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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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The Best Reviewed Books of 2021: Short Story Collections

Featuring haruki murakami, brandon taylor, elizabeth mccracken, kevin barry, lily king, and more.

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Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .

1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco)

22 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read … The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are mainly built around conditions of youth—vexed and tender relationships with parents, awkward romances, nebulous worries about the future. But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age. The stories are great fun to read—brimming over with life and energy and comic insight and deep feeling.”

–Deborah Eisenberg ( New York Review of Books )

2. Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

19 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

Read an interview with Brandon Taylor here

“Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we’re trained to expect … The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous; it is senseless without being pointless. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in Anne of Cleves that my breath hitched … Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue; Taylor’s gift is perfect tempo. In a band of writers, he’d be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. And as a plotter, he doesn’t rely on gasp-inducing reveals … Taylor’s superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph – sometimes just a sentence … I’ve come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it … He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.”

–Ian Williams ( The Guardian )

3. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (Knopf)

13 Rave • 17 Positive • 7 Mixed • 5 Pan

“… a blazing and brilliant return to form … a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories … there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. The stories echo with Murakami’s preoccupations. Nostalgia and longing for the charged, evocative moments of young adulthood. Memory’s power and fragility; how identity forms from random decisions, ‘minor incidents,’ and chance encounters; the at once intransigent and fragile nature of the ‘self.’ Guilt, shame, and regret for mistakes made and people damaged by foolish or heartless choices. The power and potency of young love and the residual weight of fleeting erotic entanglements. Music’s power to make indelible impressions, elicit buried memories, connect otherwise very different people, and capture what words cannot. The themes become a kind of meter against which all the stories make their particular, chiming rhythms … The reading experience is unsettled by a pervasive blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, dream and waking … Most of the narrators foreground the act of telling and ruminate on the intention behind and effects of disclosing secrets, putting inchoate impulses, fears, or yearnings into clear, logical prose … This mesmerizing collection would make a superb introduction to Murakami for anyone who hasn’t yet fallen under his spell; his legion of devoted fans will gobble it up and beg for more.”

–Pricilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe )

4. That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry (Doubleday)

13 Rave • 10 Positive •1 Mixed

“There’s not a bad story in the bunch, and it’s as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written … Barry does an excellent job probing the psyche of his diffident protagonist, and ends the story with an unexpected moment of sweetness that’s anything but cloying—realism doesn’t need to be miserablism, he seems to hint; sometimes things actually do work out … Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws; in just 13 pages, he manages to make Hannah and Setanta come to life through sharp dialogue and keen observations … Barry proves to be a master of writing about both love and cruelty … Barry brilliantly evokes both the good and bad sides of love, and does so with stunningly gorgeous writing … There’s not an aspect of writing that Barry doesn’t excel at. His dialogue rings true, and he’s amazingly gifted at scene-setting—he evokes both the landscape of western Ireland and the landscape of the human heart beautifully. His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is his understanding of the ways our collective psyche works; he seems to have an innate sense of why people behave the way we do, and exactly what we’re capable of, both good and bad.”

–Michael Schaub ( NPR )

5. Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove)

17 Rave • 1 Positive

Listen to an interview with Dantiel W. Moniz here

“Mortality is the undercurrent in Dantiel W. Moniz’s electrifying debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat , but where there’s death there is the whir of life, too. A lot of collections consist of some duds, yet every single page in this book is a shimmering seashell that contains the sound of multiple oceans. Reading one of Moniz’s stories is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing. The power in these stories rests in their veracity, vitality and vulnerability.”

–Michelle Filgate ( The Washington Post )

6. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth)

15 Rave 2 Positive

Read a story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed here

“There’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering—at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan … Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity … Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children—those who are ordinarily powerless—who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls … If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax … To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.”

–Chelsea Leu ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read Elizabeth McCracken on savoring the mystery of stories here

“Elizabeth McCracken’s The Souvenir Museum begins with one of the funniest short stories I’ve read in a long time … I had to stop reading ‘The Irish Wedding’ several times to explain to my husband why I was laughing so hard. I kept thinking: I wish I were reading a whole book about these people … they’re all beguiling … This tale, like much of McCracken’s work, captures the mixed bag that characterizes most people’s lives … McCracken’s writing is never dull. She ends this fantastic collection with a second English wedding and its aftermath, nearly 20 years after the first, delivering happiness tempered by sobering circumstances—and a satisfying symmetry.”

–Heller McAlpin ( NPR )

8. Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

13 Rave • 1 Positive

Read an excerpt from Wild Swims here

“How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams … The stories are vivid the way a flash of immobilizing pain is vivid … Perhaps because they’re so very short and because they mostly sketch slight interior shifts in her characters, Nors’s stories all feel a little bashful, a little tender. Surely this is intentional … Most of her stories are too short to linger deeply in time or consciousness; the characters spin back into their silence almost as soon as they emerge on the page. Nors is a master at portraying female rage, but here there is also no violent explosion outward, instead a sort of inner collapse; her characters assiduously resist confronting their fury until it rises up against them and attacks their bodies … The sense of simultaneous, furious upwelling into text and retraction into shame or reticence gives the stories a powerful undercurrent, as if they were constantly wrestling with themselves. Inherently self-contradicting, they wobble interestingly on their axes, pulled between outraged individualism and the restrictive Janteloven.”

–Lauren Groff ( The New York Review of Books )

9. Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti (Graywolf)

12 Rave • 1 Mixed

Read an interview with Nana Nkweti here

“The pure energy of the words strikes first, the thrumming, soaring, frenetic pace of Nana Nkweti’s expression … None of these stories end with a miraculous healing. Even where revelations occur, they never erase scars. Nkweti uses genre tropes to subvert our expectations. She employs the zombie story, the fairy tale, and the confessional in order to invert conventions … The levity of Nkweti’s writing can make even passing descriptions a delight … Occasionally the writing veers into the overwrought … But the sheer speed of Nkweti’s expression allows for correction in midair, and her keen descriptive eye provides more pleasures than missteps … Her inventiveness dazzles.”

–Lee Thomas ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

10. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (Henry Holt)

9 Rave • 4 Positive 1 Mixed

Read Jocelyn Nicole Johnson on how writing “vengeful fiction” can make you a better person, here

“Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses history to spectacular effect in her debut fiction collection … What makes My Monticello particularly resonant is that it does not stray far from life as we know it today. In the near future conjured by Johnson, there are the heat waves and wildfires that bring climate change into view. There is fallout from a fraught election. There is the vile replacement theory rhetoric of the right wing. But the lives of Johnson’s richly drawn characters—their personal stories—are always in focus. And, because of it, the storytelling is propulsive, as we follow these refugees along a harrowing journey, with danger ever at their heels. My Monticello is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it.”

–Anissa Gray ( The Washington Post )

Our System:

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

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April 29, 2024

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20 New Must-Read Short Story Collections

Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

View All posts by Emily Martin

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover—and in some cases even make and unmake—the various uncharted parts of existence. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that—a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

A good short story has an incredible amount of power. In just a small amount of pages, authors of short stories are able to create entire worlds, depict characters who feel real, and evoke deep emotions. If you’re a fan of short stories, you’re in luck, because 2022 has been an excellent year for short story collections. In fact, there are so many great short story collections this year, that it was hard to narrow it down to just 20 must-reads. We couldn’t possibly cover them all, so if your fave didn’t make this list, no worries! It’s still amazing.

As for the ones that are on this list, these are the 20 must-read short story collections that you’re going to love, no matter what genres you normally gravitate towards. Literary fiction is heavily represented on this list, but there are short stories in plenty of other genres as well! Love speculative fiction? Of course you do. There’s plenty of that here on this list. Mysteries? Thrillers? Suspense? Yep. Horror? Aww yeah. Sci-fi? Fantasy? Check and check. Basically, these short story collections are doing everything, and you’re going to love them.

So get your TBR lists ready, because you’re going to want to add all of these books to your to-read pile right away.

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Jean Chen Ho’s debut is a collection of linked stories following Fiona Lin and Jane Shen, two Taiwanese American women who have been best friends since the 2nd grade. Growing up in Los Angeles, Fiona and Jane have very different but equally tumultuous family lives. As with most friendships, there are moments in time when Fiona and Jane grow closer to one another, and other periods of time where they drift apart. Each short story explores a different moment in their friendship throughout their lives. Together, these stories paint a vivid portrait of friendship, love, loss, and coming of age in contemporary America.

Seasonal Work by Laura Lippman

If you are already a fan of Laura Lippman’s work, then you absolutely have to add her latest short story collection to your TBR list. But even if you’ve never read Lippman before, you’re in for a treat. Seasonal Work is a collection of psychological suspense/thriller stories featuring murder, mystery, love gone wrong, deception, scandals, and so much more. If you only read one crime fiction short story in 2022, make it one from this short story collection.

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere is the debut short story collection from O. Henry Prize winning author Sindya Bhanoo. From Pittsburgh to Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories explore the lives of South Indian immigrants and the families they leave behind. Bhanoo’s stories show how the lives of these characters and the decisions they make are complicated, filled with moments of regret, hope, and triumph.

Out There by Kate Folk

What strange and eerie secrets lurk beneath the lives of seemingly ordinary people? That’s what Kate Folk examines in her short story collection Out There. These highly imaginative short stories infuse elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction into the literary fiction landscape. Each story looks deep into the reader’s subconscious dreams and nightmares.

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

This collection consists of 12 short stories that look at life in Maine’s Native Penobscot Nation in the 21st century. These dark but honest stories follow a troubled family dealing with issues of grief, depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, and more. But these stories are filled with hope and magic as well. At the center of Night of the Living Rez is David. Each story explores the lives of David, his family, and his friends at different points in their lives.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

Life Ceremony is Sayaka Murata’s first short story collection to ever be translated into English. In these 12 stories, the award-winning author of Convenience Store Woman mixes her signature blend of the humorous, the awkward, and the terrifying to tell stories of loners and outcasts who buck traditions and societal expectations. Murata’s stories will have you questioning what it means to be human in this world and what is sacrificed when we try too hard to fit in.

Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

From New York Times bestselling author Lisa Taddeo comes a stunning collection of nine short stories you won’t want to miss. This collection includes two Pushcart Prize winners and a finalist for the National Magazine Award as well as previously unpublished work. Ghost Lover tells stories of complicated, fascinating, and flawed women and their experiences of deep love, wild obsession, and uncontrollable grief.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a collection of 12 speculative fiction short stories where the ordinary is made strange and the strange becomes ordinary. Each story in this collection creates a strange world where readers will get lost. From a group of children who steal a haunted doll to an insomniac seduced by the Sandman, each of these short stories digs deep into human nature and the contradictions that live within us all.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

Ling Ma stunned readers with her debut novel Severance in 2018, and now she’s back with a short story collection that’s just as mesmerizing. Through eight short stories, Ma introduces readers to characters and stories that examine the realities of motherhood, friendship, love, loneliness, and more. In one story, a woman lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends. In another, a toxic friendship is built around a drug that makes you invisible. These situations seems strange, but the emotions and characters are entirely relatable.

Natural History by Andrea Barrett

The six short stories in Andrea Barrett’s collection Natural History feature characters Barrett has written about in her work since 1996’s Ship Fever . But even if this is your first Andrea Barrett book, you will connect with these characters right away. In these interconnected stories, Barrett allows readers into the intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators. Following their lives throughout the years, readers see the ways women’s lives and the expectations put upon them have changed over the years.

What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

What We Fed to the Manticore is a really fun short story collection because it consists of nine short stories all told from a different animal’s perspectives. Through these animals’ eyes, debut author Talia Lakshmi Kolluri discusses environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family. Whether the story is told from the perspective of a donkey, a vulture, or a pigeon, readers will become full immersed in these characters and their stories.

Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-lee Chai

Tomorrow in Shanghai is May-lee Chai’s beautiful follow-up collection to her award-winning collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants. These stories examine the lives of people in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and people of Chinese descent living throughout the world. Whether the characters are rich or poor, male or female, living in the city or the country, each story looks at issues of prejudice, power dynamics, and interpersonal struggles in the globalized world.

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

The Memory Librarian  is like a literary tie-in for Janelle Monáe’s high-concept album  Dirty Computer,  set in a world in which thoughts can be erased or controlled. This collection expands on the totalitarian existence imagined in  Dirty Computer . To fully flesh out this sci-fi world, Monáe also collaboraties with several talented sci-fi/fantasy authors, including Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas — just to name a few.

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin

Seven Empty Houses is a short story collection that just made the  National Book Award longlist  for best book in translation. In this collection, Samanta Schweblin tells seven stories about seven strange houses that are all empty in different ways. Some are devoid of love. Some don’t have any furniture. Or any people. But in every case, something always creeps in: trespassers, a ghost, a list of things to do before you die…you get the idea. Samanta Schweblin has already wowed readers with her collection Mouthful of Birds, and this one is just as good if not better!

A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

This debut short story collection from author C. J. Tudor features 10 tales that are creepy, twisty, and mind-bending. For instance, there’s “The Lion at the Gate,” a story about a strange piece of graffiti that leads four school friends into a horrifying encounter. And as the world descends into darkness in “Final Course,” a group of old friends find time for one last dinner party. Then there’s “I’m Not Ted,” in which a case of mistaken identity turns deadly. This one is a must-read for horror fans and anyone who is hungry for stories that will stick with you long after you’ve finished the final page.

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

Chelsea Bieker, the acclaimed author of Godshot, is back with a remarkable collection of short stories set in California’s Central Valley. From a woman who steals a baby from a shelter, to a mother and son selling dreamcatchers along the highway, to two teenage girls playing a dangerous online game, all of Bieker’s characters burn with deep and reckless desires. And all are heartbroken in their own ways.

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

The last collection was set entirely in California, and Milk Blood Heat is all about Florida. In the cities and suburbs of Florida, the characters in these stories each find themselves confronted by moments of violent personal reckonings. Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut collection is filled with intimate, emotional moments that shed light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, and how we are all connected to one another.

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer, who has been called “the weird Thoreau,” is probably most known for his sci-fi/weird fiction Southern Reach trilogy ( Annihilation, Authority , and Acceptance ). In City of Saints and Madmen, VanderMeer introduces readers to the world of Ambergris, a place unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. Through this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports, VanderMeer creates a fantasy world that feels incredibly real.

Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang

With each story in K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want , the author mixes myth, memory, and surrealism to tell feminist stories about Asian American women from different walks of life. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law goes to torturous ends in an attempt to get a wife out of her home. In “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad becomes real. And in “Auntland,” a stream of aunts attempt to adjust to American life in strange ways. These uncanny stories explore questions of power, identity, and memory.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana

All of the stories in Sidik Fofana’s Stories from the Tenants Downstairs are set in a low-income Harlem high rise where gentrification weighs heavy on the tenants’ minds. Each of the eight interconnected stories explores the hopes, struggles, and strengths of the tenants in the Banneker Homes. Every tenant there has a unique, touching, and thought-provoking story to tell.

Looking for more must-read short story collections? Here are 10 speculative story collections to enjoy in 2022 . And here are the sci-fi/fantasy short story collections you won’t want to miss .

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Confessions of a Dustbin by M. Karunanidhi

In Confessions of a Dustbin by M. Karunanidhi we have the theme of loss, loneliness, and freedom. Narrated in the first person by the dustbin itself it becomes clearer to him that he as hears story of professionals of faith and love that the dustbin makes to make a connection with others. Who merely see […]

Whistling in the Dark by Ruskin Bond

In Whistling in the Dark by Ruskin Bond we have the theme of loneliness, companionship, connection and solidarity. Taken from his Collected Short Stories collection the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed male narrator and from the beginning of the story the reader realizes that Bond may be exploring the theme […]

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Between Earth and Sky by Patricia Grace

In Between Earth and Sky by Patricia Grace we have the theme of struggle, happiness, connection and freedom. Taken from her The Dream Sleepers collection the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed female narrator and after reading the story the reader realizes that Grace may be exploring the theme of struggle. […]

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Beans by Patricia Grace

In Beans by Patricia Grace we have the theme of hard-work, enthusiasm, innocence, independence, gratitude, nature and appreciation. Taken from her The Dream Sleepers collection the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed boy and the reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Grace may be exploring the theme of […]

Big Brother, Little Sister by Witi Ihimaera

In Big Brother, Little Sister by Witi Ihimaera we have the theme of desperation, violence, insecurity, selfishness, hope and paralysis. Taken from his The New Net Goes Fishing collection the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and the reader realizes after reading the story that Ihimaera may be exploring the […]

A Game of Cards by Witi Ihimaera

In A Game of Cards by Witi Ihimaera we have the theme of connection, love, matriarchy, wisdom, tradition and mortality. Taken from his Pounamu Pounamu collection the story is narrated in the first person by a young male narrator the reader realizes after reading the story that Ihimaera may be exploring the theme of connection. […]

A Room of One’s Own by Benjamin Law

In A Room of One’s Own by Benjamin Law we have the theme of conflict, sibling rivalry, fear and reconciliation. Taken from his The Family Law collection the story is narrated in the first person by Law himself and from the beginning of the story the reader realizes that Law may be exploring the theme […]

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The Performing Child by R.K. Narayan

In The Performing Child by R.K. Narayan we have the theme of aspirations, control, selfishness, acceptance and freedom. Taken from his An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories collection the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and from the beginning of the story the reader realizes that Narayan may be exploring […]

• R.K. Narayan

Courage in the Time of Harmattan by Ugochukwu Udorji

In Courage in the Time of Harmattan by Ugochukwu Udorji we have the theme of conflict, letting go, ego and paralysis. Narrated in the second person by an unnamed narrator the reader realizes after reading the story that Udorji may be exploring the theme of conflict. The young boy finds himself in conflict with Chike […]

Robert and the Dog by Ken Saro-Wiwa

In Robert and the Dog by Ken Saro-Wiwa we have the theme of control, jealousy, hierarchy and poverty. Narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator the reader realizes after reading the story that Saro-Wiwa may be exploring the theme of control. Robert, who is a servant, believes that it is easier to control […]

Ilyas (Elias) by Leo Tolstoy

In Ilyas by Leo Tolstoy we have the theme of happiness, materialism, generosity, faith, loss and gratitude. Taken from his Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales collection the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story the reader realizes that Tolstoy may be exploring the theme […]

• Leo Tolstoy

In the Box by Taeko Kōno

In the short story In the Box by Taeko Kōno we have the theme of revenge, control, struggle, anger, gratitude and connection. Narrated in the first person by an unnamed narrator (male) the reader realizes after reading the story that Kōno may be exploring the theme of revenge. The narrator is angry that the woman […]

Millicent by Merle Hodge

In Millicent by Merle Hodge we have the theme of control, conflict, innocence, insecurity and pride. Narrated in the first person by a young unnamed boy the reader realizes after reading the story that Hodge may be exploring the theme of control. Miss is in complete control of her class or she likes to think […]

My First Kiss by Lian Low

In My First Kiss by Lian Low we have the theme of curiosity, sexuality, connection, freedom, vulnerability, discovery and acceptance. Narrated in the first person by Low herself the reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Low may be exploring the theme of curiosity. Low spent her first fourteen years of her life […]

• Growing Up Asian In Australia

Destiny by Shalini Akhil

In Destiny by Shalini Akhil we have the theme of connection, belonging, identity, culture, tradition, desire and change. Narrated in the first person by Akhil herself the reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Akhil may be exploring the theme of connection. Akhil has a fondness for Wonder Woman or more importantly the […]

Hot and Spicy by Oliver Phommavanh

In Hot and Spicy by Oliver Phommavanh we have the theme of curiosity, connection, cunning, embarrassment, tradition, culture, identity and failure. Narrated in the first person by a young Year 6 boy called Albert Yip. The reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Phommavanh may be exploring the theme of curiosity. Albert’s parents […]

Hanoi and Other Homes by Sim Shen

In Hanoi and Other Homes by Sim Shen we have the theme of memories, belonging, connection, identity, change, acceptance and culture. Narrated in the first person by Shen himself the reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Shen may be exploring the theme of memories. Shen can recall the last time he visited […]

Are You Different by Mia Francis

In Are You Different by Mia Francis we have the theme of adoption, connection, culture, racism and freedom. Narrated in the first person by Francis herself the reader realizes from the beginning of the story that Francis may be exploring the theme of adoption. Francis adopts Ricky from an orphanage in Manila. It is clear […]

The Dreamer by Saki (H.H. Munro)

In The Dreamer by Saki we have the theme of class, materialism, gender, control and identity. Taken from his The Complete Short Stories collection the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and from the beginning of the story the reader realizes that Saki may be exploring the theme of class. […]

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

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Take risks and tell the truth: how to write a great short story

Drawing on writers from Anton Chekhov to Kit de Waal, Donal Ryan explores the art of writing short fiction. Plus Chris Power on the best books for budding short story writers

T he first story I wrote outside of school was about Irish boxer Barry McGuigan. I was 10 and I loved Barry. He’d just lost his world featherweight title to the American Steve Cruz under the hellish Nevada sun and the only thing that could mend my broken heart was a restoration of my hero’s belt. Months passed and there was no talk of a rematch, so I wrote a story about it.

My imagined fight was in Ireland, and I was ringside. In my story I’d arranged the whole thing. I’d even given Barry some tips on countering Steve’s vicious hook. It went the distance but Barry won easily on points. He hugged Steve. His dad sang “Danny Boy”. I felt as I finished my story an intense relief. The world in that moment was restful and calm. I’d created a new reality for myself, and I was able to occupy it for a while, to feel a joy I’d created by moving a biro across paper. I think of that story now every single time I sit down to write. I strive for the feeling of rightness it gave me, that feeling of peace.

It took me a while to regain that feeling. When I left school, where I was lucky enough to be roundly encouraged and told with conviction that I was a writer, I inexplicably embarked on a career of self-sabotage, only allowing my literary ambitions to surface very sporadically, and then burning the results in fits of disgust. Nothing I wrote rang true; nothing felt worthy of being read.

Shortly after I got married my mother-in-law happened upon a file on the hard drive of a PC I’d loaned her (there’s a great and terrifying writing prompt!). It contained a ridiculous story about a young solicitor being corrupted by a gangster client. I’d forgotten about the story, and about one of its peripheral characters, a simple and pure-hearted man named Johnsey Cunliffe. My wife suggested giving Johnsey new life, and I started a rewrite with him as the hero; the story kept growing until I found myself with a draft of my first finished novel, The Thing About December . I didn’t feel embarrassed, nor did I feel an urge to burn it. I felt peace. I knew it wouldn’t last, and so I quickly wrote a handful of new stories, and the peace didn’t dissipate. Not for a while, anyway.

So a forgotten short story, written somewhere in the fog of my early 20s, turned out to be the making of my writing career. Maybe it would have happened anyway, or maybe not, but I think the impulse would always have been present, the urge to put a grammar on the ideas in my head. Mary Costello, author of The China Factory , one of the finest short story collections I’ve ever read, says: “Write only what’s essential, what must be written … an image or a story that keeps gnawing, that won’t leave you alone. And the only way to get peace is to write it.”

I know that in this straitened, rule-bound, virus-ridden present, many people find themselves with that gnawing feeling, that urge to fashion from language a new reality, or to get the idea that’s been clamouring inside them out of their imagination and into the world. So I’ve put together some ideas with the help of some of my favourite writers on how best to go about finding that peace.

Don’t worry

In a short story, the sentences have to do so much! Some of Chekhov’s stories are less than three printed pages; a few comprise a single brief paragraph. In his most famous story, “The Lady with the Dog”, we are given a detailed account of the nature, history and motivations of Gurov within the first page, but there is no feeling of stress or overload. Stephen King’s 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars is a masterclass in compression and suspense. My colleague in creative writing at the University of Limerick, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, is, like me, a novelist who turns occasionally to the short form. Sarah considers short stories to be “storytelling’s finest gifts. In the best ones, nothing is superfluous, their focus is sharp and vivid but they can be gloriously elliptical too, full of echoes.” The novel form, as I’ve heard Mike McCormack say, offers “a wonderful accommodation to the writer”, but the short story is a barren territory. There’s nowhere to hide, no space for excess or digression.

My wife asked me once why this worried me so much. I’d just published my first two novels and had embarked on a whole collection of short stories, A Slanting of the Sun . She’d come home from work to find me curled up in a ball of despair. “Every sentence worries me,” I whined. “None of them is doing enough .” “Don’t worry about how much they’re doing until all the work is done,” she said. “Get the story written, and then you can go back and fix all those worrisome sentences. And the chances are, once the story exists, you won’t be as worried about those sentences at all. They’ll just be. ”

Ah. I can still feel the beautiful relief I felt at her wise words. Life is filled with things to worry about. The quality of our sentences should be a challenge and a constant fruitful quest, a gradual aggregation of attainment. But creativity should always bring us at least some whisper of joy. It should be a way out of worry.

One of the concepts my colleague Sarah illuminates is that of a “draft zero” – a draft that comes before a first draft, where your story is splashed on to your screen or page, containing all or most of its desired elements. Draft zero offers complete freedom from any consideration of craft or finesse.

Kit de Waal, who recently published a wonderful collection, Supporting Cast , featuring characters from her novels, offers this wisdom on getting your story from your head on to your page or screen: “Don’t overthink but do overwrite. Sometimes you see a pair of gloves or a flower on the street or lipstick on a coffee cup and it moves you in a particular way. That’s your prompt right there. Write that feeling or set something around that idea, you don’t know what at this stage, you’re going off sheer muse, writerly energy, so just follow it. And follow it right to the end – it might be a day, a week, a year. Overwrite the thing and then sit back and ask yourself, ‘Where is the magic? What am I saying? Who is speaking?’ When you’ve worked that out, you have your story and you can start crafting and editing.”

Your draft zero is Michelangelo’s lump of rough-hacked marble, but with David’s basic shape. It is the reassuring existence of something tangible in the world outside of your mind , something raw and real, containing within its messy self the potential for greatness. And the best way to make it great is to make it truthful.

Be truthful

I don’t mean by this that you need to speak your own truth at all times or to draw only on your own lived experience, but it’s important to be true to our own impulses and ambitions as writers; to write the story we want to write, not the story we think we should write. That’s like saying things that you think people want to hear: you’ll end up tangling yourself in a knot of half-truths and constructed, co-opted beliefs. You’ll be more politician than writer, and, as good and decent as some of them are, the world definitely has enough politicians.

Your own experiences, of course, your own truth, can be parlayed into wonderful fictions, and can by virtue of their foundation in reality contain an almost automatic immediacy and intensity. Melatu Uche Okorie’s debut collection, This Hostel Life , is drawn from her experiences in the Irish direct provision system as an asylum seeker. The title story in particular has about it a feeling of absolute truthfulness, written in the demotic of the author’s Nigerian countrywomen; while another story, “Under the Awning”, feels as though it might be an oblique description of events witnessed or experienced first-hand by the author.

You might as well do exactly what you want to do, even (or especially) if it’s never been done before. You have nothing to lose by taking risks, with form, content, style, structure or any other element of your piece of fiction. Rob Doyle , a consummate literary risk-taker, exhorts writers to “try writing a story that doesn’t look how short stories are meant to look – try one in the form of an encyclopaedia entry, or a list, or an essay, or a review of an imaginary restaurant, sex toy, amusement park or film. Have people wondering if it’s even fiction. Mix it all up. Short stories can explore ideas as well as emotions – huge ideas can fit into short stories. For proof, read the work of Jorge Luis Borges . In fact, I second Roberto Bolaño’s advice to anyone writing short stories: read Borges.”

Bend the iron bar

“When the curtain falls,” said Frank O’Connor of the short story, “everything must be changed. An iron bar must have been bent and been seen to be bent.” One of the first short stories to break my heart was O’Connor’s “ Guests of the Nation ”. It has been described as one of the greatest anti-war stories ever written, and one of the finest stories from a master of the form. Its devastating denouement closes with this plaintive statement from the shattered narrator: “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” This line contains within it an entreaty to short story writers to reach for that profound moment, that event or epiphany or reversal or triumph; to arrive within the confines of their story at a moment that will have a resonance far beyond its narrow scope.

Another great literary O’Connor, this time the novelist Joseph, who teaches creative writing at the University of Limerick, says that “to me every excellent short story centres around an instant where intense change becomes possible or, at least, imaginable for the character. Cut into the story late, leave it early, and find a moment.” Joseph quotes the closing words of one of his favourite short stories, Raymond Carver’s “Fat”: “It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it.”

The moment of course needn’t be in the ending, and the end of a story doesn’t necessarily have to be incendiary or revelatory, or to contain an unexpected twist. Mary Gaitskill ’s story “Heaven” describes a family going through change and trauma and loss, and iron bars are bent in almost every paragraph, but its ending is memorable for the moment of relief it offers, in a gently muted description of the perfect grace of a summer evening and a family gathered for a meal. “They all sat in lawn chairs and ate from the warm plates in their laps. The steak was good and rare; its juices ran into the salad and pasta when Virginia moved her knees. A light wind blew loose hairs around their faces and tickled them. The trees rustled dimly. There were nice insect noises. Jarold paused, a forkful of steak rising across his chest. ‘Like heaven,’ he said. ‘It’s like heaven.’ They were quiet for several minutes.”

Listen to your story

“Beer Trip to Llandudno”, Kevin Barry’s masterpiece of the short form, from his 2012 collection Dark Lies the Island , is another story that has remained pristine in my consciousness since I first read it. Part of the magic of that story, and of all Barry’s work, is its dialogue: the earthy, pithy, perfectly authentic exchanges between his characters. When I asked Kevin about this, he said: “If you feel like you’re coming towards the final draft of a story, print it out and read it aloud, slowly, with red pen in hand. Your ear will catch all the evasions and the false notes in the story much quicker than your eye will catch them on the screen or page. Listen to what’s not being said in the dialogue. Very often the story, and the drama, is to be found just underneath the surface of the talk.”

Such scrupulous attention to the burden carried by each unit of language and to the work done by the notes played and unplayed can make a story truly shine. Alice Kinsella is an accomplished poet who recently turned her hand to the short form in great style with her sublime account of early motherhood, “Window”. “Poetry or prose,” Alice says, “the aim is the same, to make every word earn its place on the page.”

Ignore everything

And as self-defeating as this sounds, here’s a final piece of advice: once you sit down to write your story, forget about this article. Forget all the advice you’ve ever been given. Free your hand, free your mind, cut yourself loose into the infinity of possibility, and create from those 26 little symbols what you will. We came from the hearts of stars. We are the universe, telling itself its own story.

Donal Ryan is a judge for the BBC national short story award with Cambridge University. The shortlist will be announced on 10 September and the winner on 19 October. For more information see www.bbc.co.uk/nssa .

Books for budding short story writers By Chris Power

If short story collections occupy a minority position on publishers’ lists, books about the short story are an even scarcer commodity. In the 1970s the academic Charles E May published Short Story Theories , which he followed up in 1994 with The New Short Story Theories . These volumes, out of print but easy enough to find second-hand, collect some of the key texts about short fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales , to Elizabeth Bowen’s tracing of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov’s influence, and Julio Cortázar’s brilliant lecture Some Aspects of the Short Story (“the novel always wins on points, while the story must win by a knockout”).

Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice (1963) studies 11 great story writers, from Ivan Turgenev to Katherine Mansfield, and argues that the quintessential short story subjects are outsiders: “There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel – an intense awareness of human loneliness.” O’Connor’s assertiveness makes disagreeing with him part of the fun. As his countryman Sean O’Faolain wrote: “He was like a man who takes a machine gun to a shooting gallery. Everybody falls flat on his face, the proprietor at once takes to the hills, and when it is all over, and you cautiously peep up, you find that he has wrecked the place but got three perfect bull’s-eyes.”

I have a similar relationship with George Saunders’s remarkable study of seven classic Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , published earlier this year. I don’t buy the overarching argument about fiction generating empathy, but this is a book stuffed with arresting observations and practical tips from a master craftsman. His 50-page close reading of Chekhov’s 12-page “In the Cart” is jaw-droppingly good.

Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin isn’t specifically about short stories, but she could certainly write them, and her clear, practical advice is invaluable to anyone wanting to learn about two of the form’s prerequisites: rhythm and concision.

My last recommendation isn’t a book at all, but the New Yorker: Fiction podcast . Appearing monthly since 2007, each episode features a writer reading a story from the magazine’s archives and discussing it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. These conversations are a wonderful education in how stories work. I strongly recommend Ben Marcus on Kazuo Ishiguro (September 2011), Tessa Hadley on Nadine Gordimer (September 2012), and ZZ Packer on Lesley Nneka Arimah (October 2020), a discussion which moves between craft, fairytale and motherhood.

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Ranking of the 100 Best Literary Magazines

In some ways it’s ridiculous to rank literary magazines by the number of awards they’ve received, but it still can be useful for writers to figure out where to submit.

(If you’re looking for nonfiction or essay rankings, go to my Ranking of Literary Nonfiction Markets ). 

The list below arranges literary journals in order of how many times they’ve had a short story or special mention in the last eleven years in the Best American Short Stories (BASS). I award a certain number of points for the winners and a lesser number of points for every special mention. Every October I’ll update the page to reflect the new year.

There were seventeen newcomers added to this year’s list, up from twelve newcomers last year. Some of the journals were new, and some have been around quite a well and only now are being recognized by BASS.

If you’d like help with your short story, I offer an editing service that will take your short story to the next level.

From copy-editing to character advice, I give detailed feedback on what’s working and what needs to be improved in your story.

Read more and contact me .

On statistics : statistics is a epistemic methodology prized by our modernistic, science-obsessed world as the primary way to Know Things. The cold hard facts trumps subjective knowledge, right? But I would argue that statistics gives us only a very limited view of the world, and one which necessarily skews “proper” knowledge.

Let me be less philosophical and more practical: Please don’t overestimate the important of the list below. The list below does not tell you whether a literary journal is good or not, it only tells you whether the Best American Short Story editors happened to like the flavor of stories in a literary journal. That, necessarily, is entirely subjective, and I encourage you to discover for yourself the type of fiction each literary magazine publishes, as well as explore the many  excellent  literary journals that don’t appear on this list.

I dislike some “high” level literary journals and really love “low” level literary journals. So while my tastes are not necessarily reflected by the list below, that’s good, because it will force you all, my lovely, devoted readers, to form your own judgments.

For those of you already deep in the literary magazine world, I hope that this Best American Short Story list is one aid among many to help you figure out where to submit and subscribe.

Southern Review and Zyzzyva had great showings this year. Zyzzyva moved from 15 to 11, continuing their upward momentum, and Southern Review moved from 12 to 7.

On the other hand, we had an enormous amount of shut-outs this year.  One Story , American Short Fiction , Atlantic Monthly , AGNI ,  Virginia Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train got completely shut out — not a single point for any of them. Which basically means their fiction didn’t resonate with this year’s editor, Roxane Gay. 

Gulf Coast has moved up a great deal over the past few years, up to a respectable spot more commensurate with their reputation, and Passages North got on the map in a big way, going from zero points to 5 points this year.

Another lit mag that’s worth noting is Fifth Wednesday Journal . They’ve been consistently amassing nods from the BASS editors, and they should be on your radar to submit to.

Also, you accomplished short story writers might be planning on writing a novel next. In that case, I’d recommend you read my post on how to pull off a smashbang novel that lights your reader’s brain on fire .

It’s one of my best posts on storytelling and novel advice, so click that link above.

*If there is an asterisk next to the name, it means that journal is no longer publishing new material.*

Best Literary Magazines Rankings :

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14 comments

You say AGNI got shut out this year, but there it is at #16.

The numbers are from the last ten years. Just because one doesn’t get points this year, that doesn’t mean they drop to zero.

OK. I see. Thank you.

Fairly odd. “The New Yorker” is so very mainstream and so well-known that one is not very enlightened by the ranking. Moreover, their “fiction” is hardly in the same league as their non-fiction…..so when you rank them by “literary,” it’s not clear if you are referring to non-fiction OR fiction. Plus you include book REVIEWS further obfuscating matters. Too, no “New York Review of Books” as long as you’re going to include reviews of books as “literary”; in addition, I don’t see “Partisan Review”. Glad to see “McSweeneys” didn’t make the list: near-pure garbage. As I say, an odd list. Nevertheless, I’ll be checking out some of the them.

Yes, if you’re a writer the biggest acceptance of your short story would be New Yorker. I’m certain the NYRB does not apply to John’s list here, nor do any of them do only book reviews.

Also, thanks for the list John! It’s been useful for my submitting process for the last year plus!

NYRB of course also publishes poetry.

To be honest, I really think No Contact Magazine is one of the best lit mags out there in the game. I find their selection to be very current and their overall brand to be one of the best.

Slice, Redivider, Chicago Tribune, and New York Tyrant do not seem to be publishing anymore and probably warrant an asterisk. Would you consider my journal, The Summerset Review? We have been around twenty years.

Redivider is still going, with a Duotrope listing.

Sincere thank you for working this and other literary lists. We writers are a selfish lot, too happy to scavenge any leads down to the metaphorical bone, and run off without so much as a nod to who actually felled and dressed the meat.

And anyone complaining about the quality of the list. Come on, it’s free. And helpful. And you were too lazy to do it yourself (you know who you are).

Some folks in the comments didn’t bother to read how the list was made… SMH

Chicago Quarterly Review has two appearances and six distinguished stories in BASS between 2017 and 2021–surely that totals more than the 5 they’re given here?

Correction to my earlier comment: Chicago Quarterly Review’s two stories and six honorable mentions in BASS range between 2016 and 2021. (PS they also have two honorable mentions in the 2022 issue)

I believe it’s no coincidence. The publications with the most stories selected for Best American Short Stories are also the magazines available to the masses. If I had to pay for them, I would not be able to subscribe to the top 10. However with various Emagazine formats available via the local public library, I can be a regular reader of the top ranked magazines.

Every writer NEEDS this book.

It’s a guide to writing the pivotal moments of your novel.

Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you’ll ever buy.

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15 Literature Review Examples

Literature reviews are a necessary step in a research process and often required when writing your research proposal . They involve gathering, analyzing, and evaluating existing knowledge about a topic in order to find gaps in the literature where future studies will be needed.

Ideally, once you have completed your literature review, you will be able to identify how your research project can build upon and extend existing knowledge in your area of study.

Generally, for my undergraduate research students, I recommend a narrative review, where themes can be generated in order for the students to develop sufficient understanding of the topic so they can build upon the themes using unique methods or novel research questions.

If you’re in the process of writing a literature review, I have developed a literature review template for you to use – it’s a huge time-saver and walks you through how to write a literature review step-by-step:

Get your time-saving templates here to write your own literature review.

Literature Review Examples

For the following types of literature review, I present an explanation and overview of the type, followed by links to some real-life literature reviews on the topics.

1. Narrative Review Examples

Also known as a traditional literature review, the narrative review provides a broad overview of the studies done on a particular topic.

It often includes both qualitative and quantitative studies and may cover a wide range of years.

The narrative review’s purpose is to identify commonalities, gaps, and contradictions in the literature .

I recommend to my students that they should gather their studies together, take notes on each study, then try to group them by themes that form the basis for the review (see my step-by-step instructions at the end of the article).

Example Study

Title: Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations

Citation: Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., … & Vogelaers, D. (2015). Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations. International journal of clinical practice , 69 (11), 1257-1267.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ijcp.12686  

Overview: This narrative review analyzed themes emerging from 69 articles about communication in healthcare contexts. Five key themes were found in the literature: poor communication can lead to various negative outcomes, discontinuity of care, compromise of patient safety, patient dissatisfaction, and inefficient use of resources. After presenting the key themes, the authors recommend that practitioners need to approach healthcare communication in a more structured way, such as by ensuring there is a clear understanding of who is in charge of ensuring effective communication in clinical settings.

Other Examples

• Burnout in United States Healthcare Professionals: A Narrative Review (Reith, 2018) – read here
• Examining the Presence, Consequences, and Reduction of Implicit Bias in Health Care: A Narrative Review (Zestcott, Blair & Stone, 2016) – read here
• A Narrative Review of School-Based Physical Activity for Enhancing Cognition and Learning (Mavilidi et al., 2018) – read here
• A narrative review on burnout experienced by medical students and residents (Dyrbye & Shanafelt, 2015) – read here

2. Systematic Review Examples

This type of literature review is more structured and rigorous than a narrative review. It involves a detailed and comprehensive plan and search strategy derived from a set of specified research questions.

The key way you’d know a systematic review compared to a narrative review is in the methodology: the systematic review will likely have a very clear criteria for how the studies were collected, and clear explanations of exclusion/inclusion criteria. 

The goal is to gather the maximum amount of valid literature on the topic, filter out invalid or low-quality reviews, and minimize bias. Ideally, this will provide more reliable findings, leading to higher-quality conclusions and recommendations for further research.

You may note from the examples below that the ‘method’ sections in systematic reviews tend to be much more explicit, often noting rigid inclusion/exclusion criteria and exact keywords used in searches.

Title: The importance of food naturalness for consumers: Results of a systematic review  

Citation: Roman, S., Sánchez-Siles, L. M., & Siegrist, M. (2017). The importance of food naturalness for consumers: Results of a systematic review. Trends in food science & technology , 67 , 44-57.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092422441730122X  

Overview: This systematic review included 72 studies of food naturalness to explore trends in the literature about its importance for consumers. Keywords used in the data search included: food, naturalness, natural content, and natural ingredients. Studies were included if they examined consumers’ preference for food naturalness and contained empirical data. The authors found that the literature lacks clarity about how naturalness is defined and measured, but also found that food consumption is significantly influenced by perceived naturalness of goods.

• A systematic review of research on online teaching and learning from 2009 to 2018 (Martin, Sun & Westine, 2020) – read here
• Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology? (Yli-Huumo et al., 2016) – read here
• Universities—industry collaboration: A systematic review (Ankrah & Al-Tabbaa, 2015) – read here
• Internet of Things Applications: A Systematic Review (Asghari, Rahmani & Javadi, 2019) – read here

3. Meta-analysis

This is a type of systematic review that uses statistical methods to combine and summarize the results of several studies.

Due to its robust methodology, a meta-analysis is often considered the ‘gold standard’ of secondary research , as it provides a more precise estimate of a treatment effect than any individual study contributing to the pooled analysis.

Furthermore, by aggregating data from a range of studies, a meta-analysis can identify patterns, disagreements, or other interesting relationships that may have been hidden in individual studies.

This helps to enhance the generalizability of findings, making the conclusions drawn from a meta-analysis particularly powerful and informative for policy and practice.

Title: Cholesterol and Alzheimer’s Disease Risk: A Meta-Meta-Analysis

Citation: Sáiz-Vazquez, O., Puente-Martínez, A., Ubillos-Landa, S., Pacheco-Bonrostro, J., & Santabárbara, J. (2020). Cholesterol and Alzheimer’s disease risk: a meta-meta-analysis. Brain sciences, 10(6), 386.

Source: https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10060386  

O verview: This study examines the relationship between cholesterol and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Researchers conducted a systematic search of meta-analyses and reviewed several databases, collecting 100 primary studies and five meta-analyses to analyze the connection between cholesterol and Alzheimer’s disease. They find that the literature compellingly demonstrates that low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels significantly influence the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

• The power of feedback revisited: A meta-analysis of educational feedback research (Wisniewski, Zierer & Hattie, 2020) – read here
• How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018) – read here
• A meta-analysis of factors related to recycling (Geiger et al., 2019) – read here
• Stress management interventions for police officers and recruits (Patterson, Chung & Swan, 2014) – read here

Other Types of Reviews

• Scoping Review: This type of review is used to map the key concepts underpinning a research area and the main sources and types of evidence available. It can be undertaken as stand-alone projects in their own right, or as a precursor to a systematic review.
• Rapid Review: This type of review accelerates the systematic review process in order to produce information in a timely manner. This is achieved by simplifying or omitting stages of the systematic review process.
• Integrative Review: This review method is more inclusive than others, allowing for the simultaneous inclusion of experimental and non-experimental research. The goal is to more comprehensively understand a particular phenomenon.
• Critical Review: This is similar to a narrative review but requires a robust understanding of both the subject and the existing literature. In a critical review, the reviewer not only summarizes the existing literature, but also evaluates its strengths and weaknesses. This is common in the social sciences and humanities .
• State-of-the-Art Review: This considers the current level of advancement in a field or topic and makes recommendations for future research directions. This type of review is common in technological and scientific fields but can be applied to any discipline.

How to Write a Narrative Review (Tips for Undergrad Students)

Most undergraduate students conducting a capstone research project will be writing narrative reviews. Below is a five-step process for conducting a simple review of the literature for your project.

• Search for Relevant Literature: Use scholarly databases related to your field of study, provided by your university library, along with appropriate search terms to identify key scholarly articles that have been published on your topic.
• Evaluate and Select Sources: Filter the source list by selecting studies that are directly relevant and of sufficient quality, considering factors like credibility , objectivity, accuracy, and validity.
• Analyze and Synthesize: Review each source and summarize the main arguments  in one paragraph (or more, for postgrad). Keep these summaries in a table.
• Identify Themes: With all studies summarized, group studies that share common themes, such as studies that have similar findings or methodologies.
• Write the Review: Write your review based upon the themes or subtopics you have identified. Give a thorough overview of each theme, integrating source data, and conclude with a summary of the current state of knowledge then suggestions for future research based upon your evaluation of what is lacking in the literature.

Literature reviews don’t have to be as scary as they seem. Yes, they are difficult and require a strong degree of comprehension of academic studies. But it can be feasibly done through following a structured approach to data collection and analysis. With my undergraduate research students (who tend to conduct small-scale qualitative studies ), I encourage them to conduct a narrative literature review whereby they can identify key themes in the literature. Within each theme, students can critique key studies and their strengths and limitations , in order to get a lay of the land and come to a point where they can identify ways to contribute new insights to the existing academic conversation on their topic.

Ankrah, S., & Omar, A. T. (2015). Universities–industry collaboration: A systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 31(3), 387-408.

Asghari, P., Rahmani, A. M., & Javadi, H. H. S. (2019). Internet of Things applications: A systematic review. Computer Networks , 148 , 241-261.

Dyrbye, L., & Shanafelt, T. (2016). A narrative review on burnout experienced by medical students and residents. Medical education , 50 (1), 132-149.

Geiger, J. L., Steg, L., Van Der Werff, E., & Ünal, A. B. (2019). A meta-analysis of factors related to recycling. Journal of environmental psychology , 64 , 78-97.

Martin, F., Sun, T., & Westine, C. D. (2020). A systematic review of research on online teaching and learning from 2009 to 2018. Computers & education , 159 , 104009.

Mavilidi, M. F., Ruiter, M., Schmidt, M., Okely, A. D., Loyens, S., Chandler, P., & Paas, F. (2018). A narrative review of school-based physical activity for enhancing cognition and learning: The importance of relevancy and integration. Frontiers in psychology , 2079.

Patterson, G. T., Chung, I. W., & Swan, P. W. (2014). Stress management interventions for police officers and recruits: A meta-analysis. Journal of experimental criminology , 10 , 487-513.

Reith, T. P. (2018). Burnout in United States healthcare professionals: a narrative review. Cureus , 10 (12).

Ritchie, S. J., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2018). How much does education improve intelligence? A meta-analysis. Psychological science , 29 (8), 1358-1369.

Roman, S., Sánchez-Siles, L. M., & Siegrist, M. (2017). The importance of food naturalness for consumers: Results of a systematic review. Trends in food science & technology , 67 , 44-57.

Sáiz-Vazquez, O., Puente-Martínez, A., Ubillos-Landa, S., Pacheco-Bonrostro, J., & Santabárbara, J. (2020). Cholesterol and Alzheimer’s disease risk: a meta-meta-analysis. Brain sciences, 10(6), 386.

Vermeir, P., Vandijck, D., Degroote, S., Peleman, R., Verhaeghe, R., Mortier, E., … & Vogelaers, D. (2015). Communication in healthcare: a narrative review of the literature and practical recommendations. International journal of clinical practice , 69 (11), 1257-1267.

Wisniewski, B., Zierer, K., & Hattie, J. (2020). The power of feedback revisited: A meta-analysis of educational feedback research. Frontiers in Psychology , 10 , 3087.

Yli-Huumo, J., Ko, D., Choi, S., Park, S., & Smolander, K. (2016). Where is current research on blockchain technology?—a systematic review. PloS one , 11 (10), e0163477.

Zestcott, C. A., Blair, I. V., & Stone, J. (2016). Examining the presence, consequences, and reduction of implicit bias in health care: a narrative review. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations , 19 (4), 528-542

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 5 Top Tips for Succeeding at University
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 50 Durable Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 100 Consumer Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 30 Globalization Pros and Cons

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10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

You’ve come to the end of another novel or short story. Now what? If you’re looking to spice up your review activities with something fresh, unique, or just plain different than your average paper, read on! Here are ten ways to review a novel or short story.

Here are 10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

1. socratic seminars.

Why write when you can discuss? If you’re unfamiliar with a Socratic Seminar , it is a method to understand information by creating a dialogue in class. Students should find deeper understanding and discuss complex ideas. Works that are “heavy” or require your students to really think about issues are perfect for Socratic Seminars.

2. Create a Game

You can either have students create their own game with various templates they find online, or you can create a game that students will play in order to review. Either way, it’s a fun excuse to host a game day in your classroom and breaks up the monotony of review, papers, and tests. I really like having students create their own games, or put a creative spin on old classics.

3. Task Cards

Instead of a long project, try several smaller tasks that review the works. It’s also great if you want to have students work in small groups. Check out my Task Card Resource that can be used with any novel. It includes a pre-reading set of task cards, as well as a second set for review. There are four sets of student directions for differentiation.

4. Escape Room

I love escape rooms, and you can usually find one for just about any novel or short story. Or, if you’re particularly creative with puzzles, you can create your own. They don’t have to be super complicated or involve anything more than paper (though there are plenty of digital escape rooms that are very engaging). Try one for your next read and see how students respond.

5. Fan Fiction

This activity is especially engaging when students have read cliff-hanger or open-ended stories. I’ll have students continue the story, or re-write it from a different perspective. When I use this with short stories, students see it as more manageable than trying to write something for a longer novel. Alternatively, you may try having students write poetry based on the overall themes or major plot points.

6. Collaborative Review Poster

I love this for the beginning of the year with my freshmen and sophomores. It works as a review for my short story unit and, since they present their posters to the class, it helps all the students review for their unit test. Because I use this within my short story unit, each group will review a different story, though sometimes I will have duplicate groups. You can read more about this project specifically here or find my poster project here .

7. Be Artsy

There are many alternatives to writing projects, and you may have students who much prefer to express their thoughts artistically. Students might work on a collection of shape poems. You could also have them copy a few pages from the novel or short story and create blackout poems . I’ve had students create bookmarks using quotes, or students who drew scenes from period pieces. I have even seen collaborative projects where students created graphic novel-inspired projects.  

8. Take it to the Theater or Silver Screen

If you’ve read a novel or short story that has no film adaptation, this is a particularly excellent activity. Have students imagine who would play in the film, or who would act on stage. Students can create soundtracks for key plot points, design the stage, research film locations, create a film poster or playbill, and even write scenes as a script. This is another collaborative opportunity for students.

9. Write for Children

Have students think about the novel or short story from a different angle. There are a lot of ways to create a children’s story from longer works. Students can condense the story into a picture book, focusing on visual aspects and simple language structure. You can also bring in alphabet books to see how it is structured around a theme, and then have students create a version of the novel in alphabet form. I suggest having a plethora of examples from the library for students to lean on, and have students work in pairs or small groups. This is really a fun activity and having to simplify a story proves to make a great review.

10. Write a Little Bit

Instead of a full paper, think of something creative that involves a little bit of writing. Give students a short stack of post-its and require the answers to fit on the square. You can also collect mint tins and require the same thing. Their “review” notes must fit inside the mint tin. If you have class sets of whiteboards, students can write a summary and then work on condensing the story into the shortest sentence. You may have students write a tweet for a summary or write the “live tweet” of the short story. Any of these can be collected and copied for a class set of notes to study for a later test.

These are all great activities to use as a review for a novel or short story, but they also work as stand-alone projects as well. Put a creative spin on your review activities with any of these, and let me know in the comments what your favorite options are.

Take a look at this resource, Activities for ANY Novel .

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Short Stories from Reedsy Prompts

Short stories may be small, but they are mighty! With the weight of a novel stripped away, great short stories strike directly at the heart of their topics. Often maligned as the novel’s poor cousin, the short story medium has produced some of the most beloved works of fiction. From the eerily-accurate predictions of Ray Bradbury to the spine-chilling thrills of Stephen King and the wildly imaginative worlds of N.K. Jemison, some of the best authors in the business have made their mark writing short stories .

Whether the stories are sweeping explorations of the human condition, or slices of life vignettes that move us to tears, short fiction has the power to dazzle from first word to last.

Who writes Reedsy’s short stories?

Here at Reedsy, we're looking to foster the next generation of beloved authors. To that end, we've been running a weekly writing contest for over six years — and these short stories are the thousands of entries we've received over that time. Our writers come to the contest from all experience levels to hone their skills through consistent practice and friendly feedback. Some of them have even gone on to write and publish novels based on their short story submissions !

Discover short stories of all genres and subjects

Centered around themed writing prompts, these short stories range across all forms, genres, and topics of interest. Simply filter by the genre that appeals you most, and discover thousands of stories from promising new writers around the world.

Maybe you want to read something new, but don’t want to choose a genre? We’ve gathered our favorite entries in our literary magazine, Prompted . Each issue is packed with prize-winning stories that have been introduced and edited by a guest editor. Grab a free copy of our first issue here . Who knows, you could even discover your next favorite author before they even hit the big time!

(And if you’re a writer, consider heading over and entering the short story contest yourself! You may just walk away with the weekly cash prize, plus the chance to appear in Prompted . )

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4 tips on how to write a good short story review.

Reviewing literary works has tremendous significance for the development and expansion of the literary field within the academic sector. It is important to provide an unbiased opinion on a piece of literature to create an independent and professional environment for the literature sphere to exist and undergo substantial advancements. This is the main reason why writing reviews of literary works is such a common practice in academia, also being one of the main indicators of a student’s competency.

Among the types of literature, college kids are often assigned to review, fiction stories receive the most attention. And the greatest focus goes to short stories in particular. Reviewing critically short stories seems to be the best option for students, as this genre of fiction is relatively easy to grasp and analyze, which is a great practice for young people who have little experience evaluating literature. Thus, by analyzing short stories, college kids train their skills and learn the craft of reviewing with exceptional effectiveness. And, as is true of every academic practice, reviewing literary works sometimes proves to be a big challenge for inexperienced students. That being the case, a few killer tips on writing a professional short story review will do!

how to write a good short story

Always Be Unbiased

After you devour the story for analysis, you will most likely have a strong impression of what you read. And developing your own opinion about anything you peruse or study is the main indicator of being equipped to do proper analysis, just like professional writers who provide online essays and reviews. However, having personal impressions of the piece you read may largely harm the quality of your review. The most critical principle that a writer should stick to when developing a review is staying unbiased and fair-minded. Leave aside your subjective impressions of the piece and instead steer an objective and reasoned way of evaluating it.

Provide a Critical Analysis of the Story

Critical analysis of the story is the bulk of your entire review. How you provide a critical viewpoint within a review defines its quality and the effect it will make on the reader – whether the review will be comprehensive and reasonable or not. To analyze the story in a critical way means to include the following important points:

• What is the main idea of the story?
• What is the purpose of the story?
• The story’s theme.
• The setting and the role it plays in the story and whether it’s relevant to the theme of the story.
• The development of the characters.
• The structure of the plot and if it’s built properly.
• The stylistic devices used in the story and if they are employed successfully or not.
• The literary and academic value of the story.

To make your review valuable and informative, you need to include each of these critical points, expressing them to the fullest. Let’s view the first point, for example. When mentioning the main idea of the story, you need to clearly state what the story’s main message is, which serves as the focal aspect of the story and its major goal. Then, we can move to the story’s purpose. This part is similar to the idea, as the purpose of your story is reached and realized with the help of its idea, so these things are interrelated within any story.

Now, speaking of the theme of your story, it’s crucial not to confuse it with the idea as many young writers tend to. A theme is something that is portrayed or described within the story, while an idea is something that the author wanted to communicate to the reader. The rest of the points we mentioned are easy to expound upon, providing you stick to academic standards, which will be the subject of our next section!

Follow the Scholarly Standards

As one of the most critical rules for academic writing, sticking to the standards that have been approved by specialists in order to unify academic writing is extremely important. It’s normal that, inspired by the story (if the story is good, of course), you might want to simply express how compelling the piece is, disregarding other criteria for an academic review. But this is a misleading habit that many young writers follow, only serving to devalue their analyses and making them unprofessional. Writing an academic review presupposes adhering to the strict academic standards, doesn’t it? Make sure to follow the common standards for scholarly writing as long as you want to strike gold with your review!

Develop a Plan

Sketching the structure and creating a plan are quite reasonable options to consider when writing a critical review. Planning your future evaluation will help you include all important points in it, eliminating any possibility of missing anything vital in your review. Be sure to take your time to think over how you want to structure your review. Decide what elements you want to include in it and wherein your essay you want to place them. To make the planning procedure more effective, you should also include sub-points to every major point you write down – this will help you elaborate on noteworthy things in your review.

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Analysis of a Short Story

Broyard, Anatole. (1981). Books of The Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-what.html Carver, Raymond. What we Talk about when we Talk about Love. The New York Times (2013). Retrieved from http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/c/raymond_carver/index.html eNotes. (2002). Short Story Critics. Gale Cengage Puclisher. Retrieved from http://www.enotes.com/what-we-essays/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-raymond The Poetry Foundation (2013). Raymond Carver. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/raymond-carver

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A Tale of Young Flames, and Their Dark Futures, After a Coup

In Lily Meyer’s first novel, “Short War,” love and family ties are tested by a nation’s upheaval.

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By Jamie Fisher

Jamie Fisher is a writer who focuses on culture and literary criticism. She is working on a biography of the musician and songwriter Elliott Smith.

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SHORT WAR, by Lily Meyer

The translator and critic Lily Meyer’s first novel opens in Santiago, Chile, with a lovely, eerie assuredness, a moment like an incantation: a girl walking toward a boy through a crowded party, illuminated. “He knew, with inexplicable, terrifying certainty, that she was coming for him,” the boy, Gabriel Lazris, thinks. He refers to this later as “the true start of his life,” the night he met Caro Ravest, in 1973.

Gabriel is 16, Jewish, American; he came to Santiago with his family as “a monolingual 8-year-old terrified to make eye contact with the school priests or anyone else” and is barely more confident now. His friend Nico gently calls him “our quiet American.” When Caro kisses Gabriel, he has a “soft, cracked-open feeling.” They clink beers in the kitchen, Gabriel reciting the Lazris family toast, an almost charmingly imperialistic relic of the Second World War. “Short war,” he says, and they drink.

But the reader knows what Gabriel doesn’t: that they are all five months away from a coup.

It’s the texture of Gabriel’s story that grabs you, much more than its portrait of American complacency and complicity. Gabriel waiting outside Caro’s school, faint with nerves, “the candied-nut cart streaming sugary smoke” in the plaza. His sullen mother and her tennis diamonds, his conservative journalist father and his bullying dinner-table arguments over black-market fish that has seen better days.

Gabriel knows his father peddles lies about President Salvador Allende to American audiences; when he goes rummaging in his father’s office, he realizes that the C.I.A. will orchestrate a takeover. In June, as Santiago is sealed off and Gabriel prepares to return to the United States, Caro tells him she’s pregnant.

“Short War” is a novel built from novellas, and we move next to Gabriel’s daughter, Nina, in 2015, when she’s a grad student researching a protest movement in Buenos Aires. She thinks of herself as a scholar of connection, someone who believes in learning “to pay real, sustained attention to others.” At the same time she’s started to worry that her career is only an excuse to waste time on social media. Gabriel looms at the edges of her story — depressed and lonely in Chicago, calling Nico on weekends, too broken by loss to return to Santiago even now. “Short war,” he says to Nina before she leaves for Argentina, clinking her glass.

Meyer’s interest is the absurdity of that phrase, a toast, we learn in her acknowledgments, borrowed from her own family. The book that changes Nina’s life — with its intertwined stories of kidnapping, torture and survival — is called “Guerra Eterna,” its title a refutation: eternal war. She reads about a Chilean survivor sheltering in Mexico City with her Jewish toddler and her nightmares, and feels a stab of foreboding when she learns the child’s father was American. She calls Gabriel and asks him, over the hiss of the line: Are you in a book? “I was afraid this would happen,” he says. And Nina begins to piece together her family’s haunted past.

It’s hard for the light liberal satire of Nina’s story to compete with the immediacy of Gabriel’s, or the life and color around him — Caro, unapologetically lovely and smart-mouthed; the vulgar funniness and kindness of Gabriel’s friends. When Nina comes in, a sensual urgency leaves the narrative and never really comes back. And that may be the point. The question at the core of Nina’s story is whether she can ever have a life separate from her father’s, something that isn’t small in comparison. She calls herself “a story leech,” wearing “her dad’s grief like hand-me-down clothes.”

As Caro walks toward a teenage Gabriel at the party in 1973, he knows the rest of his life is about to begin. Nothing for Nina will ever be so clear.

SHORT WAR | By Lily Meyer | Deep Vellum | 275 pp. | Paperback, $16.95

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Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poetry

By Amanda Petrusich

In the past several months, Taylor Swift has become culturally ubiquitous in a way that feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while. The most recent catalyst was, in part, love: in the midst of her record-breaking Eras Tour , Swift, who is thirty-four, began dating Travis Kelce , a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Whenever Swift appeared at one of Kelce’s games, the broadcasters whipped their extra-high-definition cameras toward her, sending legions of amateur lip-readers scrambling for their phones. I’m paid to give legibility to such things, and even I couldn’t help but think that we were crossing some sort of Rubicon with regard to our collective sanity. Swift was everywhere, beheld by everyone. She is one of the most streamed artists of all time on Spotify; Billboard reported that, at one point, she accounted for seven per cent of all vinyl sales in the U.S. Swift is a capable and hugely savvy businesswoman (a billionaire, in fact), yet I began to worry about her in a nearly maternal way: How could anyone survive that sort of scrutiny and retain her humanity? Detaching from reality can be lethal for a pop star, particularly one known for her Everygirl candor. I thought of the oft-memed bit from “Arrested Development,” in which Lucille Bluth, the oblivious matriarch, asks, “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael—what could it cost? Ten dollars?”

This month, Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department,” her eleventh studio album. She has now reached a level of virtuosity within her genre that feels nearly immutable—she’s too practiced, too masterly, to swing and really miss. But “The Tortured Poets Department” suffers from being too long (two hours after it was released, Swift announced a second disk, bringing the total number of tracks to thirty-one) and too familiar. Swift co-wrote most of the record with Jack Antonoff and with Aaron Dessner. (The two producers have oppositional melodic sensibilities: Antonoff sharpens Swift; Dessner softens her.) The new songs suggest that, after a decade, her partnership with Antonoff has perhaps run its course. The tracks written with Dessner are gentler, more tender, and more surprising. The raw and stirring “Robin” seems to address a child—either a very young Swift (the album contains several references to her hijacked youth, including “The Manuscript,” a sombre song about a relationship with an older man), or maybe a future son or daughter.

“The Tortured Poets Department” was released following the end of Swift’s six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn, and the album is mostly about the utter unreliability of love—how bonkers it is that we build our entire lives around a feeling that can simply dissipate. “You said I’m the love of your life / About a million times,” Swift sings on “Loml,” a wrenching piano ballad. “You shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles.” Shortly after Swift and Alwyn split, she reportedly had a fling with Matty Healy , the front man for the British rock band the 1975. (“I took the miracle move-on drug / The effects were temporary,” she sings on “Fortnight.”) Healy is a provocateur, prone to making loutish jokes; onstage, he smokes, eats raw steak, and makes out with strangers. The rumored relationship sent Swifties into spasms of outrage, and revealed the unusual extent to which Swift is beholden to her fans. She has encouraged and nurtured a parasocial affection (at times she nearly demanded it: inviting fans to her home, baking them cookies), and she now has to contend with their sense of ownership over her life. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” she scornfully chastises the “judgmental creeps” who relentlessly hounded her about her love life: “I’d rather burn my whole life down / Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” (She saves the nastiest barb for the final verse: “All the wine moms are still holding out.”) Regardless, things with Healy ended fast, and, a few months later, she did the most wholesome thing possible: she started dating a football player whose team would go on to win the Super Bowl.

Quite a few of the album’s lyrics seem to evoke Healy: “You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots,” Swift sings on the title track, a shimmering song about broken people clinging to each other. I like that line—it suggests self-awareness—but it’s followed by one of the weirdest verses of Swift’s career: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” Other lyrics lack Swift’s signature precision: “At dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she sings. Even the greatest poets whiff a phrase now and then, but a lot of the language on the record is either incoherent (“I was a functioning alcoholic till nobody noticed my new aesthetic”) or just generally bewildering (“Florida is one hell of a drug”). My favorite lyrics are the simplest, and are delivered with a kind of exhausted calm. On “Down Bad,” a woozy song about feeling like shit, Swift admits defeat: “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym / Everything comes out teen-age petulance / Fuck it if I can’t have him.” Feel you, dude.

Each of Swift’s records has a distinct visual component—this is more or less the premise of the Eras Tour . “The Tortured Poets Department” is preoccupied with writerly accoutrements, but the vibe is ultimately more high-end stationery store than musty rare-books room. Initially, the title seemed as if it might be a smirking reference to Joe Alwyn (he once joked about being part of a WhatsApp group called the Tortured Man Club). But I find that the phrase works well as a summation of Swift’s entire self-conception. She has always made a big deal about her pain being generative. “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on the page,” she wrote on Instagram. She has talked about this album as if the songs were mere monuments to her suffering: “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”

An unusual number of Swift’s songs portray love as combative, perhaps because she is so prone to working from a place of wounded longing. On “Better Than Revenge,” a song she wrote at eighteen, Swift sings about art as a useful weapon, a way to punish anyone who does her dirty: “She thinks I’m psycho / ’Cause I like to rhyme her name with things.” It’s a funny lyric, but, by Swift’s current age, most people understand that love isn’t about winning. (Art isn’t, either.) Yet, in Swift’s universe, love is often a battlefield. On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” she catalogues the ways in which fame can pervert and destroy a person: “I was tame, I was gentle, till the circus life made me mean,” she sings. She is paranoid, wild-eyed: “Tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is ?” (After the year Swift has had, she’s not wrong to ask.) The song itself is so tightly produced that it doesn’t sound dangerous. But, midway through, her voice briefly goes feral. I found the moment thrilling, which is maybe part of the problem.

In the weeks before “The Tortured Poets Department” was released, it seemed as though a backlash was inevitable. Swift’s lyrics are often focussed on her perseverance against all odds, but, these days, she is too omnipresent and powerful to make a very convincing underdog. Still, interest in Swift has yet to diminish or fully sour. She announced the album at the Grammys, in February, as she was accepting the award for Best Pop Vocal Album, for her previous record, “Midnights.” I found her speech so profoundly mercenary it was sort of funny. “I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand-new album comes out April 19th,” Swift said. “I’m gonna go and post the cover.”

As I’ve grown older, I’ve mostly stopped thinking about art and commerce as being fundamentally at odds. But there are times when the rapaciousness of our current pop stars seems grasping and ugly. I’m not saying that pop music needs to be ideologically pure—it wouldn’t be much fun if it were—but maybe it’s time to cool it a little with the commercials? A couple of days before the album’s release, Swift unveiled a library-esque display at the Grove, a shopping mall in Los Angeles. It included several pages of typewritten lyrics on faux aged paper, arranged as though they had recently been tugged from the platen of a Smith Corona. (The word “talisman” was misspelled on one, to the delight of the haters.) The Spotify logo was featured prominently at the bottom of each page. Once again, I laughed. What is the point of all that money if it doesn’t buy you freedom from corporate branding? For a million reasons—her adoption of the “poet” persona; her already unprecedented streaming numbers—such an egregious display of sponsorship was worse than just incongruous. It was, as they say, cringe.

Among the other clues Swift doled out were five exclusive playlists for Apple Music (sorry, Spotify!), comprising her own songs and organized according to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. At first, I thought the playlists were just another bit of overwrought marketing, but the more I listened to “The Tortured Poets Department” the more germane the concept felt. Anyone who has grieved knows that these categories are not a ladder you climb toward peace: it is possible, instead, to feel all of them at once, briefly or forever. Each stage is evident on “The Tortured Poets Department.” Sometimes they oppose one another: Swift is cocky and self-loathing, tough and vulnerable, totally fine and completely destroyed. She is free, but trapped. Dominant, powerless. She wants this, but she doesn’t. Those sorts of contradictions can be dizzying, but, in the end, they’re also the last things keeping her human. ♦

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