cast of characters: her beautiful older sister, Rose; her rather unsociable author father and his second wife, artist-model Topaz; Stephen, the garden boy; a cat and a bull terrier; and sometimes her brother Thomas when he is home from school. One fateful day they make the acquaintance of the Cotton family, including the two sons, and a web of tangled relationships ensues.

While I definitely recommend this book to other readers, I would recommend it to older teenagers, mainly because it will resonate better with them. The writing is tame enough that younger teens could also read it, but most of the characters are adults or on the verge of adulthood. Older readers would take the most from it since they can not only relate, but they may also better pick up on and appreciate Cassandra's sometimes subtle humor.

Over the course of the novel, Cassandra undergoes a definite transformation from child to mature young adult, even though it's only over the course of several months. I love that I could see into her mindset and read exactly what she was feeling when she thought out situations. Her thoughts flowed well and moved the book along very quickly.

Cassandra's narrative voice is wonderful. She is serious at times, but also very witty, which makes for an engaging read. It feels absolutely real, as though I'm reading someone's actual journal. Sometimes I forget that I am reading a story and not a real-life account. Her emotions and the dialogue are so genuine, and they are spot-on for a seventeen-year-old girl in her situation.

Cassandra has many wonderful insights on life, on topics ranging from writing to faith to matters of the heart. I personally have had some of the same thoughts as Cassandra, except Ms. Smith was able to put them into words.

Capture the Castle should be essential reading for aspiring writers, those looking for historical fiction or romance, or anyone who loves reading amazing classic books. Dodie Smith is an exceptional writer, and I Capture the Castle is a book that will never become obsolete.

Frankenstein's Cat Review by Zander H., age 12, Mid-America Mensa

I appreciated Frankenstein's Cat for its fascinating explanation about the often baffling subject of bioengineering and its sister sciences. Emily Anthes explains the many sides of today's modern technology, such as gene modification, cloning, pharmaceutical products (from the farm), prosthesis, animal tag and tracking and gene cryogenics. This book provides a well-rounded summary of these complicated sciences without being boring or simply factual. Her real world examples take us on a journey from the farm, to the pet store and then from the pharmacy to the frozen arc.

Have you ever wondered if the neighborhood cat is spying on you? Read about Operation Acoustic Kitty and find out if this feline fantasy fiction or fact. Do you think bugs are creepy? What about a zombified cyborg beetle? Is Fido so special that you want two of him? Money can buy you an almost exact copy of your pooch BUT don't expect the same personality. Emily Anthes makes you crave more information. She makes you want to know the future of Earth's flora and fauna, as well as humanity itself.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who desires a guide to the future of biological science and technology. Frankenstein's Cat is best read by the light of a glow-in-the-dark fish, while cuddling your favorite cloned dog and drinking a glass of genetically modified milk.

About Marsupials Review by Connor C., age 6, Boston Mensa

About Marsupials is the title so the book is about...marsupials, of course. It's non-fiction. I really think everyone would like the book. I think someone who likes animals would especially like to read it.

The glossary of facts in the back of About Marsupials is the most useful part. I thought the most interesting parts were that some marsupials have their pouch at their back legs and one marsupial, the Yellow-footed Rock Wallaby, is very small but can jump 13 feet wide!

Kids in the 4-8 age range would like this book. Even though it's not a story book, 4 year olds would like the few words on each page and they would love the beautiful pictures. But older kids would like it because of all the facts in the back of the book. There's a lot of information for each animal. I think boys and girls (and parents) would enjoy reading it. This book is very interesting. I give it 4 stars.

Mapping the World Review by Umar A., age 10, Central New Jersey Mensa

Every day, people around the world use maps. Whether it is an airplane pilot or businessman, housewife or museum group, maps have always and will continue to provide useful information for all.

Mapping the World talks about the uses of maps, as well as how to differentiate between the type of map projection and type of map.

In this series, we travel to the past and learn about historical mapmakers, from Claudius Ptolemy (who stated the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe) to Gerardus Mercator (who created one of the most widely used map projections) and more. This series goes into tremendous detail on the cartographer's life and maps. We then journey to the present era to learn about map projections and the diverse types of maps used today. You might ask, "What is the difference between the two? They sound the same to me." No map projection is perfect, because you cannot really flatten a sphere into a rectangle. An uncolored projection could be used in many ways. We could use it for population concentration, highways, land elevation, and so many other things!

For example, we could make a topographic map of the U.S., which shows land elevation. We could make it a colorful map that shows the amount of pollution in different areas, or it could be a population map, or it could even be a map that shows the 50 states, their capitals and borders! Our last step in this amazing excursion is the near future, where we see some hypothetical solutions as to what maps will be used for. Currently, we are working on better virtual map technology.

Now, scientists have been able to put maps on phones. Back in the early 1900s, people had to lug a lot of maps around to find your way from place to place, or just keep asking for directions. Now, all the information is on a phone or global positioning system (GPS). It is amazing how much maps have changed technology and the world in this century.

The Mapping the World 8-book set goes into amazing levels of detail. It is a long read, but it gives an immense range and amount of information that you would not find in any other book or series on maps. The flowing way the chapters and books are organized makes it easy to link passages from different books in this series together. Mapping the World is a treasure box, filled with the seeds of cartography. Collect and plant them, and you soon will have the fruits of cartography, beneficial to those who want to be cartographers. Use this series to the utmost, then the fruits of mapping will be sweet for all who endeavor to succeed in cartography.

This series of lessons was designed to meet the needs of gifted children for extension beyond the standard curriculum with the greatest ease of use for the educator. The lessons may be given to the students for individual self-guided work, or they may be taught in a classroom or a home-school setting. Assessment strategies and rubrics are included at the end of each section. The rubrics often include a column for "scholar points," which are invitations for students to extend their efforts beyond that which is required, incorporating creativity or higher level technical skills.

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2020: Short Story Collections

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

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

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

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

18 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed

Read an interview with Nicole Krauss here

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

–Joan Frank ( The Washington Post )

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

14 Rave • 4 Positive

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

–Ann Levin ( USA Today )

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

14 Rave • 2 Positive

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

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

–Nathan Deuel ( The Los Angeles Times )

4. Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)

12 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read a story from Verge here

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

–Nicholas Mancusi ( TIME )

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

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed

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

–John Banville ( The Wall Street Journal )

6. Daddy by Emma Cline (Random House)

9 Rave • 8 Positive

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

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

–Brandon Taylor ( The New York Times Book Review )

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

9 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

Listen to an interview with Mary South here

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

–Jennifer Schaffer ( The Nation )

8. If It Bleeds by Stephen King (Scribner)

6 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed

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

–Allen Adams ( The Maine Edge )

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

7 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

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

–Anthony Cummins ( The Guardian )

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

7 Rave • 4 Positive

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

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

–Naomi Jackson ( The Washington Post )

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

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Paul Auster’s Best Books: A Guide

The novelist played with reality and chance in tales of solitary narrators and mutable identities. Here’s an overview of his work.

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By Wilson Wong

Paul Auster, who died on April 30 at the age of 77, was an atmospheric author whose scalpel-sharp prose examined the fluidity of identity and the absurdity of the writer’s life. An occasional memoirist, essayist, translator, poet and screenwriter, Auster was best known for his metafiction — books that were characterized by their elusive narrators, chance encounters and labyrinthine narratives.

Consuming Auster’s genre-defying books is not unlike the experience of reading he describes in “The Brooklyn Follies”: “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear,” he wrote. “For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.” Thankfully, Auster left us with many worlds and stories and realities to lose ourselves in.

These are the books that best represent his work.

The Invention of Solitude (1982)

Auster’s debut memoir, “The Invention of Solitude,” put him on the map as an exciting new voice in the literary world. Bold and inventive, it chronicles his life as the son of an absent father and the father of a young son. The book’s themes — grief, loss, identity, loneliness, coincidence — all became central in his later work, both fiction and nonfiction.

The New York Trilogy (1987)

This book is technically a triptych of novels (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”), each of which borrows elements from detective fiction by focusing on a man investigating a subject to the point of oblivion. But at its core, “The New York Trilogy” — likely his most popular work among academics, undergraduates and aspiring writers — is a meditation on the things that make a person who they are. It cemented Auster as a stylish writer, one whose distinctive narrators searched for meaning and identity, circuitously and in perpetuity, against the constraints of art and language.

Moon Palace (1989)

This novel has all the ingredients that readers came to expect from Auster’s work: the isolated male narrator, the search for an absent father and the disappointment of missed chances. It follows an orphan, Marco Stanley Fogg, on a picaresque journey west from New York as he tries to learn more about his family’s past. At times the journey is almost too farcical to be “unbelievable,” Joyce Reiser Kornblatt wrote in her New York Times review, but the book is grounded by a cast of characters both “heartfelt and complex.”

Leviathan (1992)

“Leviathan” — which borrows its name from Thomas Hobbes’s treatise about the role of government in society — is about a man trying to understand why a friend has blown himself up with a bomb. The Austerian themes are on full display, as our reviewer wrote, in “a work in which fictional lives are circumscribed by recorded events, and real people shape the destinies of conjured ones.”

The Book of Illusions (2002)

Questions of random coincidence bedevil David Zimmer, the book’s narrator, who appeared briefly in “Moon Palace.” Alone and on a path of self-destruction after losing his family in a plane crash, he becomes obsessed with the work of Hector Mann, an actor who vanished decades before and is presumed dead. After writing a book about him, Zimmer receives a cryptic letter saying that Mann is very much alive. The letter threatens to unravel Zimmer’s entire world, which Auster renders in a muted, elegiac tone.

The Brooklyn Follies (2005)

Set in an alluringly bleak New York, “The Brooklyn Follies” follows Nathan Glass, a cancer survivor looking for “a quiet place to die” until meeting someone who sends him spiraling into an existential crisis. Though the subject is solemn, this is Auster at his most playful.

4 3 2 1 (2017)

“4 3 2 1” is an epic bildungsroman that presents the life of a boy named Archie Ferguson in four versions simultaneously. At 866 pages, this book might sound like a drag; but as Tom Perrotta wrote in his New York Times review: “It’s impossible not to be impressed — and even a little awed — by what Auster has accomplished. ‘4 3 2 1’ is a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.”

Spokane author Jess Walter wins O. Henry Prize for ‘The Dark’

Spokane author Jess Walter (“Beautiful Ruins,” “Cold Millions,” “Citizen Vince,” “Ruby Ridge” and more) has earned the O. Henry Prize, the oldest major prize for short fiction in America.

The annual awards, which began in 1919, seek to provide a platform for short-story writers from around the world by collecting and publishing their work annually.

Walter’s piece “The Dark,” which ran in the literary journal “Ploughshares” last summer, was one of 20 recipients.

“I was thrilled to win an O. Henry Prize,” Walter wrote in an email.

The prize used to name one winner out of the honored stories, Walter said, referencing the past work of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever, but, in recent years, they publish the finalists in an anthology instead of picking a single winner.

“I’ve been reading these anthologies – the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories – since I was in college,” Walter said. “I’d read these great writers – Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Grace Paley – and daydream seeing my name at the end of one of those alphabetical tables of contents (Updike, Vonnegut, Walter …).

“I’ve had three stories in Best American, and now, with my first O. Henry, it still feels I’m daydreaming.”

The summer 2023 issue of Ploughshares , out of Emerson College, was guest-edited by Tom Perrotta, and featured prose by Marianne Leone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Andre Dubus III, Fabio Morábito, Jen Trynin, Olufunke Grace Bankole, and Walter, among others.

“Most readers think of novels when they think of fiction, but like a lot of writers, I started out trying to craft a simple, decent short story, so this taps into my earliest ambitions,” Walter said. “I wasn’t sure how much I liked ‘The Dark’ when I finished it. I’d read a version at the Humanities Washington Bedtime Stories fundraiser, and I thought it was funny, but I was worried I hadn’t stuck the landing, that the story’s surprise ending – ironically, O. Henry’s specialty – didn’t quite work.

“But Tom Perotta, the editor of that issue of Ploughshares, said he loved it, and if there’s one thing I should remember, it’s to always defer to a better writer’s opinion of my work.”

“The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners,” edited by Amor Towles and Jenny Minton Quigley, will be published in September by Vintage Books. Pre-orders for the $18 collection can be made at bookshop.org or on Amazon . The summer issue of “Ploughshares” can be ordered for $14 print or $7 digital at www.pshares.org/issues/summer-2023.

Advancing rural health in Northeast Washington and beyond

Access to health care across rural Washington is a growing challenge.