Fiction Short Story Collections

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

A stunning collection of interconnected stories set in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries. Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.

A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times).

Originally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. These stories, by turns satirical, perverse, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life even as their characters stay hidden behind the disguises they have so carefully created.

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: Six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. “The book spans the 20th century, bringing characters into tableaus of deceit and desire. Beneath his coifed prose Towles is a master of the shiv, the bait and switch; we see the flash of light before the shock wave strikes, often in the final sentence … Table for Two delivers the kick of a martini served in the Polo Lounge” (The New York Times Book Review).

Meet the women of American Housewife. They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven. Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these twelve delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: “What do housewives do all day?”

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.

Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin’s birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online — never mind that he’s a Cyclops. An inventive story collection that spans the globe as it explores love, childhood, and parenthood with an electric mix of humor and emotion.

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life.

A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City — for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi. 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.

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror — on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the MacArthur “genius” and award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles.

National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill’s classic debut collection from the 1980s — powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire. Set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and peopled with artistic freelancers and intelligent sex workers, smug yuppies and love-torn masochists, Bad Behavior depicts a world equally cruel and tender, where romance and danger go hand in hand. Gaitskill delivers unforgettable stories of disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation groping for human connection.

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

An extraordinary short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness — from a writer whose “spellbinding, buoyant” (Texas Monthly) storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds. In Holler, Child’s eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something — hope, reconciliation, freedom.

Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret’s stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain — from a father’s first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises. With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.

Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret — Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.

With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest (“The Sisters”), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of “Two Gallants,” or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife (“The Dead”), Joyce takes narrative art to places it had never been before.

The first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master of the form since her number one New York Times bestseller Unaccustomed Earth. Rome — metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical — is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories.

In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance. Brilliant, hilarious, and heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction.

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters bemoan their fleeting youth, focus on their breathing, meet cute, break up, write book reviews, translate ancient glyphs, bid on stuff online, whale watch, and once in a while find solace in the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. Spanning a quarter century, these sixteen stories tell the absurd truth about our lives. They capture the moment when the present becomes the past — and are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most imaginative and insightful writers working today.

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writers, the award-winning, bestselling author of Blonde. In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities. Provocative and stunning, Zero-Sum reinforces Oates’s standing as a literary treasure and an artist of the mysterious interior life.