- Craft and Criticism
- Fiction and Poetry
- News and Culture
- Lit Hub Radio
- Reading Lists
- Literary Criticism
- Craft and Advice
- In Conversation
- On Translation
- Short Story
- From the Novel
- Bookstores and Libraries
- Film and TV
- Art and Photography
- Freeman’s
- The Virtual Book Channel
- Behind the Mic
- Beyond the Page
- The Cosmic Library
- The Critic and Her Publics
- Emergence Magazine
- Fiction/Non/Fiction
- First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
- Future Fables
- The History of Literature
- I’m a Writer But
- Just the Right Book
- Lit Century
- The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
- New Books Network
- Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
- Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
- Write-minded
- The Best of the Decade
- Best Reviewed Books
- BookMarks Daily Giveaway
- The Daily Thrill
- CrimeReads Daily Giveaway
43 of the Most Iconic Short Stories in the English Language
From washington irving to kristen roupenian.
Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language ; it’s high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What does “iconic” mean in this context? Can a short story really be iconic in the way of a poem, or a painting, or Elvis?
Well, who knows, but for our purposes, “iconic” means that the story has somehow wormed its way into the general cultural consciousnessโa list of the best short stories in the English language would look quite different than the one below. (Also NB that in this case we’re necessarily talking about the American cultural consciousness, weird and wiggly as it is.) When something is iconic, it is a highly recognizable cultural artifact that can be used as a shorthandโwhich often means it has been referenced in other forms of media. You know, just like Elvis. (So for those of you heading to the comments to complain that these stories are “the usual suspects”โwell, exactly.) An iconic short story may be frequently anthologized , which usually means frequently read in classrooms, something that can lead to cultural ubiquityโbut interestingly, the correlation isn’t perfect. For instance, Joyce’s “Araby” is anthologized more often, but for my money “The Dead” is more iconic . Film adaptations and catchy, reworkable titles help. But in the end, for better or for worse, you know it when you see it. Which means that, like anything else, it all depends on your point of viewโicon status is (like most of the ways we evaluate art) highly subjective.
So, having acknowledged that there’s no real way to make this list, but because this is what we’re all here to do, here are some of the most iconic short stories for American readers in the English languageโand a few more that deserve to be more iconic than they are.
Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) I agonized over whether I should pick “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Irving’s oeuvre. Both have many, many adaptations to their name and are so ubiquitous as to have drifted into the folklore realm. The latter certainly has more memorable recent adaptations, but the formerย is the only one with a bridge named after it . Ah, screw it, we’ll count them both.
Edgar Allan Poe, โThe Tell-Tale Heartโ (1843) Poe’s early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adaptedโand even more often referenced โshort stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear. (Still not quite as ubiquitous as Poe himself , though . . .)
Herman Melville, โBartleby, the Scrivenerโ (1853) Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag , a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell “Melville! That’s Melville!” Which is all you really need to know about that .
Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) I will leave it to Kurt Vonnegut, who famously wrote , “I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce. It isn’t remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, โThe Yellow Wallpaperโ (1892) Odds are this was the first overtly Feminist text you ever read, at least if you’re of a certain age; it’s become a stand-in for the idea of women being driven insane by the patriarchyโand being ignored by doctors, who deem them “hysterical.” This is another one with lots of adaptations to its name, including a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone , which concludes: “Next time you’re alone, look quickly at the wallpaper, and the ceiling, and the cracks on the sidewalk. Look for the patterns and lines and faces on the wall. Look, if you can, for Sharon Miles, visible only out of the corner of your eye or… in the Twilight Zone.”
Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) Technically a novella, but discussed enough as a story that I’ll include it here (same goes for a couple of others on this list, including “The Metamorphosis”). It has, as a work of literature, inspired a seemingly endless amount of speculation, criticism, unpacking, and stance-taking. “In comment after comment, article after article, the evidence has been sifted through and judgments delivered,” Brad Leithauser wrote in The New Yorker . Fine, intelligent readers have confirmed the validity of the ghosts (Truman Capote); equally fine and intelligent readers have thunderously established the governessโs madness (Edmund Wilson).” And nothing that inspires so much interpretive interest could escape the many interpretations into other media: films, episodes of television, and much other literature.
Anton Chekhov, โThe Lady with the Toy Dogโ (1899) Widely acknowledged as one of Chekhov’s best stories, if notย theย best, and therefore almost no students get through their years at school without reading it. Has been adapted as a film, a ballet, a play, a musical, and most importantly, a Joyce Carol Oates short story.
W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) So iconicโbe careful what you wish for, is the gistโthat you probably didn’t even know it started out as a short story. My favorite version is, of course, the Laurie Anderson song .
O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) According to Wikipedia, there have been 17 different film adaptations of O. Henry’s classic short story about a couple’s thwarted Christmas; the essential formatโDella sells her hair to buy Jim a watch chain; Jim sells his watch to buy Della a set of combsโhas been referenced and replicated countless times beyond that. I even heard Dax Shepard refer to this story on his podcast the other day, and so I rest my case.
James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914) The last story in Joyce’s collectionย Dubliners and one of the best short stories ever written; just ask anyone who wanted to have read some Joyce but couldn’t crackย Ulysses . (Or anyone who could crackย Ulyssesย too.) And let’s not forget the John Huston movie starring Anjelica Huston as Gretta.
Franz Kafka, โThe Metamorphosisโ (1915) Everyone has to read this in school, at some pointโwhich is probably the reason why it’s been parodied, referenced, and adapted many times in just about every format . And why not? What could be more universal than the story of the man who wakes up to find himself transformed into an enormous insect?
Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game” aka “The Hounds of Zaroff” (1924) “The most popular short story ever written in English” is obviously the one about aristocrats hunting people. Widely adapted , but one of my favorite versions is the episode of Dollhouse in which a Richard Connell (no relation except the obvious) hunts Echo with a bow.
Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” (1927) I was tempted to include “Hills Like White Elephants” because of the number of people forced to read it to learn about dialogue (happily, there are other options ), but “The Killers,” while less often anthologized, is more influential overall, and gave us not only two full length film adaptations and a Tarkovsky short but Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” which I do think is a very good story to learn from, if not for dialogue, then for story-making.
Zora Neale Hurston, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933) Hurston is most famous forย Their Eyes Were Watching God , but those who know will tell you that this story of love, marriage, betrayal, and love againโwhich was also made into a 2001 filmโis a classic, too.
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948) The short story that launched a thousand letters toย The New Yorker โor if not a thousand , then at least “a torrent . . . the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction.” Still taught widely in schools, and still chilling.
J. D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) The very first story to destroy many a young mind. In a good way, obviously.
Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950)
Bradbury’s work has thoroughly permeated pop culture; plenty of his stories are widely adapted and referenced, so I could have chosen a few others here (“The Veldt” is my personal favorite). But every year, the image of a smart house going on long after the death of its occupants becomes more chilling and relevant an image; we can’t help but keep going back to it.
Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952) I know it’s really the Hitchcock film adaptation that’s iconic, but you wouldn’t have the Hitchcock without the du Maurier.
Flannery OโConnor, โA Good Man Is Hard to Findโ (1953) Another oft-assigned (and oft-argued-over) story, this one with so many title rip-offs .
Elmore Leonard, “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) I know, I know, it’s “Fire in the Hole” that gave usย Justified , and we’re all so very glad. But “Three-Ten to Yuma” has more name recognitionโafter all, it was adapted into two separate and very good films, the former of which (1957) actually created contemporary slang : in Cuba, Americans are called yumas and the United States isย La Yuma .
Philip K. Dick, “The Minority Report” (1956) As a whole, Philip K. Dick’s work has had massive influence on literature, film, pop culture, and our cultural attitudes toward technology. Most of his best-known works are novels, but when a short story gets made into a Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film, you’re basically assuring iconic status right there. (Or at least that’s how it used to work…)
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) Baldwin’s best known short story pops up in plenty of anthologies, and can be thanked for being the gateway drug for many budding Baldwin acolytes.
Alan Sillitoe, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (1959) Not only is the story itself widely known and readโjust ask Rod Blagojevich ( remember him? )โthat title has been rewritten and reused thousands of times for varying endsโjust ask the reporter who wrote that piece about Blagojevich. Or Adrian Tomine .
John Cheever, “The Swimmer” (1964) Cheever’s most famous story nails something essential about the mid-century American sensibility, and particularly the mid-century American suburbs, which is probably why everyone knows it (it’s also frequently anthologized). Or maybe it’s more about Burt Lancaster’s little shorts ? Either way.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) Another frequently anthologized and unwaveringly excellent short story; and look, it’s no one’s fault that Laura Dern turns everything she touches iconic.
Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson” (1972) Yet another story often assigned in schools (the good ones, anyway), which hopefully means one day we’ll wake up and find out that everyone has read it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, โThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelasโ (1973) As others have pointed out before me , Le Guin’s most read and most famous short story is almost always chillingly relevant.
Donald Barthelme, โThe Schoolโ (1974) This one might only be iconic for writers, but considering it’s one of the best short stories ever written (according to me), I simply couldn’t exclude it.
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1978) Another staple of a writer’s education, and a reader’s; “are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker wonโt let near the bread?” being a kind of bandied-about shibboleth.
Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981) I struggled choosing a Carver story for this listโ”Cathedral” is more important, and probably more read, but “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” has transcended its own form more completely, at least with its title, which has spawned a host of echoes, including Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running , and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , to the point that I think it’s recognizable to just about everyone. A quick Google search will reveal that the framing has been used for almost everything you can think of. There’sโand I kid you notโa What We Talk About When We Talk About Books/War/Sex/God/The Tube/Games/Rape/Money/Creative Writing/Nanoclusters/Hebrew/The Weather/Defunding the Police/Free Speech/Taxes/Holes/Climate/The Moon/Waste/Cancel Culture/Impeachment/Gender/Digital Inclusions/Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease/COVID-19 . You see what I’m getting at here.
Stephen King, “The Body” (1982) Otherwise known, to the general public, asย Stand By Me .
Amy Hempel, โIn the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buriedโ (1983) Want to feel bad about your writing? This was the first short story Amy Hempel ever wrote.
Lorrie Moore, โHow to Be an Other Womanโ (1985) A very very good short story that has given rise to so many bad ones.
Mary Gaitskill, “Secretary” (1988) Bad Behaviorย is iconic as a whole , but probably the story to have most acutely permeated the wider culture is “Secretary,” on account of the film adaptation starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spaderโdespite the fact that it totally butchers the ending.
Amy Tan, “Rules of the Game” (1989) This story originally appeared in The Joy Luck Club , Tan’s mega-bestseller, so probably almost everyone you know has read it. The film version didn’t hurt either.
Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried” (1990) Why, it’s only the most anthologized short story of the last 30(ish) years. That’s why even the people you know who haven’t picked up a book in their adult lives have read it.
Denis Johnson, โEmergencyโ (1992) When I left New York to go get my MFA, a friend gave me a copy of Jesus’ Son with the inscription “Because everyone in your MFA will talk about it and you don’t want to be the girl who hasn’t read it. (It’s also really good).” He was not wrong.
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain” (1997) Everybody knows this storyโeven if they only know it from its (massively successful and influential, not to mention the true Best Picture Winner of 2006) film adaptationโand not for nothing, coming out when it did, it went a long way towards making some Americans more comfortable with homosexuality. Open the floodgates, baby.
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter” (1998) The story that made Lahiri a household name.
Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (1998) Otherwise known asย Arrival . (Also technically a novella.)
Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (2001) At this point, almost everyone has read at least someย Alice Munro, right? This story is one of the best from one of the greats, and was also adapted into a fantastic but heartbreaking film,ย Away From Her .
Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person” (2017) Sure, it’s recent, so it’s not quite as ingrained as some of the others here, but it’s also the story that broke the internet โand quite possibly the only New Yorkerย story that thousands of people have ever read.
Finally, as is often the case with lists that summarize the mainstream American literary canon of the last 200 years, it is impossible not to recognize that the list above is much too white and male. So for our future and continuing iconography, your friends at Literary Hub suggest reading the following stories, both new and old:
Eudora Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.” (1941) Clarice Lispector, “The Imitation of the Rose” (1960) Leslie Marmon Silko, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1969) Ralph Ellison, “Cadillac Flambรฉ” (1973) Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild” (1984) Bharati Mukherjee, “The Management of Grief” (1988) John Edgar Wideman, “Fever” (1990) Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991) Christine Schutt, “To Have and to Hold” (1996) ZZ Packer, “Brownies” (2003) Edward P. Jones, “Marie” (2004) Karen Russell, “Haunting Olivia” (2005) Kelly Link, “Stone Animals” (2005) Edwidge Danticat, “Ghosts” (2008) Yiyun Li, “A Man Like Him” (2008) Claire Vaye Watkins, “Ghosts, Cowboys” (2009) Ottessa Moshfegh, “Bettering Myself” (2013) Amelia Gray, “House Heart” (2013) Zadie Smith, “Meet the President!” (2013) Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” (2014) Diane Cook, “The Way the End of Days Should Be” (2014) Kirstin Valdez Quade, โFive Woundsโ (2015) NoViolet Bulawayo, “Shhhh” (2015) Mariana Enriquez, “Spiderweb” (2016) Ken Liu, “State Change” (2016) Helen Oyeyemi, “Sorry Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” (2016) Lesley Nneka Arimah, “What Is a Volcano?” (2017) James McBride, “The Christmas Dance” (2017) Viet Thanh Nguyen, “War Years” (2017) Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “Friday Black” (2018). . .
Honestly, this list could go on forever, but let’s stop and say: more short stories of all kinds in the hands of the general public, please!
- Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
Emily Temple
Previous article, next article, support lit hub..
Join our community of readers.
to the Lithub Daily
Popular posts.
Follow us on Twitter
Rebecca Solnit on Twitter Conspiracies, QAnon, and the Case of the Two-Faced Mailboxes
- RSS - Posts
Literary Hub
Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature
Sign Up For Our Newsletters
How to Pitch Lit Hub
Advertisers: Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Support Lit Hub - Become A Member
Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter
For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for freeโno paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, youโll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editorsโ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, youโll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.
Become a member for as low as $5/month
Bite-sized: 50 great short stories, chosen by Hilary Mantel, George Saunders and more
Quick and easily shared, is the short story the form for our times? Leading authors pick their favourites
โThe Tributeโ by Jane Gardam (1980)
John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardamโs 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters . Reading this gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of โdiplomatic wivesโ, trailing inebriate husbands through the ruins of empire. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which a small kindness โ though not by a diplomatic wife โ pays off 40 years later. I must have read it a dozen times, to see how its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung; every time it makes me smile with delight. Hilary Mantel
โThe Stone Boyโ by Gina Berriault (1957)
This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on good and evil and especially about the way that peopleโs expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down and eventually force us into compliance with their view. But it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like any great work of art, resists reduction. Berriault, who died in 1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. A wonderful sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories . George Saunders
โThe Love of a Good Womanโ by Alice Munro (1998)
Among the handful of short stories closest to my heart, Iโve chosen โThe Love of a Good Womanโ by Canadian writer Munro, from her 1998 collection of that name. Itโs about a murder โ probably itโs a murder, because nothing is certain โ and a love match that depends on keeping that murder secret. Like so many of Munroโs stories, this one has the scope of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. The sociology of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the loose weave of her narration; the story takes in whole lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us deep inside particular moments. A woman moves among the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. Tessa Hadley
โThe Sirenโ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961)
Born in Palermo in 1896, Lampedusa was a learned prince who died before his work was published. In addition to his celebrated novel The Leopard , he left behind some short stories, including โThe Sirenโ, a mysterious masterpiece that jolts and haunts me every time I read it. It contains two narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two tonal registers and two points of view. There are even two titles; though published as โLa Sirenaโ, it was originally called โLigheaโ, the name of the siren, portrayed as a 16-year-old girl. Lampedusaโs description renders this fatefully seductive creature specific, vulnerable and real. Jhumpa Lahiri The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March.
โA Simple Heartโ by Gustave Flaubert (1877)
Flaubert wrote this story for his old friend and โfellow troubadourโ George Sand. Itโs the story of Fรฉlicitรฉ, an old servant-woman, and the diminishing loves in her life, the final one being a (live โ at first) parrot. It has a sombre novelistic density, and is touching and tender, comic and grotesque. Control of tone is central to its effect. It also exemplifies the Flaubertian principle that irony and sympathy are not incompatible. Sand died before she was able to read it. โSo it is with all our dreams,โ noted Flaubert. Julian Barnes
โFriendsโ by Grace Paley (1985)
This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is dying. The women then go home on the train. It ends with a brief conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-year-old son. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold spaces within it. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of the world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions, our childrenโs colonisation of our hearts and our powerlessness ultimately to protect them. Its understated tone is perfectly pitched: the narrative moves gently, then soars, into either sadness, or joyful contentment โ again and again. I am in this story, and so is the world. Ahdaf Soueif
โMy Lifeโ by Anton Chekhov (1896)
This is Chekhovโs longest short story and one of the very few he wrote in the first-person singular. Itโs the autobiography of a young man in provincial Russia struggling to live up to his lofty ideals and being brought down by lifeโs random contingencies. I actually adapted โMy Lifeโ for a play and know it intimately. If you could only read a single Chekhov story then this is the one: all his gifts and genius โ the wry, dark comedy of his voice, his unique angle on the human condition, his refusal to judge โ are contained in it. William Boyd
โIn the Nightโ by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)
Part poetic incantation, part eccentric kaleidoscopic vision, this is a story which contorts each time you read it. Born in Antigua, Kincaid invents aesthetics which are wholly unique, transfiguring human form and surroundings, in particular, the Caribbean landscapes. Here, she conveys the multiple textures of smaller islands, creating a literary geography which remains experimental, new and indefinable. Irenosen Okojie
โMusic at Annahullionโ by Eugene McCabe (2004)
McCabeโs story is set on the border between Monaghan and Fermanagh sometime in the 1950s or 60s. Two brothers and a sister are uneasily sharing a smallholding. The landscape itself and the states of sour feeling are described with sharpness and precision. When the sister announces that she would like a piano that is advertised for sale locally, one of the brothers buys it for her. But it wonโt fit into the house and is left to rot outside. The failure to get the piano into the house has an extraordinary power and pathos. Its purchase has stood for all hope, and now there is no hope. The hard-won sense of despair and darkness in the final pages of this small masterpiece is memorable and chilling. Colm Tรณibรญn
โWernerโ by Jo Ann Beard (2007)
Only afterwards did I discover that this was in fact a piece of densely textured reportage, but it taught me so much about how to write a short story that I will always see it as one. A young man, Werner Hoeflich, trapped by a fire, escapes by leaping from the window of his New York apartment, across the intervening gap and in through the window of the adjacent building. It has the richness of a novel, the raw and dirty grip of life and was, for me, a revelation. Fine language and a deftly conjured mood are all well and good, but fiction โ of whatever length โ should thrill. Mark Haddon
โThe Window Theatreโ by Ilse Aichinger (1953)
Miscommunication, antic disposition, voyeurism, glee โ this translation of one of Aichingerโs most famous stories provides windows upon windows upon windows. Simply expressed and made to linger long in the mind, it was my first experience of the prizewinning Austrian writer and her dark, precise prose styling, and the start of an ongoing pursuit on my part to read more of her work. Eley Williams
โThe Tell-Tale Heartโ by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
Poeโs obsessive theme was the terror of losing sanity โ never more dramatically evoked than in this masterpiece. In โThe Tell-Tale Heartโ, one of Poeโs shortest โtales of the grotesque and arabesqueโ, and the one that seems most contemporary in the hallucinatory intensity of its narration, an unnamed individual commits a brutal, seemingly unprovoked murder of an old man with whom he lives, disposes of the body by dismembering and burying it beneath the floorboards of the residence they share, and succumbs to madness and self-destruction in the aftermath of guilt. Throughout, the narrator insists on his sanity: โTrue โ nervous โ very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses โ not destroyed โ not dulled them.โ That the murder is entirely irrational is acknowledged by the murderer: โObject there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture โ a pale blue eye, with a film over it.โ
Poe is a master of the โunreliable narratorโ โ a voice that speaks with devastating spontaneity and is utterly convincing โ that has come to be a staple of much suspense and horror fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unhampered by the literary pretensions of certain of Poeโs other, longer stories, totally committed to its unrepentant pathology, and its visceral celebration of this pathology, โThe Tell-Tale Heartโ is the very essence of Poe, as Poe is himself the very essence of the American gothic tradition. Joyce Carol Oates
โAn Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridgeโ by Ambrose Bierce (1890)
Many readers might come to this from the short film, made rather confusingly in French. But itโs a tale set during the American civil war. Peyton Farquhar is being hanged by Union soldiers on a small bridge in Alabama. To say more might ruin the experience of reading it. When I happened on the story a few years ago, I thought I might be one of only a few intrepid readers. Of course, it is considered to be one of the best stories in American literature. Sebastian Barry
โAfter Rainโ by William Trevor (1996)
William Trevor has influenced me more than any other writer, and itโs impossible for me to name one story by him that is an absolute favourite. I can, however, name 20 to 30 stories that I return to often. One of these is โAfter Rainโ. A woman travels alone to recover from a love that has ended too abruptly, but the wish that solitude could exorcise loneliness is as faulty as the wish that love could exorcise disappointment brought by love. The story to me is like an eye drop for the mind. It doesnโt offer a resolution to lifeโs muddiness, but it offers a moment of clarity. Yiyun Li
โIn the Heart of the Heart of the Countryโ by William H Gass (1968)
The thing that is most striking about this story, aside from its restrained, grave beauty, is that it should manage to be so moving. On one level it is a dryly detailed and topographically exact portrait of a small town in the American midwest, but on another it is a devastating threnody for lost love. Gass was one of the great prose stylists, and the writing here is typically smooth and pellucid, conjuring its effects by stealth and unflagging control. Simply, and by simple means, a masterpiece. John Banville
โAmerican Expressโ by James Salter (1988)
The temporal shifts in James Salterโs short fiction are its distinguishing glory. Decades unfold inside the beat of a sentence; a single moment might linger unspoken for many pages. Time seems to concertina, expanding and contracting to open out pockets of aromatic description. In โAmerican Expressโ, a pair of venal New York lawyers make a shabby killing and embark with their riches on a playboy jaunt through Italy, where one of them takes up with a schoolgirl. The story deals in oxymorons โ bitter desire, weak power โ and jolts to a conclusion that is harsh, cool, indelible. Kevin Barry
โParadiseโ by Edna OโBrien (2014)
Key to a great short story is the tension and torsion created within each sentence. โParadiseโ combines remarkable disquiet, poetry and narrative drive. OโBrien is a phenomenal architect of landscape, both physical and human, imbuing her setting with exact detail, lush discomfort, intrigue and counterintuitive fate. The main character, a nurse, has been taken to the overseas villa of her rich lover. Not only must she learn to swim and entertain his companions, sheโs interviewing โ without any real prospect โ for the position of wife. The story is lit with sexual chemistry, but travels a horribly misaligned path. Its true test lies in finding an exit from the female dream. Sarah Hall
โHandsโ by Sherwood Anderson (1916)
This is a strange, dark little story. Its charm comes from the eccentricities of its subject, former schoolteacher Wing Biddlebaum, since โthe story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of handsโ. Anderson evokes the Ohio town of Winesburg by focusing on the hands of its inhabitants. Wingโs hands are โslender, and forever trying to conceal themselvesโ and he notices how the hands of those around him are โquieter, inexpressiveโ. And itโs the wandering hands of Wing Biddlebaum, who has changed his name from Adolph Myers, that leads to the storyโs disturbing conclusion. Guy Gunaratne
โLet It Snowโ by David Sedaris (2003)
Sedaris is in the fifth grade when heavy snow closes the schools. After a few days, his mother breaks down: โGet the hell out of my house,โ she says, โand stay out!โ. The little Sedarises go off sledding and return to find the door locked against them. They peer through the window to see their mother watching TV and glugging wine. โOpen the door,โ they yell, โitโs us!โ. She closes the drapes on them. โThat bitch!โ shouts a Sedaris sister. Fun turns to fear, mild sibling savagery follows and then, suddenly, itโs OK again.
A story โ more memoir than fiction โ that starts with the recognition that the very sight of you drives your mother to drink is attractive to me. But when it ends with that mother wading barelegged through five inches of snow to reach you, itโs everything a story should be. Itโs The Sound of Music / Lord of the Flies / Owl Babies in a few short pages. He is a genius. Nina Stibbe . Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe will be published by Viking on 28 March .
โThe Distance of the Moonโ by Italo Calvino (1963)
This is a gloriously sensual story, narrated by a man who wants anotherโs wife โ but the true star of the show is the moon. Calvino imagines it so close it risks dipping its scales in the sea. Fishermen gather lunar milk as the protagonist writhes in unrequited love. It is a great example of magic realism โ full of texture and motion and mischief and longing. Leone Ross Come Let Us Sing Anyway , by Leone Ross, is published by Peepal Tree.
Contemporary and classic tales picked by Chris Power
โcivil peaceโ by chinua achebe (1971).
Achebe didnโt write many short stories (in the preface to his 1972 collection, Girls at War , he notes that โa dozen pieces in twenty years must be accounted a pretty lean harvest by any reckoningโ), but his best are deeply memorable. โCivil Peaceโ takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Biafran war, and gives vivid life to the luck and misfortune experienced by Jonathan Iwegbu โ an incorrigible optimist in a devastated society โ and the surviving members of his family.
โIn a Bamboo Groveโ by Ryลซnosuke Akutagawa (1921)
Akutagawaโs ingenious riddle of a story takes the form of seven testimonies given to a magistrate in the course of a murder investigation. A samurai has been found dead in a bamboo grove, but the narrative doesnโt end with the confession of the notorious bandit Tajลmaru. Instead, two subsequent testimonies, that of the samuraiโs wife and of the samurai himself, via a spirit medium, contradict each other and the banditโs story, and ask the reader to turn investigator and puzzle out the truth.
โHappy Endingsโ by Margaret Atwood (1983)
Alice Munro once said: โI want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way itโs still happening โฆ I donโt want it to be shut up in the book and put away โ oh well, thatโs what happened.โ Atwood articulates the same position in this fun, thought-provoking story that begins with a man meeting a woman, then offers variants of what happens next. Any ending that isnโt death, she concludes, is false, and the interesting part of stories isnโt what happens, but how and why.
โGoing to Meet the Manโ by James Baldwin (1965)
A southern white deputy sheriff tries and fails to have sex with his wife. As she goes to sleep he talks about the vicious beating he gave a black protestor earlier that day, and returns to a deeper and even darker memory from his childhood: the ritual killing of a black man. After the killing, there was a picnic. Baldwin doesnโt deny his character humanity, but as the storyโs shocking climax shows, neither does he forgive him.
โThe Garden of Forking Pathsโ by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
When described in summary, there is a danger of reducing Borges to a collection of tropes: labyrinths, mirrors, invented books (he avoided โthe madness of composing vast booksโ by pretending they exist and writing commentaries on them). But with these elements he explored some of the most thrilling ideas in fiction. Labyrinths and strange books are both present here, as is a theory of existence that anticipates the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Extraordinarily, all these elements are enfolded within an account of a wartime espionage mission.
โThis Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemenโ by Tadeusz Borowski (1946)
From spring 1943 to summer 1944 the young Polish poet Borowski was a political prisoner in Auschwitz. His stories are some of the darkest documents in world literature. This one describes the narratorโs first shift as a kapo unloading trains packed with Jewish men, women and children. Borowskiโs prose alternates between a blunt numbness and image making of extraordinary power.
โThe Company of Wolvesโ by Angela Carter (1979)
In The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter rewrote some of the best known fairytales โ โBeauty and the Beastโ, โSnow Whiteโ, โBluebeardโ โ challenging their assumptions about gender, sexual cruelty and morality. In โThe Company of Wolvesโ Red Riding Hood is no longer the meek victim of the wolf, but a woman of agency and courage who uses her sexuality to tame him.
โWhy Donโt You Dance?โ by Raymond Carver (1981)
The best Carver stories donโt require the conventional techniques of exposition or backstory but create an extraordinary immediacy. Here we witness a man who has taken his furnishings and arranged them on his lawn: bed, couch, desk, turntable, lamp. Itโs all for sale, and as the man gets drunk with a young couple looking to furnish their apartment, we can guess how he has got here. But a hangnail of the unknowable remains, and stays long in the memory.
โThe Country Husbandโ by John Cheever (1954)
Cheever is known as a chronicler of the suburbs, but in this story the leafy neighbourhood of Shady Hill, a recurring location in his fiction, blends the domestic with something much stranger, almost magical. The story is comic (its title mirrors William Wycherleyโs 1675 comedy of manners The Country-Wife ), but darker currents work beneath its surface and it builds to a stunning finale that is one of the most rapturous passages Cheever ever wrote.
โAn Outpost of Progressโ by Joseph Conrad (1897)
Kayerts and Carlier, agents for the Great Trading Company, are โtwo perfectly insignificant and incapable individualsโ left in charge of a remote trading station. Conrad mines a deep vein of irony as he describes their work โserving the cause of progressโ. As the story unfolds, and the men are shown to be idiotic cogs in the engine of colonialism, Conrad exposes the gap between the high-flown language of such projects (โprogressโ, โcivilisationโ, โvirtueโ) and their brutal reality.
โTwilight of the Superheroesโ by Deborah Eisenberg (2006)
Eisenbergโs story is high on the list of great literature about 9/11. Since the 1990s she has examined the effects of American power on the world and asked the question one of her characters asks here: โHow far away does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it?โ The attack on New York, that โterrible dayโ, although it seemed to come from nowhere, โhad been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtainโ.
โIn the Tunnelโ by Mavis Gallant (1971)
Sarahโs father sends her from Canada to Grenoble as a way of ending her relationship with a married professor, but she ends up on the French Riviera. There she meets Roy, an ex-prison inspector, and rashly moves in with him. The storyโs charge arises from a combination of wit, the awfulness of the relationshipโs collapse, and Gallantโs profound grasp of the psychology of love affairs. She talks about her characters in a way that makes you feel your own perceptiveness is being worked like a muscle.
โThe Yellow Wallpaperโ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
During her lifetime Gilman was best known for her nonfiction, and she was forgotten after her suicide. Her fiction, in particular โThe Yellow Wallpaperโ, was rediscovered in the 1970s by feminist academics. This chilling story takes the โmadwomanโ figure of gothic fiction, memorably used by Charlotte Brontรซ in Jane Eyre , and describes her experience from the inside looking out. Having been told to avoid mental stimulation by her doctor following an episode of depression, Gilman wrote the story to โconvince him of the error of his waysโ.
โThe Overcoatโ by Nikolai Gogol (1842)
It is uncertain whether it was Turgenev or Dostoevsky who said, โWe all came out from under Gogolโs โOvercoatโโ, but his influence on those writers โ as well as on Tolstoy, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and many more โ is profound. The main character of this bleakly hilarious story, the downtrodden government clerk Akaky Akakievich, is arguably the first antihero in modern literature, and his doomed pursuit of a new overcoat one of the most memorably absurd quests in fiction.
โSix Feet of the Countryโ by Nadine Gordimer (1953)
The reality of apartheid, and later the effects of its aftermath, dominates Gordimerโs fiction. Here her narrator, who has escaped the tension of Johannesburg to play at farming in a rural suburb, becomes enraged when, following the death and autopsy of one of his workersโ brothers, the authorities return the wrong body for burial. Despite his efforts to achieve justice, the storyโs final, bitterly ironic lines reveal that he is blind to his own racism.
โBig Two-Hearted Riverโ by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
Hemingwayโs distinctive style โ which John Updike described as โgleaming economy and aggressive minimalismโ โ is stunningly showcased here. Nick Adamsโs journey into the Michigan backwoods is also a journey into his own war-damaged psyche, and his unwillingness to fish the deep water of the swamp a resonant evocation of trauma.
โA Village After Darkโ by Kazuo Ishiguro (2001)
The tension in this uncanny piece is stoked by Ishiguroโs refusal to provide more than tantalising fragments of backstory. At nightfall an old man, Fletcher, arrives at a village where he once held great influence, but is now resented (โI was mistaken about a lot of things,โ he admits). This might be an alternative Britain, or a future one. The dilapidated buildings and Fletcherโs tramp-like appearance give the story a Beckettian feel, while its allegorical quality carries over to Ishiguroโs novel The Buried Giant .
โThe Lotteryโ by Shirley Jackson (1948)
Asked to describe her writing, Jackson once noted its fascination with โthe uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviourโ. โThe Lotteryโ, in which a crowd gathers for a ceremony in the main square of a New England village on a sunny June morning, ends with one of the nastiest surprises in fiction. When the New Yorker printed the story it became the โ Cat Person โ of its era as letters flooded in expressing admiration, disgust, and โ unbelievably โ concern that the gruesome story was true.
โEmergencyโ by Denis Johnson (1991)
Johnsonโs story begins in a hospital emergency room. Itโs the night shift, and Fuckhead (his nickname is the only name for him we get) and Georgie are taking care of hospital business while swallowing every pharmaceutical they can get their hands on. When their shift finishes, they drive into the countryside and reality unravels completely. Johnson rides a line between the sacred and the profane, between hilarity and sadness., and writes prose that will take your breath away
โArabyโ by James Joyce (1914)
The stories in Dubliners divide into the four stages of life, and โArabyโ encapsulates the turbulence and humiliation of adolescence in a boyโs lonely night-time journey across Dublin to buy a gift for the girl he loves.
โA Bright Green Fieldโ by Anna Kavan (1958)
If you love JG Ballard, you should read Anna Kavan. Few novelists, Ballard said, โcould match the intensity of her visionโ, and that same intensity fuels her stories. The narrator of โA Bright Green Fieldโ claims to encounter the same, unnaturally vivid field of grass wherever she goes. Itโs an unlikely candidate for a bete noire, but Kavanโs descriptions of a mountain town in the gathering gloom, loomed over by โthe sheer emerald wall that was the meadowโ, create an atmosphere of powerful unease.
โExtraโ by Yiyun Li (2003)
Granny Lin is 51, and doesnโt know when everyone started calling her granny. Working as a maid at a boarding school in the Beijing suburbs she develops feelings for six-year-old Kang, a rich manโs illegitimate son, an unwanted โextraโ who โhas to be got rid ofโ. Granny Linโs love is complicated; is it maternal, or is it perhaps the great romance she missed out on in her youth? Li has a Chekhovian ability to disappear from the text, allowing a remarkable intensity to develop between reader and story.
โThe Husband Stitchโ by Carmen Maria Machado (2014)
Machado takes a grisly campfire tale (โThe Green Ribbonโ), combines it with the purported medical practice of suturing a womanโs perineum with an extra stitch or two after childbirth to increase her husbandโs pleasure, and creates a powerful modern fable about misogyny and motherhood. Before her wedding day, as Machado expertly builds the atmosphere of foreboding, the narrator notes that, โBrides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candleโ.
โMadame Tellierโs Houseโ by Guy de Maupassant (1881)
Maupassant, probably the only short-story writer as influential as Chekhov, wrote in two modes: short, impressively constructed but one-dimensional stories with trick endings (โThe Necklaceโ is the most famous of these), and longer, more interesting work. He wrote โMadame Tellierโs Houseโ after a friend reported passing a brothel in Rouen with a sign on its door saying, โClosed because of First Communionโ. His expansion on this irresistible detail resulted in one of his greatest stories.
โA Horse and Two Goatsโ by RK Narayan (1970)
Narayan, who wrote more than 200 short stories, called them โconcentrated miniatures of human experience in all its opulenceโ. The opulence of the clay horse at the centre of this story has faded beneath the Indian sun, but the conversation it triggers between an American tourist who speaks no Tamil and Muni, a poor peasant who speaks no English, is not only very funny, but also telling about the degree to which misunderstanding is an unavoidable part of human interaction.
โMinutes of Gloryโ by Ngลฉgฤฉ wa Thiongโo (1976)
This story by Kenyaโs most prominent writer follows the struggles of barmaid Beatrice as she works in a succession of increasingly seedy establishments. Men prey on her, buying her body as if it were โa bag of potatoes or a sack of cabbagesโ, and her hopes of living the high life in Nairobi become more unlikely by the day. โShe fought life with dreams,โ Ngลฉgฤฉ writes, and through a reckless action Beatriceโs fantasies briefly become reality before the story reaches its sorrowful conclusion.
โA Good Man Is Hard to Findโ by Flannery OโConnor (1953)
This story is a vicious and darkly funny account of a familyโs encounter with a criminal gang led by the psychotic Misfit. Its closing lines, and the apparent act of grace they describe, are as memorable as they are ambiguous.
โWe Didnโt Like Himโ by Akhil Sharma (2013)
Two boys grow up together on a lane in Delhi. One, the narrator, becomes a lawyer. The other, Manshu, becomes pandit of the local temple. The narratorโs burgeoning dislike for Manshu, the way the events of life bring them back into contact with one another, the Hindu burial process and the mechanics of โputting someone in the Gangesโ: these elements are so absorbingly animated that the storyโs emotional impact, when it arrives, feels like an ambush.
โHeads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apologyโ by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (2015)
Police shoot two black men outside a comic-book convention in LA, while halfway across the country an artist buys his daughter a cupcake at a vegan bakery. Thompson-Spiresโs self-reflexive story is โangry, like a big black fistโ, but itโs also breathtaking in the way it loops back and forth in time and constantly second-guesses the readerโs assumptions.
โSmote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley)โ by Eley Williams (2015)
โTo kiss you,โ this story begins, โshould not involve such fear of precision.โ Williamsโs story is less a stream of consciousness than a barrelling wave, as a woman debates whether or not to kiss her girlfriend in an art gallery, and all the doubt, thrill, uncertainty, hilarity and panic of love is compressed into a few seconds of indecision.
- Short stories
- Anton Chekhov
Yiyun Li: โIโm not that nice friendly Chinese lady who writesโฆ Being subversive is important to meโ
Taymour Soomro: โI want to challenge reductionist narratives about Pakistanโ
Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga among this yearโs Windham-Campbell prize winners
Edmund White: โMy earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temperโ
2022 in books: highlights for the year ahead
Claire Messud: 'To be a writer is to stand at the side'
Must I Go by Yiyun Li review โ like stumbling across a cache of personal papers
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li review โ a motherโs grief
Most viewed.
- AI Title Generator
- Poem Title Generator
- Book Title Generator
- YouTube Title Generator
- Essay Title Generator
- Title Rewriter
- Title Capitalization
- Sentence & Paragraph Rewriter
- Essay Writer
- Book Title Wizard
- Character Name Generator
- Name Generators
- Pokemon Name Generator
- Character Backstory Generator
- Song Generator
- Poem Generator
- Ideation Articles
- Random Topic Generator
- Writing Prompt Generator
- Random Essay Title Generator
- Writing Articles
- Online Word Counter
- Online Grammar Checker
- Headline Analyzer
- Best Book Writing Software and Book Writing Apps
- 150 Best Resources for Writers
- Productivity
- English Language
- Grammar Tips
- Headline Analyzer Tool
- Title Capitalization Rules
- For WordPress
- Publishing Articles
- Email Marketing
- Book Articles
- How to Get A Book Published
- Best Literary Agencies
- How To Self Publish a Book
16 Famous Short Story Authors and Their Best Stories
Short stories are short pieces of fiction focused on a single plot, character, setting, and theme. Since the 1800s, famous short story authors have left their mark on literary history, preserved in books and other publications.
Table of Contents
Edgar Allan Poe
The influential short story writer was born in 1809. At 24, he wrote “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,” which set him on course as one of the most critically acclaimed writers ever. Edgar Allan later gained fame for his dark tales such as:
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- The Cask of Amontillado
Despite winning awards and selling out newspapers, Poe didn’t receive much recognition until after his death in 1849. Poe’s legacy lives on today, with media adaptations and literature classes studying his work.
Aside from being a short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe is also one of the most famous poets in the world .
This prolific author was a master of satire and a genius for creating unforgettable characters. He gained international fame for works like “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Humorous Tales ” and “ The Million Pound Bank Note .”
Twain also wrote scathingly honest social commentaries and admired lectures on various topics. He was also a fierce abolitionist, growing up on the border between free Missouri and slave-owning states. Newspaper stories he wrote while traveling the globe were popular reads. The American literature giant grew up as Samuel Clemens and died in 1910.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was a Nobel Prize-winning journalist and hunter who greatly influenced 20th-century literature. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he began his career as a writer while working as an ambulance driver during World War I. His works were known for their simplicity of language and modern themes.
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature for “ The Old Man and the Sea ” in 1954. Hemingway was also well known for his adventurous lifestyle, hunting abroad, and fishing expeditions. Some of his other notable works include:
- A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940)
- The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Virginia Woolf
The iconic English author became one of the famous short story authors thanks to her modernist writing style. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and wrote prose works such as “ The Voyage Out ” (1915) and “ Mrs. Dalloway ” (1925).
Her ground-breaking book “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) argued for equal opportunity for women in literature and brought the issue to international attention.
She unhappily suffered from bouts of mental illness throughout her life, culminating in her death by drowning.
James Joyce
Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and playwright. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers, celebrated worldwide for using the novelistic technique in his novels.
A driving force behind modernism and a revered figure to both English language literature enthusiasts and postmodernist critics, Joyce published many short stories in magazines. He eternally remains one of history’s most profound minds whose works continue to shape literature seen everywhere today.
Ambrose Bierce
This celebrated American author’s career covered the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing style, which could be both cynical and darkly humorous, garnered him a strong following of devoted readers. Bierce’s most famous works include Killed at Resacaand Beyond the Wall.
Still, he also wrote poetry, fiction, plays, essays, reviews, and letters and was widely acclaimed for his work in investigative journalism. Bierce penned several iconic war stories, such as “ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ,” which many consider one of the most significant pieces of American literature.
James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s works elaborated on themes of racial inequality, sexuality, and religious issues during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1924 in New York City, Baldwin struggled with his identity as an openly gay black man in America. He’s best known for his works, such as “ Going to Meet the Man and “ The Outing “.
Most of his works focused on human relationships with truth and morality during a difficult period in US history . In addition, he gave powerful speeches discussing social justice issues through his words and advocacy for African American rights. During the latter years of his life, he became popular globally due to his genius writing skills and charitable causes.
Flannery O’Connor
The passionate American writer loved to depict the Southern lifestyle from her Catholic faith-infused perspective. Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Georgia and published two books of short stories and two novels during her lifetime – “ Wise Blood ” and “ The Violent Bear It Away .”
O’Connor also wrote numerous letters and nonfictional essays that were later collected and published. Her works earned many prestigious awards, including the National Book Award (1972) and the National Medal of Arts in 1996.
George Saunders
Sander’s unique blending of humor and pathos makes him one of today’s most famous short story authors. He has written stories, essays, novellas, novels, children’s books, and screenplays which have won him critical acclaim from critics. He penned the National Magazine Award-winning work early in his career, later expanding into a novel.
His “ Tenth of December ” publication was a significant turnaround for his career. George recently won The Man Booker Prize for his 2017 book and received numerous other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This Scottish writer became famous for creating the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. Although he published over 200 works, including novels, poems, plays, and nonfiction, many know him for his 66 detective stories.
He also wrote popular historical romances such as “ The White Company ” (1891) and produced formidable science fiction tales such as “The Lost World” (1912). Doyle was a pioneering author in crime writer who used real-life issues to create compelling mysteries.
Despite being immensely successful as an author, Doyle held firm religious beliefs, which led him to become a spiritualist advocate.
Kate Chopin
Chopin began writing in the late 1890s after being inspired by local folk stories, Creole culture, and other famous short story authors.
Her “ The Awakening ” is a forerunner to modern feminist literature, revealing feelings of freedom among women living in oppressive environments. Other works include:
- The Story of an Hour
Several short story collections were published posthumously. Despite initial criticism for their focus on female sexuality and free will, many consider her a trailblazer for feminist writers.
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver was a celebrated American short story writer, poet, and essayist. He associated his work with the “dirty realism” writing style due to its focus on ordinary people. They explore complex themes such as loneliness, depression, and alcoholism.
Carver began his career in small magazines throughout the United States before having his first book published in 1976. He won an O. Henry award for “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love ” in 1981. He also received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and later died from cancer in 1988.
Shirley Jackson
This hugely influential figure is known for her works that blend horror, psychological terror, and black comedy. She became famous due to her short story “The Lottery.”
Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Rochester before graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in English. She later moved to North Bennington, Vermont, where she’s written most of her works, which would become literary classics.
An ardent feminist who wrote about women’s inner lives in ways unheard of for their time, it’s no surprise her legacy continues. Jackson died at her Vermont home from natural causes on August 8th, 1965.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte was an American feminist, scholar, novelist, and social reformer who advocated for women’s rights to employment and education. She is best known for her short story “ The Yellow Wallpaper ” (1892), which discusses a woman’s mental health struggles.
Gilman also wrote nonfiction works exploring issues of sex and gender roles. She wrote over two hundred poems and hundreds of other pieces on various social reform-related topics. Her efforts in influencing the world through scholarly works helped advance the cause of women everywhere during this historic time.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov is widely considered one of the famous short story authors, alongside Alexandr Ostrovsky and Nikolai Gogol. Born in 1860, he initially worked as a physician while writing short stories. Consequently, he marked 19th-century literature with short stories such as “ The Darling ” and “ Vanka .”
He later turned his attention to plays, producing some of his most notable works. Additionally, he wrote over 500 letters collected in 1952 and can provide insight into his life and work as a writer. His stories often used understatement to make an emotional impression rather than relying on dialogue or plot.
Washington Irving
This legendary figure is one of the earliest American writers to combine influences of his home country and Britain successfully. He rose to fame with tales like “ Rip Van Winkle ” and “ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ,” which not only spoke to the spirit of the people at that time but have become iconic cultural touchstones in the present day.
Outside of writing, Washington was also an accomplished businessman and diplomat, becoming the United States ambassador to Spain from 1842-1846. As a result, Irving kept very close relationships with many influential figures, including William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper. He broadened the literature palette through clever wordplay and sketches derived from local stories or European folklore.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist regarded as one of the most famous short story writers of the 20th century. Born in 1883 in Prague, his works often reflect alienation, anxiety, and isolation themes. He wrote extensively on existential topics and used his writing to address political tyranny and bureaucracy.
Many of his works remained incomplete at his death. Kafka’s influence can still be seen today in literature, philosophy, film, visual arts, and beyond, despite his limited recognition during his lifetime. He died in 1924 after suffering from tuberculosis.
RELATED ARTICLES MORE FROM AUTHOR
15 Authors like Stephen King
Debbie Macomber Books in Order
14 Famous Authors From India
Famous Christian Authors
12 Famous Authors in the Philippines
13 Famous Sci-Fi Authors Worth Reading
Leave a reply cancel reply.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
- Accessibility
Forgot your password?
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive mail with link to set new password.
Back to login
- Short Story Writers
- Bars Where Famous Writers Hung Out
- Strange Stories of How They Passed
- The Greatest Novelists of All Time
- The Top Writers of All Time
- The Very Best Living Writers
- Greatest Poets
- American Writers
- The Greatest Science Fiction Authors
- Best Playwrights
- History's Greatest Female Authors
- Horror Writers
- The Greatest Living Novelists
- Great Essayists
- Russian Authors
- Romance Novelists
- The Best Children's Book Authors
- Suspense Authors
- Writers Who Should Have Biopics
- Mystery Authors
- Great Historical Fiction Writers
- Female Novelists
- The Best Modern Horror Writers
- Young Adult Authors
- History's Most Controversial Writers
- Writers Who Were Drug Addicts
- Movies All Writers Should Watch
- Alcoholic Writers
- The Lamest Authors of All Time
- The Very Best Fantasy Authors
- Crime Writers
- The Best Selling Fiction Authors
- Documentaries About Writers
- The Best Movies About Writers
- Famous Authors Who Used Pen Names
- Celebs Who Wrote Children's Books
- Great Movies About Real Writers
- Do You Know What Famous Authors Look Like?
The Best Short Story Writers of All Time
List of the best short story writers of all time. From Voltaire to George Saunders, a complete list of the greatest short story authors who have written works in English or whose works have been translated into English.ย Usually, short fiction features a small cast of characters and is focused on one incident or anecdote and one overall mood, such as romance , humor , or sadness . Complex stories with sweeping timelines and superfluous characters are not often written in the short story medium, because there is simply not enough time to develop more than one or two cohesive thoughts. The best short story writers think that writing short-fiction is a completelyย separate art form than writing a novel, but some would argue that writing short stories is great practice for writing a full length work of fiction.ย
Because of the constraints of page length, great short story writers have to use language that is descriptive and quickly sets the scene or develops their characters. Hemingway is notoriously good at short, pithy stories. One of his most famous is the world's shortest short story: โFor Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.โ Very short stories are also known as flash-fiction.
Anton Chekhov
Jorge Luis Borges
Guy de Maupassant
Edgar Allan Poe
Ernest Hemingway
Franz Kafka
Leo Tolstoy
Flannery O'Connor
Ray Bradbury
Raymond Carver
Nikolai Gogol
Arthur Conan Doyle
James Joyce
William Faulkner
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alice Munro
Oscar Wilde
Jack London
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kurt Vonnegut
John Cheever
Joseph Conrad
Hans Christian Andersen
H. P. Lovecraft
H. G. Wells
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lists about novelists, poets, short story authors, journalists, essayists, and playwrights, from simple rankings to fun facts about the men and women behind the pens.
- Search Results
The best short stories ever written
Modern life is a busy affair and sometimes, a short story offers the perfect form. Escape with these groundbreaking works, both classic and modern.
The short story, says Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steven Millhauser, has powers the novel only dreams of. โThe novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature,โ he wrote in his essay,ย The Ambition of the Short Story . โ[And yet] the short story apologises for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.โ
Many of history's finest novelists have tried their hand at the short story, and some are even best-known for their prowess in this form.ย Think ofย John Cheever ,ย Katherine Mansfield ย andย Tessa Hadley , all of whom appear on this list. Elsewhere, short stories offer unfamiliar readers an opportunity to dip their toe into a writer's style, or else see a different side of them altogether:ย James Joyce ,ย Carson McCullers ย andย Ian McEwan , arguably best-known for their novels,ย can all be accessed in a different way through their short fiction.ย
Readers continue to show a huge appetite for the short story and it's no wonder when modern writers such asย Lauren Groff ,ย Daisy Johnson ย andย Ottessa Moshfegh ย have turned out some of the most critically-acclaimed collections of recent years. There have even been viral short story sensations: 2017'sย Cat Person , a tale of romance gone wrong, capturedย the cultural zeitgeist and sparked conversations around the world immediately after its publication in theย New Yorker .
So, without further ado, here are 50 of literature's greatest short stories to entertain, distract, reassure and inspire โ just what a short story should do.ย
What did you think of this article? Emailย [email protected] ย and let us know.
Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter
By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy
Join Discovery, the new community for book lovers
Trust book recommendations from real people, not robots ๐ค
Blog โย Posted on Sunday, Jun 17
Best short stories and collections everyone should read.
If you are on the lookout for great storytelling but donโt want to commit to a full-length novel, then short story collections are the answer. Whether itโs just before bed, during your commute, or waiting to see your doctor, small chunks of time are perfect for reading short stories.
Here we have gathered thirty-one of the best short stories and collections , from all sorts of backgrounds and sources, to help you grow your โTo Be Readโ pile.
For your convenience, we've divided this post into two parts: 1. the ten best free short stories to read right now , and 2. best short story collections. Feel free to jump to the section that you prefer!
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great short stories out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized short story recommendation ๐
Which short story should you read next?
Discover the perfect short story for you. Takes 30 seconds!
Free Short Stories to Read Right Now
These individual short stories are the best of the best โ and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse. From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories for you to read.
1. โLamb to the Slaughterโ by Roald Dahl
While not exactly a philosophical or political tale like our first two examples, this twisty short story from Dahl does delve into some shady moral territory. We are introduced to Mary Maloney: a loving wife and dedicated homemaker. In just a few short paragraphs describing how she welcomes her husband home, Dahl makes us sympathize with Mary โ before a rash act turns her life upside down and takes the reader with her on a dark journey.
For those who havenโt read it, we wonโt spoil the rest. However, itโs safe to say that Dahl serves up a fiendish twist on a platter.
2. โThe Lotteryโ by Shirley Jackson
A perennial feature in many a high school syllabus, Shirley Jacksonโs best-known short story clinically details an unusual ritual that takes place in a small town. Thereโs not exactly a lot of plot to spoil in The Lottery โ but within a few short pages, Jackson manages to represent the mob mentality that can drive reasonable people to commit heinous acts.
3. โHow to Become a Writerโ by Lorrie Moore
Told in the second person point of view , this story from Mooreโs debut anthology Self-Help takes an honest look at the inner life of a struggling artist. Through the use of an unusual POV, the author manages to turn her reader into a confidante โ making it abundantly clear that the โyouโ the narrator is speaking about is actually herself.
This story is a standout, but the entire collection is well worth a read for its insight, humor, and disregard for literary norms.
4. โCat Personโ by Kristen Roupenian
In the Social Media Age, no short story has gone viral the way this New Yorker contribution from Roupenian has. Arriving at the height of #MeToo, it begins with 20-year-old Margot embarking on the early stages of flirtation with an older man, Robert. As she gets to know more about this man (as well as filling in the gaps with her imagination), the power dynamic in their relationship starts to fluctuate.
Lauded for its portrayal of Margotโs inner life and the fears many modern women face when it comes to dating, it also has its fair share of detractors โ many are critical of the central character, some are downright outraged by the storyโs success. Still, this story undeniably struck a chord with the reading public, and will likely remain relevant for some time.
5. โCathedralโ by Raymond Carver
First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, โCathedralโ is today known as one of Raymond Carverโs finest works. When it opens, we meet a narrator whose wife is expecting a visit from an old friend, a blind man. Dissatisfied and distrusting of people not like him, our narrator struggles to connect until the blind man asks him to describe a cathedral to him.ย
ย โCathedralโ is one of Carverโs own personal favorites, and deservedly so. His characteristic minimalist style is devastating as the story builds up to a shattering moment of emotional truth โ an ultimate reminder that no-one else can capture the quiet sadness of working-class people like him.ย
6. โA Good Man Is Hard to Findโ by Flannery OโConnor
Innocuously titled, โA Good Man Is Hard to Findโ is nevertheless Flannery OโConnorโs bleakest โ and most famous โ work. It begins unassumingly with a Southern family whoโs planning to go on a road trip. Yet the journey is rudely interrupted when their car overturns on an abandoned dirt road โ and they are met by an enigmatic group of three men, coming up over the far hill.ย
This short story inspired some strong reactions from the public upon publication โ and the conversation continues today as to its frank depiction of the nature of good and evil. Again, we wonโt spoil anything for you, except to say that โA Good Man Is Hard to Findโ is well worth your time.ย
7. โSymbols and Signsโ by Vladimir Nabokov
The famous author of Lolita wrote โSigns and Symbolsโ in 1948. Its premise is seemingly simple: an elderly couple visits their mentally ill son in the sanatorium in America. Yet their background and trials come into sharp focus as the story develops, until an explosive ending disrupts everyoneโs peace of mind.ย
As you might expect, the somber โSymbols and Signsโ diverges sharply from Lolita in terms of both tone and subject โ but its ending will keep you awake at night thinking about its implications.ย ย
8. โSticksโ by George Saunders
Not so much a short story as it is flash fiction, โSticksโ is written from the perspective of a young man whose father has an unusual habit: dressing up a crucifix thatโs built of out a metal pole in the yard. One of Americaโs greatest living short story writers, George Saunders explained: "For two years I'd been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story."ย
The result is a masterful piece of fiction that builds something out of seemingly nothing โ all in the space of only two paragraphs.ย
9. โThe Veldtโ by Ray Bradbury
If thereโs anyone who you can trust to deliver thought-provoking, terrifying science fiction on the regular, itโs Ray Bradbury. In โThe Veldt,โ George and Lydia Hadley have bought an automated house that comes with a โnursey,โ or a virtual reality room. Worried about the nurseryโs effect on the kids, George and Lydia think about turning off the nursey โ but the problem is that their children are obsessed with it.ย
As an ominously prescient prediction of the downside of technology, โThe Veldtโ is a short and shining example of how Ray Bradbury was an author before his time.ย
10. โFlowers for Algernonโ by Daniel Keyes
In this classic short story, we are privy to the journals of Charlie Gordon, a cleaner with an IQ of 68. ("I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me. All my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb.โ) Charlieโs luck changes when he is selected for an experiment that purports to turn him into a genius โ but everything that goes up must come down in the end.ย
โFlowers for Algernonโ won the Hugo Award in 1960 for its groundbreaking presentation. Heartbreaking and rich with subtle poignance, it is likely to remain a staple for centuries to come.ย ย
Best Short Story Collections to Devour
If you'd like many short stories at your fingertips all at once, short story collections are where you should look. Here, we've collected 21 of the best short story collections โ along with the standout story in each volume.
11. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Standout Story: โA Manual for Cleaning Womenโ
12. Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortรกzar
Standout Story: โHouse Taken Overโ
13. Drifting House by Krys Lee
Standout Story: โDrifting Houseโ
Looking for something new to read?
Trust real people, not robots, to give you book recommendations.
Or sign up with an email address
14. Dubliners by James Joyce
Standout Story: โThe Deadโ
15. Everythingโs Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King
Standout Story: โRiding the Bulletโ
16. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Standout Story: โThe Garden of Forking Pathsโ
17. Florida by Lauren Groff
Standout Story: โAbove and Belowโ
18. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman
Standout Story: โThe Flints of Memory Laneโ
19. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
Standout Story: โThe Pigโ
20. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
Standout Story: โSamsa in Loveโ
21. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Standout Story: โFor Esme - With Love and Squalorโ
22. Rashลmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryลซnosuke Akutagawa
Standout Story: โIn a Bamboo Groveโ
23. Runaway by Alice Munro
Standout Story: โRunawayโ
24. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
Standout Story: โThe Trail of Your Blood in the Snowโ
25. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
Standout Story: โA Man Told Me the Story of His Lifeโ
26. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway
Standout Story: โHills Like White Elephantsโ
27. The Complete Stories by Flannery OโConnor
Standout Story: โA Good Man is Hard to Findโ
28. The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Standout Story: โThe Lady with the Dogโ
29. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Standout Story: โIโd Love You to Want Meโ
30. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Standout Story: โThe Thing Around Your Neckโ
31. The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferrรฉ
Standout Story: โWhen Women Love Menโ
Ready to write your own short story? Check out these short story ideas for all your inspiration needs.
Continue reading
More posts from across the blog.
33 Best Vampire Books to Sink Your Teeth Into
From the reported reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the explosive success of Twilight, thereโs no question about it: vampires are โinโ right now. At once dangerous, bloodthirsty, and sensual, vampires are the perfect villains to mesmerize both protagonists an...
The 20 Best Haruki Murakami Books, Ranked
Haruki Murakami is known for his surrealist writing. Here are the best Haruki Murakami books that will show you just how fantastic his works are.
15 Best Toni Morrison Books: Where to Start
Choosing the very best Toni Morrison books would be near impossible (and totally subjective). So instead, to introduce you to this literary giant, we've curated the perfect route into a lifetime of remarkable writing...
Heard about Reedsy Discovery?
Or sign up with an
Or sign up with your social account
- Submit your book
- Reviewer directory
Free course: How to Write a Short Story
10 lessons to turn your story idea into a sparkling piece of short fiction.
Erica Fransisca
10 famous short stories you can read online.
Do you ever want to read famous literary work, but find it hard to actually make the time to sit down and open a book? I know I do sometimes. The good news is, there are plenty of famous short stories by renowned authors youโre probably familiar with. Many of them are available online!
Iโve compiled here some of my own favorites, plus a synopsis for each and why I think youโd enjoy them.
Here are some famous short stories that you can read online for free :
1. โThe Lotteryโ by Shirley Jackson
Best known for her horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House, Jacksonโs short story is not any less chilling. It starts by describing a village and its annual lottery. Weโre introduced to the village families and taken through their rituals. By the time we realize what the Lottery entails, however, itโs already too late for the โwinnerโ.
I love the eeriness and that it reminds us how blindly following tradition can be dangerous.
You can read โThe Lotteryโ in the New Yorker , where it was first published back in 1948.
2. โLamb to the Slaughterโ by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl is the British writer who has created many of our childhood favourites. From Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the recently filmized The BFG . Not surprisingly, he has written his share of famous short stories.
This is about a wife who kills her husband and hides the murder weapon in such an unexpected way that the investigating policemen will probably never, ever, find it.
โLamb to the Slaughterโ is a brilliant example of black comedy. I loved it exactly because of the simple language that takes such a dark theme and portrays it with misplaced lightness and humour.
You can read it here .
3. โA Very Old Man with Enormous Wingsโ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marquez is arguably one of the most successful Latin American writers. If you havenโt read his longer works, this short story might convince you to start doing so.
A winged old man appears in a coupleโs backyard and what follows is their response, which in turn exposes the capacity for cruelty that lies in us all. I think itโs an important reminder of what a person can become if theyโre suddenly handed power over the weak.
Itโs available to read here .
4. โThe Second Bakery Attackโ by Haruki Murakami
Another eccentric work by Murakami. Itโs always hard to describe what his books are about, and this oneโs no different. This one centers around a newly married couple who wakes up hungry one night. The husband suddenly tells his wife that he once attacked a bakery, and she convinces him to do a second one.
What follows become a study in the relationship dynamics, past actions and being in control of oneโs fate.
See what you think after you read it here .
5. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ by George Orwell
From one of the more important pioneers of modern dystopian novels is this metaphorical story of British imperialism. Itโs unknown to what extent โShooting an Elephantโ is autobiographical, considering it was published as an essay.
It describes the English narratorโs experience shooting an elephant, only because heโs coaxed by the Burmese crowd behind him. Itโs sad and poignant, especially as we see his genuine anguish at watching the great elephant fall and suffer.
Itโs available for free here .
6. โThe Eggโ by Andy Weir
Iโm sure most of you know of The Martian film featuring Matt Damon. Well, the author who wrote the book it was adapted from has a famous short story called โThe Eggโ.
Only 1000 words and comprised almost entirely of dialogue, itโs a rather quick read. Though it will leave you thinking about it still. Itโs clever and thought-provoking, scary and comforting at the same time. What I enjoyed most about this story: we make our own meaning out of it.
Itโs been translated into over 30 languages by readers. Theyโre all available in Weirโs own website along with the original English version.
7. โ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridgeโ by Ambrose Bierce
Unlike others in this list, Bierce is popular for his short stories. Heโs a prolific writer and journalist, and I think you shouldnโt miss this one. I read this a few years ago and still remember how haunting and beautiful it was.
Set during the Civil War, it begins when a man is being prepared for execution. The non-linear narrative blurs his memories with the present time, and the mind with reality. I donโt want to say too much as itโs the kind of plot that you need to discover for yourself.
Check the story out on Project Gutenberg .
8. โPremium Harmonyโ by Stephen King
This is a heart-breaking story by Stephen King, perhaps the most influential horror writer of today. It follows the failing marriage of a couple who canโt stop arguing about trivial things, until a tragedy happens.
It was the ending that really hit me, not necessarily because I didnโt see it coming, but because of how our protagonist handled it. The story is also set in Castle Rock, Kingโs fictional town that features is many of his works.
Itโs published in the New Yorker .
9. โThree Questionsโ by Leo Tolstoy
We probably know Tolstoy from his long works, including the 1,225-paged War and Peace. Turns out he also writes short stories.
Written in the style of a parable, โThree Questionsโ is about a king endeavours to find the answers to three questions he thinks are the key to success.
10. โThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelasโ by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is highly regarded for her sci-fi and fantasy series, which I have yet to read. But if theyโre anything like her short story, then I have only high expectations.
Omelas, a city of perfect utopia, is revealed to thrive only because of the continuous misery of a single child. It proposes that no matter how it appears, happiness simply cannot exist without suffering.
Itโs not too long and you can read it here .
I hope you enjoy these famous short stories as much as I do!
If you want something even shorter that will take less than 5 minutes, try my flash fiction A Modern Tale of Kinship !
20 Great American Short Stories
We hope you enjoy reading these stories (there are actually thirty). They represent the first collection published at American Literature. You may also enjoy Favorite Short Story Collections or search The Short Story Library
You may also be interested in The Short Story of the Day and 25 Great American Novels
- The Gift of the Magi (1905) by O. Henry This tender story -- one of the most famous titles in the short story genre -- is a must-read. The story is about a young couple and how they meet the challenge of buying each other a Christmas gifts when they don't have enough money. This sentimental tale has a moral lesson and is widely enjoyed during Christmastime and the holiday season. Study Guide
- The Little Match Girl (1845) by Hans Christian Andersen This is a special seasonal selection for The Holiday Season. It's a story to read for perspective, and is also featured in our Christmas Stories collection. Study Guide
- To Build a Fire (1908) by Jack London A classic Man versus Nature story set in the Yukon Territory in Northwestern Canada. "The dog did not know anything about thermometers" but it had the sense to know "that it was no time for travelling." A brilliant story to read in the depth of winter when a freezing spell is in the forecast or gripping your region.
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890, 1891) by Ambrose Bierce A short story masterpiece: This a suspenseful story about a Civil War soldier, Petyon Farquhar, who has been captured by enemy troops. The story opens in a dangerous predicament, with the soldier about to be hanged, "A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama ... A rope closely encircled his neck." Will Farquhar succeed in his effort to make a daring escape? Study Guide
- A Dark Brown Dog (written 1893, published 1901) by Stephen Crane This a powerful and well written tale of sorrow. The story -- depending on the reader -- can operate on at least two levels; as a simple story about a dog, a child and crushing cruelty. It may also be interpreted as an allegorical social criticism after the American Civil War. Either way, it's a powerful, sad story.
- The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W.W. Jacobs Three wishes and a Monkey's paw. What could go wrong? A horror story in the short story form. And I quote: "The first man had his three wishes. Yes," was the reply, "I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw."
- The Cask of Amontillado (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe A classic revenge story in the horror genre. The story is set in an unspecified Italian city, the protagonist, Motressor believes he has suffered a thousand slights and injuries at the hand of his friend. Montressor invites -- rather tricks --his friend, Fortunato , into tasting some wine stored back at his pallazo in the wine cellar.
- Eve's Diary (1906) by Mark Twain Mark Twain's take on the battle of the sexes is funny and witty and brilliant as he writes once from Eve's perspective and then follows-up from Adam's. A sample observation from Eve, "He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright..." I recommend starting with Eve first, then move over to the companion piece, Extracts from Adam's Diary .
- The Story of an Hour (1894, 1895) by Kate Chopin This dramatic short story -- an early entrant in feminist literature -- was very controversial when published in 1894. It suggests a possibility that people of that era were more comfortable rejecting rather than considering. The story still has the power to make modern readers uncomfortable. But please note that it is possible and sometimes even desirable to criticize an aspect of something to point out a nuanced feature; a quick mind can illuminate part of an arrangement without condemning the entire arrangement. I believe that is what Chopin did here. This suspenseful and climactic story will take you on an emotional journey. Study Guide
- The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) by Bret Harte The hard-luck life of hard-hearted miners changes with the birth of Thomas Luck who draws on the heart strings of the rough and tumble miners of Roaring Camp. Featured in our Civil War Stories
- Regret (1897) by Kate Chopin A beautiful story hinting at the depths of a woman's emotional complexity. A great short story, one that could easily be misunderstood by modern feminists.
- The Skylight Room (1906) by O. Henry This one was selected for its simple poignancy.
- A Horseman in the Sky (1889) by Ambrose Bierce Another interesting story from Ambrose Bierce. This one is also set during the American Civil War. I classify this one under man versus himself. Study Guide
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) by Washington Irving One of the early American classics, and don't forget its famous companion Rip Van Winkle .
- My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832), Young Goodman Brown (1835), and The Minister's Black Veil (1832) by Nathaniel Hawthorne All three of these stories are important examples of Hawthorne's contribution to the genre of Dark Romanticism, and should be read. The first one is my favorite of the three. If you are having trouble understanding the stories, it might be helpful to visit Hawthorne's Home Page for some background, and The Minister's Black Veil Study Guide
- The Cactus (1882) by O. Henry A classic dose of O. Henry coming straight at you. Short and direct. Communication is important.
- The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe "Me crazy? Not at all. Let me prove my sanity by describing how carefully and ingeniously I murdered my victim!"
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865) by Mark Twain The famous story of Dan'l Webster the frog, and his anticipated performance in the jumping contest.
- Scarlet Stockings (~1869) by Louisa May Alcott "[ Belle Morgan ] does and says what she likes, is very blunt and honest, has ideas and principles of her own, goes to parties in high dresses, won't dance round dances, and wears red stockings, though Mrs. Plantagenet says it's fast." Independent, assertive, and clad in scarlet stockings. Lennox is helpless to resist.
- An Angel in Disguise (1851) by T.S. Arthur A sentimental story about love and kindness: "A bond had already corded itself around them both, and love was springing into life."
- Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856) by Herman Melville A widely read story, one of Melville's finest examples of Dark Romanticism, whose interpretation has been widely debated. If you figure out what it means, please let us know!
- The Purloined Letter (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe Poe again, this time with an early entry into the genre of detective stories. Also consider The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget
- A Jury of Her Peers (1917) by Susan Glaspell This short story is based on a murder story that Glaspell covered as a young reporter. It's adapted from her play Trifles which is a selection on the High School list. Read the story and please share it if you like it, Glaspell deserves to be more widely known.
- On the Gull's Road (1908) by Willa Cather A love story complicated by circumstance and protocol.
- The Lottery (1948) by Shirley Jackson A comprehensive summary of The Lottery , Jackson's dramatic and suspenseful short story. This story was probably intended as an allegorical lesson but it sparked controversy and even outrage across the United States, particularly in rural communities like the one where the story takes place.
- Thank You, M'am (1958) by Langston Hughes A comprehensive summary of Thank You, M'am . A compassionate story about what happens when a young boy tries to rob the wrong woman! Forgiving, yet firm: we should all be like Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.
- The Split Cherry Tree (1939) by Jesse Stuart A comprehensive summary of The Split Cherry Tree . TIn this widely read story, set in the rural hills of Kentucky in the 1930s, young Dave Sexton finds himself trapped between the modern world that demands an education and his father's past where hard work may have held more value than "book learning." A conflict arises when he is punished by his teacher, and Dave's father Luster has to make a determination about the value of education.
- The Cat (1901) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Freeman's cunning in crafting this tale is well matched to the cat's marvelous waiting powers, hunting for its prey and anticipating the return of its master.
- The Lady, or the Tiger? (1882) by Frank Stockton The princess has a difficult choice to make. This iconic story has become a catchphrase to describe a problem that has no solution.
- The Night Came Slowly (1895) by Kate Chopin "The night came slowly, softly, as I lay out there under the maple tree."
Ready for more? You may enjoy our Favorite Short Stories Collection . Only have five minutes to spare? Try one of these Short Short Stories , sorted to suit your mood.
Return to American Literature Home Page
UK Edition Change
- UK Politics
- News Videos
- Paris 2024 Olympics
- Rugby Union
- Sport Videos
- John Rentoul
- Mary Dejevsky
- Andrew Grice
- Sean OโGrady
- Photography
- Theatre & Dance
- Culture Videos
- Food & Drink
- Health & Families
- Royal Family
- Electric Vehicles
- Lifestyle Videos
- UK Hotel Reviews
- News & Advice
- Simon Calder
- Australia & New Zealand
- South America
- C. America & Caribbean
- Middle East
- Politics Explained
- News Analysis
- Todayโs Edition
- Home & Garden
- Fashion & Beauty
- Travel & Outdoors
- Sports & Fitness
- Sustainable Living
- Climate Videos
- Behind The Headlines
- On The Ground
- Decomplicated
- You Ask The Questions
- Binge Watch
- Travel Smart
- Watch on your TV
- Crosswords & Puzzles
- Most Commented
- Newsletters
- Ask Me Anything
- Virtual Events
- Betting Sites
- Online Casinos
- Wine Offers
Thank you for registering
Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in
The top 20 short story collections
From anton chekhov to ali smith, these authors have nailed the art of the short story. charlotte cripps picks the best, article bookmarked.
Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails, thanks for signing up to the breaking news email.
T here is nothing more appealing, particularly when time is limited, than dipping into a short story collection.
And just because this genre is written in fewer words than a novel, it doesnโt mean itโs any less potent.
The short story can be a mechanism for writers to explore and find their own voice. For others, the themes in a short story can gestate and make it into their greatest novel.
Some writers are simply more prolific at short story writing, while others just donโt have time to write a novel, finding short stories less of a commitment.
Here, we round up 20 of the best short story collections for those who want an enduring story in fewer pages.
Dancing Girls and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaidโs Tale author โ whose sequel, The Testaments, is out on 10 September โ reveals the complexities of human relationships in ordinary peopleโs lives in her occasionally violent short story collection. Standout stories include โThe Man from Marsโ, in which a college student with a creepy stalker almost comes to appreciate this unhealthy obsession, when it gives her the attention that is lacking in her mundane life.
The Collected Short Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald
This career-spanning collection of stories brings together the Tender Is the Night authorโs most famous stories, including โThe Diamond as Big as the Ritzโ. This sinister fantasy tale about the perils of fabulous wealth is a topic he explored in greater depth later, especially when writing his best-known novel The Great Gatsby .
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl is better known for childrenโs books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , but these creepy, tense and dark stories are a real treat for adults. A highlight is โMrs Bixby and the Colonelโs Coatโ, about a married woman who pawns a mink coat her lover gave her, with a jaw-dropping twist at the end. Alfred Hitchcock directed the screen version.
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
This is the third and most revered short story collection by the pioneering modernist writer, whose psychologically in-depth characters tend to have sudden epiphanies. It was written towards the end of Katherine Mansfieldโs short life (she died aged 34 of tuberculosis), and includes the title story, one of her best-known works. In it, the wealthy Sheridan family prepares for a picnic, and through this seemingly mundane affair, the author deals with issues of life and death as well as the British class system.
The Acid House by Irvine Welsh
The Trainspotting authorโs first collection of short stories is a real page-turner, bursting with colourful characters and humour. He plays with surrealism and fantasy in standout stories including the title story, about a football hooligan on an acid trip and a pregnant feminist on her way to the hospital who are struck by lightning. In โEurotrashโ, a Scottish junkie hangs around Amsterdam in typically hopeless, Trainspotting fashion.
Top 20 short story collections
First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan
The author admitted that his first published work allowed him to experiment and discover his voice. The perverse and ominous stories in this collection are linked by a theme of adolescence and include โButterfliesโ , in which a man has a sordid meeting with a girl who he then drowns. The man describes the murder himself, and is alarmingly void of emotion when doing so.
Public Library by Ali Smith
The Man-Booker shortlisted author of Autumn and How To Be Both defends UK public libraries against threats of mass closures in her most recent, must-read short story collection. All of the characters in its 12 stories are passionate about books. Highlights include โThe Ex-Wifeโ, in which Katherine Mansfield becomes the other woman in a relationship, when the narrator feels left out of his partnerโs life as she researches the famous authorโs life and works.
Recommended
- 30 best childrenโs books: From Peter Rabbit to Artemis Fowl
- Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls, book review: Utterly heartfelt
- Best YA books for readers of all ages
Nine Stories by JD Salinger
The American author of The Catcher in the Rye was deeply affected by his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, and this is reflected in his writings. This collection includes two of his most famous short stories โ โA Perfect Day for Bananafishโ, about a combat veteran recently discharged from an army hospital, and โ For Esmรฉ โ with Love and Squalorโ, a tribute to those former Second World War soldiers suffering from PTSD.
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
The master of the contemporary short story won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, at the age of 82. She started writing short stories when she was at home with three young children and didnโt have time to write a novel. Her 2004 collection contains stories about 12 women whose romantic lives are derailed by broken marriages and betrayed affections.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Angela Carter made it very clear that her intention was not to do โhorrible, โadultโ fairy talesโ but to โextract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new storiesโ. These dark and sensual new tales include the famous title story, which acts more like a novella within the collection. This gruesome story is about a beautiful young girl who finds the bodies of her husbandโs previous wives in a castle chamber.
Dubliners by James Joyce
The authorโs only short story collection, which is taken up largely by the subject of death, nearly never made it into print. One publisher even burnt the manuscript when he changed his mind about publishing it. Highlights include โEvelineโ, about a girl deciding between staying at home like a dutiful daughter or leaving Dublin with her lover. โThe Deadโ is considered his best short work and a masterpiece of modern fiction.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Carverโs breakthrough short story collection is a punchy and concise portrait of the lives of people ambling along in middle America. The writer digs deep into the themes of friendship and heartache with his use of vivid dialogue. The unedited version of the stories were first published after his death under the title โBeginnersโ, with the approval of Carverโs widow.
The Collected Stories by Jean Rhys
In 1945, Jean Rhys said that her stories were โtoo bitter... and besides, who wants short stories?โ She found fame in 1966 with her novel Wide Sargasso Sea , which went unpublished for over 20 years. Her stories draw on autobiographical material, moving between the Caribbean, London and Paris โ all places where she lived โ and the characters are mostly women living life on the periphery of an indifferent society, dealing with alcoholism, doomed relationships and poverty.
The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is best-known for his poem โThe Ravenโ, but fans of his Gothic tales of horror will love these macabre stories that include โThe Fall of the House of Usherโ, in which a brother buries his sister alive in the family tomb, and one of Poeโs best known short stories, โTell-Tale Heartโ, in which the narrator tries to convince the reader of his sanity while describing a murder.
Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka is a master of the short story and never finished any of his full-length novels. This collection, published in Kafkaโs lifetime, brings together the few works that he actually wanted to be published. It includes his most famous story, โMetamorphosisโ, about a manโs alienation when he turns into a beetle, and โThe Judgementโ, which Kafka saw as one of his most perfect literary creations. He instructed his executor to burn all his unpublished writing after his death โ but this was not upheld. These stories can be found in The Burrow .
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
This posthumous collection by the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea includes a foreword by his sons, as well as the classic First Forty-Nine Stories and a number of other stories. Considered to be one of his best stories is โThe Snows of Kilimanjaroโ about Harry, a writer dying of gangrene while on Safari in Africa, who is musing on his life experiences. It was turned into a 1952 film starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, with an extra part written especially for Ava Gardener.
The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde
Though he is best known for his novels and plays, Oscar Wildeโs stories for children are fairytales for any age group. Wilde, who believed it was โthe duty of every father to write fairytales for his childrenโ, enjoyed reading โThe Selfish Giantโ to his two sons. The collectionโs title story is about a statue who asks a swallow to strip him of all the jewels and gold leaf on his body, to help the poor โ a tale which canโt fail to make you cry.
Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
The Argentinian writerโs novel Fever Dream made the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. Her debut collection of eerily unnerving and nightmarish short stories translated into English includes Headlights , in which a jilted bride is dumped at a roadside petrol station by her new husband โ along with lots of other rejected women. In the title story a young womanโs transformation from a teenager involves her eating live birds, much to the disgust of her parents.
Selected Stories by Anton Chekov
Considered the greatest short story writer, Chekov collated his 30 best stories into this collection. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky โ who translated War and Peace , Doctor Zhivago , and Anna Karenina โ it includes โThe Lady with the Dogโ, about an adulterous affair that turns to love.
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
These 12 melancholic short stories, from the Orange Prize -winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun , focus largely on the lives and experiences of Nigerian women. Standout stories include Imitation , in which a young motherโs new life in Philadelphia is turned upside down when she finds out that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home, and the title story, about the loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to America.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
New to The Independent?
Or if you would prefer:
Want an ad-free experience?
Hi {{indy.fullName}}
- My Independent Premium
- Account details
- Help centre
Seven of the Best Modernist Short Stories Everyone Should Read
The best modernist stories selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
A number of modernist novels are praised as among the greatest novels of the twentieth century: James Joyceโs Ulysses , Virginia Woolfโs Mrs Dalloway , and Joseph Conradโs novella Heart of Darkness , to offer just three examples. But modernist fiction had its origins in the short story form, and many of its finest statements about art and the world are to be found in short stories. Below we introduce seven of the most definitive and must-read modernist short stories. Would you add any authors or stories to this list of the best modernist short stories, or would you substitute any of our choices for a different story?
1. Katherine Mansfield, โ The Garden Party โ.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was the one writer Virginia Woolf was jealous of , according to Woolf herself. Mansfield never wrote a full-length novel, but wrote a number of classic modernist short stories. This story, from 1920, is probably her most famous: it focuses on a young woman, Laura Sheridan, whose family is holding a garden party at their home in New Zealand. Shortly before the guests arrive, tragedy strikes: one of their neighbours from the poor part of the village dies in an accident.
The story is told in a spare, simple style, but with moments of trademark modernist features: in particular, stream of consciousness and the idea of the โepiphanyโ or moment of consciousness. Weโve offered a short summary and analysis of โThe Garden Partyโ here .
2. James Joyce, โ The Dead โ.
The concluding story in Joyceโs 1914 collection Dubliners , and by far the longest story in the book, โThe Deadโ is widely regarded as one of the greatest modernist short stories ever written. It tells of a husband and wifeโs night out at a New Yearโs party, and the โepiphanyโ or conscious realisation that the husband, Gabriel Conroy, experiences as they arrive home at the end of the night. Joyce was one of the great modernist stylists , and every detail here is ripe with suggestion and connotation.
3. Virginia Woolf, โ The Mark on the Wall โ.
I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.
โThe Mark on the Wallโ puts such an idea into practice: this short tale focuses on the musings of a narrator who is sitting in a room and trying to figure out what the mark on the wall is. This starting-point leads into another thought, and then another โ showing the โstream of consciousnessโ that many of our minds follow in an average day.
Woolf wrote โThe Mark on the Wallโ in 1917, while the First World War was still raging; itโs the earliest of her โmatureโ and most recognisably modernist short stories. The story was conceived partly as an escape from the wearisome process of writing her second novel,ย Night and Dayย (1919), which, like her first novel, began to gesture towards a new modernist technique but hadnโt quite arrived there yet.
We have analysed this story here .
4. Anton Chekhov, โ Gusev โ.
Although perhaps not Chekhovโs very finest story, โGusevโ shows how the Russian master of the short story helped to anticipate and, in a sense, create the modernist short story in the late nineteenth century. โGusevโ (1890), which focuses on the conversation of a group of soldiers aboard a boat travelling to Russia, was singled out by Virginia Woolf as an example of the new impressionistic, โspiritualโ and psychological way of writing which she herself was to embody so consummately in her fiction.
5. D. H. Lawrence, โ Odour of Chrysanthemums โ.
In many ways, โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ was the story that made D. H. Lawrence โs name. Published in 1911 in a magazine edited by the writer Ford Madox Ford, โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ focuses on the mixed feelings experienced by a minerโs wife after her husband goes missing and, following the news that he has been killed in a mining accident, her feelings about his death and her reassessment of their marriage.
The story is a fine illustration of Lawrenceโs concept of โapparent formlessnessโ, where a seemingly unstructured story actually evinces tight control but has the appearance of reflecting the messy realities of ordinary life.
6. Joseph Conrad, โ The Secret Sharer โ.
Conradโs stories and novels can be linked with the adventure story genre, especially the colonial and imperial romances of hugely popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers like H. Rider Haggard . But whereas Haggard is a pure storyteller offering adventure and plenty of action , Conrad is more concerned with questioning the very nature of storytelling and examining our perceptions of the world โ including how we perceive reality. โThe Secret Sharerโ (1910) is narrated by a man who saves the life of another man found drowning in the sea, only to discover that the rescued man was guilty of killing fellow crewmates on board his former ship. The moral questions Conradโs story throws out remain explored, but without any definitive answers being proposed. Was the narrator right to help the man? Was it murder or was the killing of his fellow crew-members actually, oddly, a moral act?
7. Henry James, โ The Figure in the Carpet โ.
I pass rapidly over the question of this unmitigated tragedy, of what the loss of my best friend meant for me, and I complete my little history of my patience and my pain by the frank statement of my having, in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the receipt of the hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband mightnโt at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap …
This story has variously been described as a satire on literary criticism and simply โa jokeโ. It is narrated by a rather odd and self-absorbed critic for a fictional newspaper; this narrator is told by a leading novelist, Hugh Vereker, that he โ Vereker โ has concealed a โsecretโ within all of his fiction. Every one of his novels contains this secret which, like a thread in a Turkish carpet, has been so carefully woven into the fabric of the novel that only the most careful reader will find it. The story that ensues is part mystery, part detective story, part exposรฉ of the worst aspects of the literary world.
โThe Figure in the Carpetโ invites numerous interpretations, many of them equally plausible. Is it a satire on the relationship between authors and critics, whereby James is mocking those critics and reviewers who arenโt really interested in understanding an authorโs work, but merely want to advance their own careers? Is it a satire on the vogue for popular fiction in the 1890s, such as the hugely successful detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and James โ in withholding the solution to the riddle, and suggesting that there may not evenย beย a solution โ is deliberately playing with readersโ expectations concerning the detective story?
We have analysed this classic story here .
Image (top): Virginia Woolf by Christiaan Tonnis , share-alike licence.
15 thoughts on “Seven of the Best Modernist Short Stories Everyone Should Read”
What an interesting list. I’ve read Joyce’s ‘the dead’. But, I haven’t read any of the others. I have heard some interesting things about the Garden party. I think that I will have to check out some of these stories. Thanks for sharing
What about Dostoyevsky’s The Crocodile? I suppose Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich doesn’t count as modernist. Pity as it is one of the most moving short stories ever!
- Pingback: Seven of the Best Modernist Short Stories Everyone Should Read | Tayoulevy's Weblog
Reblogged this on Jerri Perri .
Wonderful list. Thank you.
Excellent, thank you very much.
What an odd choice. These are not the books one automatically associates with those authors.
Such a list is always going to be a little subjective, I grant you. What short stories would you recommend by these authors?
What I really mean was that we usually think of the novels: when we go for Conrad ‘Heart of Darkness’ – Joyce ‘A Portrait …’ – and so on. Chekhov is a bit different, he being a master of short stories with such an easy style. There’s Vanka for example, and The Looking Glass.
Ah, I see. Yes, we’ve compiled a list of the best modernist novels/poems/short stories in a separate post. Heart of Darkness is a must! https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/02/8-classic-works-of-modernist-literature-everyone-should-read/
Great suggestion list! Thanks, will definitely get to this~ โค
Thank you! Glad you found the suggestions helpful :)
- Pingback: Although I am in love with creative nonfiction, I have always wanted to give short stories a go. This is an interesting list- | Sugarcoated Chili
- Pingback: Seven of the Best Modernist Short Stories Everyone Should Read | Phil Slattery's Blog
Great list here. I try to read a short story every week for my blog. These title will certainly go on my list. Recently I’ve been reading the short fiction of Anais Nin. Wow! Really deep stories that stay with you a long time.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
Discover more from interesting literature.
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
Type your emailโฆ
Continue reading
100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections
Liberty Hardy
Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is โHoly cats!โ Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, sheโs leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! Sheโs too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty
View All posts by Liberty Hardy
This list of must-read contemporary short story collections is sponsored by Random House’s ย Buzziest Short Story Collections of 2018
From New York Times bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeldโs dazzling first collection, You Think It, Iโll Say It , to National Book Award winner Denis Johnsonโs final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden , thereโs something for every book lover from Random House.
Carmen Maria Machado raves of Anjali Sachdevaโs exhilarating collection, All the Names They Used for God ; โcompleting one [story] is like having lived an entire life, and then being born, breathless, into another.โ
All are available in Spring 2018 from Random House, wherever books are sold.
Of all of the 100 must-read lists I have done so far, this was probably the easiest, because there are so many amazing contemporary short story collections. Story collections are such a gift: a whole bunch of different stories in one convenient place! What fun! The following list is made up of the first 100 collections that popped into my head. I have read and loved each of them. (And I probably have enough titles to do a sequelโstay tuned!) And by “contemporary” I mean “published this century.” (Which still gave me eighteen amazing years to choose from!)
I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these youโve read or other contemporary short story collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!
The Thing Around Your Neck ย byย Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them…Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.”
War by Candlelight: Stories ย byย Danielย Alarcรณn
“Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments.ย War by Candlelight ย is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and peopleโa devastating portrait of a world in fluxโand Daniel Alarcรณn is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.”
The Water Museum: Stories ย byย Luis Alberto Urrea
“From one of America’s preeminent literary voices comes a new story collection that proves once again why the writing of Luis Alberto Urrea has been called ‘wickedly good’ ( Kansas City Star ), ‘cinematic and charged’ ( Cleveland Plain Dealer) , ย and ‘studded with delights’ ( Chicago Tribune) . Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning ‘Amapola’ and his now-classic ‘Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses,’ which had the honor of being chosen for NPR’s ‘Selected Shorts’ not once but twice.”
In the Country: Stories ย byย Mia Alvar
“In these nine globe-trotting tales, Mia Alvar gives voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvarโs stories explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined.ย In the Country ย speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call homeโand marks the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.”
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories ย byย Lesley Nneka Arimah
“A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home…Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human,ย What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky ย heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.”
North American Lake Monsters: Stories byย Nathan Ballingrud
“Nathan Ballingrud’s Shirley Jackson Awardโwinning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud’s intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.”
Young Skins: Stories ย byย Colin Barrett
“Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars…In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence. Told in Barrettโs vibrant, distinctive prose,ย Young Skins ย is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a singular new voice in contemporary fiction.”
There Are Little Kingdoms: Stories ย byย Kevin Barry
“These stories, filled with a grand sense of life’s absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-dayย Dubliners . The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year inย The Irish Times , theย Sunday Tribune , andย Metro ,ย There Are Little Kingdoms ย marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.”
We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories ย byย Clare Beams
“The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beamsโs landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her charactersโ desires stretch the limits of reality…As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories inย We Show What We Have Learned ย reveal Clare Beamsโs rare and capacious imaginationโand yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.”
Welcome Thieves: Stories ย byย Sean Beaudoin
“Black humor mixed with pathos is the hallmark of the twelve stories in this adult debut collection from a master writer of comic and inventive YA novels…Beaudoinโs stories are edgy and profane, bittersweet and angry, bemused and sardonic. Yet theyโre always tinged with heart. Beaudoinโs novels have been praised for their playfulness and complexity, for the originality and beauty of their language.”
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead: Stories ย byย Chanelle Benz
“The characters inย The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead , Benz’s wildly imaginative debut, are as varied as any in recent literature, but they share a thirst for adventure which sends them rushing full-tilt toward the moral crossroads, becoming victims and perpetrators along the way. Riveting, visceral, and heartbreaking, Benzโs stories of identity, abandonment, and fierce love come together in a daring, arresting vision.”
Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories ย byย Megan Mayhew Bergman
“Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergmanโs powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collides with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place canโt be denied.”
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories ย byย Lucia Berlin
“A Manual for Cleaning Women ย compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how theyโd ever overlooked her in the first place.”
Things that Fall from the Sky ย byย Kevin Brockmeier
“Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeierโs richly imaginedย Things That Fall from the Sky ย views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens…Achingly beautiful and deceptively simple,ย Things That Fall from the Skyย defies gravity as one of the most original story collections seen in recent years.”
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories ย byย Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Named by theย Guardian ย as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women ofย Mothers, Tell Your Daughters ย must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter relationships can be lifelines, anchors, or they can sink a woman like a stone.”
Honeymoon and Other Stories ย byย Kevin Canty
“Honeymoonย is a book about love, about lovers and would-be lovers exploring unlikely alliances, all of them toeing a certain eventful edge, a decision between rational restraint and something altogether different…Revealing the hidden longings and quirky needs of both men and women with a tough sensitivity and deep, sometimes biting humor,ย Honeymoonย presents a masterful writer purely at home in his form, yet continuing to push himself and his stories to their limits with enthusiasm and daring.”
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington ย byย Leonora Carrington
“Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917โ2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.”
Among the Missing ย byย Dan Chaon
“In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion.ย Among the Missing ย lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.”
Stories of Your Life and Others ย byย Ted Chiang
“What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven’s other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang.”
The Ladies of Grace Adieu: and Other Stories ย byย Susanna Clarke
“Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time embroidering terrible fates or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice. The heroines and heroes bedeviled by such problems in these fairy tales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell : Strange himself and the Raven King.”
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories byย Kathleen Collins
“Now available in Eccoโs Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmakerโa contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paleyโwhose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim. Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collinsโs stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issuesโrace, gender, family, and sexualityโthat shape the ordinary moments in our lives.”
Mary and O’Neil: A Novel in Stories ย byย Justin Cronin
“Justin Croninโs poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and OโNeil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and OโNeil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of OโNeilโs parents, Maryโs long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, OโNeilโs sisterโs battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and OโNeil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.”
We’ve Already Gone This Far: Stories ย byย Patrick Dacey
“In this stunning debut, Patrick Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers. Here, in small-town Massachusetts, after more than a decade of boom and bust, everyone is struggling to find their own version of the American dream: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighborโs veteran son, a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television, a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town, a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged.”
The Redemption of Galen Pike ย byย Carys Davies
“From remote Australian settlements to the snows of Siberia, from Colorado to Cumbria, restless teenagers, middle-aged civil servants, and Quaker spinsters traverse expanses of solitude to reveal the secrets of the human heart. Written with raw and rigorous prose, charged throughout by a prickly wit, the stories inย The Redemption of Galen Pike ย remind us how little we know of the lives of others.”
The Shell Collector: Stories ย byย Anthony Doerr
“The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerrโs debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varietiesโmetamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending heartsโconjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.”
Ghost Summer: Stories ย byย Tananarive Due
“Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence bestselling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness.”
The Wilds by Julia Elliott
“In her genre-bending stories, Elliott blends Southern gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities, sci-fi speculations with fairy-tale transformations. Teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, Elliottโs language-driven fiction uses outlandish tropes to capture poignant moments in her humble charactersโ lives. Without abandoning the tenets of classic storytelling, Elliott revels in lush lyricism, dark humor, and experimental play.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories ย byย Nathan Englander
“These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.”
A Collapse of Horses ย byย Brian Evenson
“A stuffed bearโs heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust wonโt stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinaryโthe terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.”
Half an Inch of Water: Stories ย byย Percival Everett
“For the plainspoken men and women of these storiesโfathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinariansโsmall events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar… Half an Inch of Waterย tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.”
A Natural History of Hell: Stories ย byย Jeffrey Ford
“Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor’s daughter’s exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain’s head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker’s dozen of exhilarating visions.”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories ย byย Ben Fountain
“The well-meaning protagonists ofย Brief Encounters with Che Guevara ย are caughtโto both disastrous and hilarious effectโin the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountainโs prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.”
Ayiti by Roxane Gay*
“Fromย New York Times โbestselling powerhouse Roxane Gay,ย Ayiti ย is a powerful collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. Originally published by a small press, this Grove Press paperback will make Gayโs debut widely available for the first time, including several new stories.”
*Originally published in 2011, being reissued by Grove Press on June 12
Dead Girls and Other Stories ย byย Emily Geminder
“With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.”
Gutshot: Stories ย byย Amelia Gray
“A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands inย Gutshot , where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. A master of the macabre, Gray’s work is not for the faint of heart or gut: lick at your own risk.”
Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories ย byย Lauren Groff
“Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motifโsex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur; they’re in every storyโlove in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a themeโGroff’s women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.”
You Should Pity Us Instead ย byย Amy Gustine
“You Should Pity Us Insteadย explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.”
Madame Zero: 9 Stories ย byย Sarah Hall
“From one of the most accomplished British writers working today, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author ofย The Wolf Border , comes a unique and arresting collection of short fiction that is both disturbing and dazzling…In this collection of nine works of short fiction, she uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul.”
You Are Not a Stranger Here: Stories ย byย Adam Haslett
“In these unforgettable stories, the acclaimed author ofย Imagine Me Gone ย explores lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them. The impact is at once harrowing and thrilling…Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it,ย You Are Not a Stranger Here ย is a triumph of storytelling.”
Single, Carefree, Mellow byย Katherine Heiny
“For the commitment-averse women in the eleven sublime stories ofย Single, Carefree, Mellow,ย falling in love is never easy and always inconvenientโฆThe women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.”
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria ย byย Carlos Hernรกndez
“Assimilation is founded on surrender and being broken; this collection of short stories features people who have assimilated, but are actively trying to reclaim their lives…Poignant by way of funny, and philosophical by way of grotesque, Hernandezโs stories are prayers for self-sovereignty.”
20th Century Ghosts ย byย Joe Hill
“Imogene is young, beautifulโฆand dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945โฆFrancis was human once, but now he’s an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him singโฆJohn is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the deadโฆNolan knows but can never tell whatย really ย happened in the summer of ’77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worldsโฆ The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even pastโฆ”
Barbara the Slut and Other People ย byย Lauren Holmes
“Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves.”
Falling in Love with Hominids ย byย Nalo Hopkinson
“In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retellingย The Tempest ย as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders.”
Deceit and Other Possibilities ย byย Vanessa Hua
“In this powerful debut collection, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.ย These stories shine a light on immigrant families navigating a new America, straddling cultures and continents, veering between dream and disappointment.”
Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter
“Lindsay Hunter tells the stories no one else will in ways no one else can. In this down and dirty debut she draws vivid portraits of bad people in worse places…A rising star of the new fast fiction, Hunter bares all before you can blink in her bold, beautiful stories. In this collection of slim southern gothics, she offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read.”
Knockout: Stories ย byย John Jodzio
“The work of John Jodzio has already made waves across the literary community. Some readers noticed his nimble blending of humor with painful truths reminded them of George Saunders. His creativity and fresh voice reminded others of Wells Tower’sย Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . But with his new collection, Jodzio creates a class of his own.”
Fortune Smiles: Stories ย byย Adam Johnson
“Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we donโt often hear.”
All Aunt Hagar’s ChildreN: stories ย byย Edward P. Jones
“Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book,ย Lost in the City , Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city’s power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.ย All Aunt Hagar’s Children ย turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones’s masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.”
After the People Lights Have Gone Off ย byย Stephen Graham Jones
“The fifteen stories inย After the People Lights Have Gone Offย by Stephen Graham Jones explore the horrors and fears of the supernatural and the everyday.ย Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print narratives, as well as a few ‘best of the year’ inclusions.”
Unaccustomed Earth byย Jhumpa Lahiri
“These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,ย Unaccustomed Earthย exquisitely renders the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.”
Virgin and Other Stories ย byย April Ayers Lawson
“Nodding to the Southern Gothic but channeling an energy all its own,ย Virgin and Other Stories ย is a mesmerizing debut from an uncannily gifted young writer. With self-assurance and sensuality, April Ayers Lawson unravels the intertwining imperatives of intimacyโsex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desireโeyeing, unblinkingly, what happens when we succumb to temptation.”
Back Talk: Stories ย byย Danielle Lazarin
“Through stories that are at once empathetic and unexpected, these women and girls defiantly push the boundaries between selfishness and self-possession. With a fresh voice and bold honesty,ย Back Talkย examines how narrowly our culture allows women to express their desires.”
The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories ย byย Ursula K. Le Guin
“The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards, the renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, inย The Birthday of the World, ย this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.”
Bobcat and Other Stories ย byย Rebecca Lee
“Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels…Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it’s impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they’d expected.”
We Come to Our Senses: Stories ย byย Odie Lindsey
“For readers ofย Billy Lynnโs Long Halftime Walk ย andย Redeployment , a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South. Lacerating and lyrical,ย We Come to Our Senses ย centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war.”
Get in Trouble: Stories ย byย Kelly Link
“Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas,ย The Wizard of Oz, ย superheroes, the PyramidsโฆThese are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailtyโand the hidden strengthsโof human beings. Inย Get in Trouble,ย this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.”
The Complete Stories ย byย Clarice Lispector,โย Benjamin Moserย (Editor),โย Katrina Dodson (Translator)
“Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who donโt know what to do with themselves. Clariceโs stories take us through their livesโand ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.”
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories byย Ken Liu
“With his debut novel,ย The Grace of Kings , taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction inย The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories …Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.”
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail ย byย Kelly Luce
“Set in Japan, Luce’s playful, tender storiesโreminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Aimee Benderโtip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love. The award-winning narratives in this mesmerizing debut trace the lives of ex-pats, artists, and outsiders as they seek to find their place in the world.”
Half Wild: Stories ย byย Robin MacArthur
“Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthurโs formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermontersโadolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call homeโgolden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.”
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories ย byย Carmen Maria Machado
“In ย Her Body and Other Parties , Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of womenโs lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.”
Music for Wartime: Stories ย byย Rebecca Makkai
“Rebecca Makkaiโs first two novels,ย The Borrower ย andย The Hundred-Year House , have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions ofย The Best American Short Stories, ย returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.”
Thunderstruck & Other Stories ย byย Elizabeth McCracken
“In Elizabeth McCrackenโs universe, heartache is always interwoven with strange, charmed moments of joyโan unexpected conversation with small children, the gift of a parrot with a bad French accentโthat remind us of the wonder and mystery of being alive.ย Thunderstruck & Other Stories ย shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers.”
Heartbreaker: Stories ย byย Maryse Meijer
“In her debut story collectionย Heartbreaker , Maryse Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensembleโa feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophileโwho share in vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. Meijer deals in desire and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood, crafting a landscape of appetites threatening to self-destruct. In beautifully restrained and exacting prose, she sets the marginalized free to roam her pages and burn our assumptions to the ground.”
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It ย byย Maile Meloy
“Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefieldsโand fields of victoryโthat exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship.”
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories ย byย China Miรฉville
“The fiction of multiple awardโwinning author China Miรฉville is powered by intelligence and imagination. Like George Saunders, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility, employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative, unexpected ways.”
I Was a Revolutionary: Stories ย byย Andrew Malan Milward
“Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories inย I Was a Revolutionary ย capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas.”
Runaway by Alice Munro
“In Munroโs hands, the people she writes aboutโwomen of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and childrenโbecome as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.”
After the Quake: Stories ย byย Haruki Murakami,โย Jay Rubinย ย (Translator)
“The six stories in Haruki Murakamiโs mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakamiโs characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.”
You Are My Heart and Other Stories ย byย Jay Neugeboren
“From the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships. In works that are as memorable, engrossing, and exciting as they are gorgeously crafted, Neugeboren delivers on his reputation as one of our pre-eminent American writers.”
The Refugees ย byย Viet Thanh Nguyen
“With the same incisiveness as inย The Sympathizer , inย The Refugees ย Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration.”
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls: Stories byย Alissa Nutting*
“Throughout these breathtakingly creative seventeen stories spread across time, space, and differing planes of reality, we encounter a host of women and girls in a wide range of unusual jobs…Wickedly funny yet ringing with deep truths about gender, authority and the ways we inhabit and restrict the female body,ย Unclean Jobs for Women and Girlsย is a brilliant commentary on the kaleidoscope of human behavior and a remarkably nuanced satire for our times.”
*Originally published in 2011, being reissued by Ecco on July 3
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales ย byย Yoko Ogawa,โย Stephen Snyderย (Translator)
“Sinister forces collideโand unite a host of desperate charactersโin this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author ofย The Housekeeper and the Professor …Yoko Ogawa’sย Revengeย is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the last page.”
Salsa Nocturna ย byย Daniel Josรฉ Older
“A 300 year-old story collector enlists the help of the computer hacker next door to save her dying sister. A half-resurrected cleanup man for Death’s sprawling bureaucracy faces a phantom pachyderm, doll-collecting sorceresses and his own ghoulish bosses. Gordo, the old Cubano that watches over the graveyards and sleeping children of Brooklyn, stirs and lights another Malaguena. Down the midnight streets of New York, a whole invisible universe churns to life in Daniel Jose Older’s debut collection of ghost noir.”
The Bigness of the World: Stories ย byย Lori Ostlund
“In Lori Ostlundโs award-winning debut collection, people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind. In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation,ย The Bigness of the Worldย contains characters that represent a different sort of everymanโmen and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign.”
When the Emperor Was Divine ย byย Julie Otsuka
“Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination ‘both physical and emotional’ of a generation of Japanese Americans…Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated,ย When the Emperor Was Divine ย is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.”
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ย byย ZZ Packer
“With penetrating insight that belies her youthโshe was only nineteen years old whenย Seventeen ย magazine printed her first published storyโZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision.ย Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ย is a striking performanceโfresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.”
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories ย byย Edith Pearlman
“In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.”
I Want to Show You More ย byย Jamie Quatro
“Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Quatroโs stories upend and shake out our views on infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatroโs hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with fractured marriages, mercurial temptations, and dark theological complexities, and establish a sultry and enticingly cool new voice in American fiction.”
You Have Never Been Here: New and Selected Stories ย byย Mary Rickert
“Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickertโs protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.”
The Republic of East LA: Stories ย byย Luis J. Rodriguez
“From the award-winning author ofย Always Running ย comes a brilliant collection of short stories about life in East Los Angeles.ย In these stories, Luis J. Rodriguez gives eloquent voice to the neighborhood where he spent many years as a resident, a father, an organizer, and, finally, a writer: a neighborhood that offers more to the world than its appearance allows.”
The Girl of the Lake: Stories ย byย Bill Roorbach
“These moving and funny stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and memorable as Bill Roorbachโs novels. He has been called โa kinder, gentler John Irving…a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful styleโ (theย Washington Post ), andย his work has been described as โhilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wiseโ ( Parade ย magazine), all of which is evident in spades (and also hearts, clubs, and diamonds)ย in every story in this arresting new collection.”
Telling the Map: Stories ย byย Christopher Rowe
“There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novellaย The Border State ย Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded storyย The Voluntary State . Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the borderโฆinto Tennessee.”
All the Names They Used for God: Stories ย byย Anjali Sachdeva
“Like many of us, the characters in this collection are in pursuit of the sublime, and find themselves looking not just to divinity but to science, nature, psychology, and industry, forgetting that their new, logical deities are no more trustworthy than the tempestuous gods of the past. Along the way, they walk the knife-edge between wonder and terror, salvation and destruction.ย All the Names They Used for God ย is an entrancing work of speculative fiction that heralds Anjali Sachdeva as an invigorating, incomparable new voice.”
Tenth of December: Stories ย byย George Saunders
“Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human. Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories inย Tenth of December โthrough their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spiritโnot only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhovโs dictum that art should ‘prepare us for tenderness.’”
Blueprints for Building Better Girls ย byย Elissa Schappell
“Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.”
Ambiguity Machines: and Other Stories ย byย Vandana Singh
“Singh’s stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and oft reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.”
The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories ย byย Christine Sneed
“Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent inโand often the source ofโboth abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.”
The Unfinished World: And Other Stories ย byย Amber Sparks
“Sparksโs storiesโpopulated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriorsโform a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving,ย The Unfinished World and Other Stories ย heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.”
Monstress: Stories ย byย Lysley Tenorio
“A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines,ย Monstress ย heralds the arrival of a breathtaking new talent on the literary scene: Lysley Tenorio. Already the worthy recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writerโs Award, and a Stegner Fellowship, Tenorio brilliantly explores the need to find connections, the melancholy of isolation, and the sometimes suffocating ties of family in tales that range from a California army base to a steamy moviehouse in Manilla, to the dangerous false glitter of Hollywood.”
Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories ย byย Kanishk Tharoor
“With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of todayโs refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance.ย Swimmer Among the Stars ย announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.”
Night at the Fiestas: Stories ย byย Kirstin Valdez Quade
“With intensity and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths…Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade’s characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save each other.”
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us: Stories ย byย Laura van den Berg
“Containing work reprinted in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010, the stories in Laura van den Berg’s rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane…Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searchingโfor absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.”
Battleborn: Stories ย byย Claire Vaye Watkins
“In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region’s vast spaces, winning redemption despiteโand often because ofโthe hardship and violence they endure.”
Children of the New World: Stories ย byย Alexander Weinstein
“ Children of the New Worldย grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.”
Honored Guest: Stories ย byย Joy Williams
“With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various waysโcomic, tragic, and unnervingโwe seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers,ย Honored Guestย is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.”
Diving Belles: And Other Stories ย byย Lucy Wood
“In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwallโs ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our livesโif only we can let ourselves see it.”
The Mountain: Stories ย byย Paul Yoon
“Hailed byย New Yorkย magazine as a ‘quotidian-surreal craft-master’ and a ‘radiant star in the current literary firmament’ byย The Dallas Morning News , Yoon realizes his worlds with quiet, insightful, and gorgeous prose. Though each story is distinct from the others, his restrained voice and perceptive observations about violenceโto the body, the landscape, and ultimately, the human soulโweaves throughout this collection as a whole, makingย The Mountain ย a beautiful, memorable read.”
Sour Heart: Stories ย byย Jenny Zhang
“Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloatโdumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buckโthese seven stories showcase Zhangโs compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent ofย Portnoyโs Complaint .ย A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood,ย Sour Heartย examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.”
What are your favorite contemporary short story collections?ย
You Might Also Like
- 8 Best Teenage Love Story Novels to Spice Up Your Reading List October 16, 2022
- 8 Best Stephen Hawking Books of All Time October 15, 2022
- 8 Steamy Historical Romance Novels to Start Your Journey on This Genre October 13, 2022
- 10 Best Secret Pregnancy Romance Novels for You to Read May 20, 2022
- 10 Romantic Novels for Teens To Read March 24, 2022
- 10 Popular Female Authors Today You Must Know March 18, 2022
- 11 Plus Size Romance Novels You Should Read March 17, 2022
- Percy Jackson Books for Your Mythological Fiction Addict March 16, 2022
- Best of Nora Roberts Romance Novels For You March 15, 2022
- 8 New York Times Famous Seller Books to Add to Your Reading List March 14, 2022
- Privacy Policy
List of 15 Best Short Story Authors and Their Masterpieces You Need to Know
authors of books February 2, 2022 Author 0
Do you like reading books but do not have enough time to read a novel? Then, you need to consider reading short stories as an alternative. It is a writing with a shorter page length, yet contains concise and descriptive language to portray the scene and develop the characters. Discover 15 best short story authors along with their famous works for your upcoming reading schedule.
Please note that many of the best-selling novelists we know also write short story, usually wrapped in the best short story collection for their readers.
Get To Know the Best Short Story Authors and Their Masterpiece
1. guy de maupassant.
Guy de Maupassant was born on August 05, 1850 in Chรขteau de Miromesnil, France. During his career, this French short story writer has written about 300 short stories. Among the renowned works are The Necklace, Boule de Suif, Mother Savage and Bel-Amis. His writing has a strong influence on modern literature that makes him considered as the father of modern short story.
2. Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is among the American Famous short story writers who was born in Boston, USA on 19 January 1809. He was the first writer who invented the genre of detective fiction story and has a main influence on the science-fiction genre. Moreover, he is regarded as the modern short-storyโs architect.
His best-known masterpieces among others are The Tell-Tale Heart, the Raven, The Pit and The Pendulum, and the Fall of the House of Usher.
3. Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov is a Russian short story writer who is considered as the greatest short fiction writer. He was born in Taganrog, Russia on 29 January 1860. His works offer great influence on the modern short story progress. Aside from writing short story, Chekov was also a playwright who brought influence to modernism in theatre with Hendrik Ibsen and August Strindberg.
The masterpieces of this modern short story founder for example are The Lady with the Dog, The Darling, Vanka and The Bet.
4. Alice Munro
Alice Munro is a Canadian writer who was born on 10 July 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada. In 2013 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature as master of the contemporary short story (link). Her prominent works among others are Too Much Happiness and Runaway. Being one of the Best contemporary short story writers, Munroโs stories are mostly about women and their friendship, relationships and motherhood, written in a candid prose.
5. Margaret Atwood
Same with Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood who was born on 18 November 1939 is also a Canadian writer, environmental activist and novelist. Many of Atwoodโs works have been adapted into television series and films. Happy Endings and The Handmaidโs Tale are among her renowned works.
6. Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver is an American prolific short story writer whose works do not need any exposition on conventional techniques. He was born in Oregon, USA on 25 May 1938 and died in 1988. Cathedral and Why Donโt You Dance? are among the best works he has already written. Both stories were published in 1981.
7. Ernest Hemingway
Everybody knows about this American writer who was born on 21 July 1899. Ernest Hemingwayโs works had a great influence on 20th century fiction. He earned a Nobel Prize on Literature in 1954 (link) for his famous book i.e. The Old Man and the Sea. Aside from that, his classic work among others are: A Farewell to Arms, Big Two-Hearted River, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hills Like White Elephants and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
8. Hans Christian Andersen
If you have ever read fairy tales like Thumbelina, The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid or The Emperorโs New Clothes, then you know about this legendary Danish author. Hans Christian Andersen who was born on 2 April 1805 is not only appreciated by young readers but the old ones alike.
Many of his works have been made into films, play and even ballets. Surely, we should put him on our short story writers list.
9. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
British author who is also a physician, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859. He is the one who created the globally famous character detective Sherlock Holmes. He also created other famous characters like Brigadier Gerrard and Professor Challenger. Doyle has written 56 short story about the adventure of Sherlock Holmes who dearly loved by readers from all over the world.
10. Stephen Kings
Born on 21 September 1947, Stephen King is one of the best short story writers of the 21st century particularly known for his dark tale story. Approximately 350 million copies of his works have been sold globally; many of which have been adapted into miniseries, TV series as well as films. His popular works among others are Everythingโs Eventual:14 Dark Tales and Riding the Bullet.
11. Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl is a British writer who was born in Cardiff, Wales on 13 September 1916. Some of his classic works are Matilda, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach and The Twist. His famous short stories are Kiss Kiss and The Pig.
12. J.D. Salinger
American best short story authors, J.D. Salinger is best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye of which story has sexual content. The writer who was born in New York, USA, on 1 January 1919 also wrote some short stories. Examples of his works on short story are For Esme-With Love and Squalor and A Perfect Day for Bananafish which was published in 1948.
13. Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentine on 12 August 1899. He has a great influence in Latin American literature. The theme for his stories is dreams, labyrinths and mythology.
14. Rudyard Kipling
This English short story writer, Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai, India on 10 December 1865. Jungle Book is his iconic book he wrote. Growing up in India, the inspiration for most of his stories are from his daily lives in the country. He is among the best short story writers in English both in the 19th and 20th century.
15. O. Henry
American best short story authors, O Henry who was born on 11 September 1862 is regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the world. The Gift of Magi is his classic work that makes him famous.
Final Thoughts
Short stories are as interesting as novel; thus, you can pick this kind of literature if you only have a limited reading time. However, you need to look for the best short story that will not offer you great plot but also enrich you as well. Hope that the above mentioned 15 Best Short Story Authors will do you a favor in choosing their best works. Happy reading!
No comments so far.
Be first to leave comment below.
Cancel reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Post comment
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
8 Best Teenage Love Story Novels to Spice Up Your Reading List
novels to read Oct 16, 2022 0
8 Best Stephen Hawking Books of All Time
books to read Oct 15, 2022 0
8 Steamy Historical Romance Novels to Start Your Journey on This Genre
novels to read Oct 13, 2022 0
10 Best Secret Pregnancy Romance Novels for You to Read
novels to read May 20, 2022 0
10 Romantic Novels for Teens To Read
novels to read Mar 24, 2022 0
10 Popular Female Authors Today You Must Know
authors of books Mar 18, 2022 0
11 Plus Size Romance Novels You Should Read
novels to read Mar 17, 2022 0
- Readers Read
- Writing Contests
NBF Expands National Book Awards Eligibility Criteria
Striking Writers and Actors March Together on Hollywood Streets
Vice Media Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Oprah Selects The Covenant of Water as 101st Book Club Pick
Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Lawsuit Over Marvin Gaye Song
- Self-publishing
- Technical Writing
- Writing Prompts
- Browse Rare Books
- Search Rare Books
- Browse Signed Books
- Search Signed Books
- Browse First Editions
- Search First Editions
- Saul Bellow
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Charles Dickens
- Umberto Eco
- Ian Fleming
- Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
- Ernest Hemingway
- Rudyard Kipling
- Doris Lessing
- Arthur Miller
- V.S Naipaul
- Harold Pinter
- Philip Pullman
- Philip Roth
- John Steinbeck
- J. R. R Tolkien
- John Updike
- Elie Wiesel
- Business Partner
- Father's Day
- Mother's Day
- Valentine's Day
- Book Search
blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.
Eight Short Story Writers You Should Be Reading Right Now
Topics: Pulitzer Prize , Literature
Nobody cares about literature anymore. Thatโs the death-cry heard time and time again about the state of 21st Century reading. Sure, studies and surveys continually show the ways in which todayโs average reader experiences literature are changing, from e-readers, smart phones, and tablets, to podcasts and other subscription-based audio book websites and services.
These advancements are designed to help readers immerse themselves into fictional characters and worlds with more ease and expediency as the pace and rigors of everyday life in todayโs society make it more and more difficult to pull-back from reality and allow our imaginations to explore and expand. But even with these time-saving gizmos, a large percentage of the population still cannot dedicate the time and energy to a 200 page novel at the end of a 9 to 5 workday that includes commuting, chores, and family time. The solution? The short story.
If you only have thirty minutes a day to devote to literature, the short story provides a complete, encapsulated narrative experience to scratch your literary itch.
So here are eight recommendations for some of todayโs most innovative, exciting short story authors you should check out to help you get down with your story-self in roughly 3,000 words or less. Okay, so it's not quite a Tweet, but it's not War and Peace, either.
1. Robert Olen Butler
Story to check out: In 2001, Butler composed an entire short story in real-time during a series of 17 webcast sessions called Inside Creative Writing, all of which are available via iTunes. The result, This is Earl Sandt* , is set in 1913 and centers on a man and his son watching a bi-plane crash during an air show following Sunday morning church services. Butler called the real-time composition โan extended teaching momentโ in an effort to provide insight into the creative process .
2. Tobias Woolf
Woolf is regarded just as highly for his work as a memoirist as a short story practitioner. Known for what critics refer to as โdirty realism,โ Woolfโs stories are often focused on the male adolescent experience and the ramifications of those experiences as his characters grow and mature. Woolf, perhaps best known for his memoir This Boyโs Life (1989) and story collection Our Story Begins (2008), spent a number of years on faculty at Syracuse University with renowned short story master Raymond Carver. Woolfโs other highly-acclaimed collections include 1981โs In The Garden of North American Martyrs , and 1997โs The Night in Question and Other Stories .
Story to check out: Powder , a three-page story in Woolfโs The Night in Question and Other Stories , revolves around an estranged father and son on a country drive in the middle of the night during a blizzard. The storyโs economy of language, evocative imagery, and plain-spoken voice is classic Woolf and lends itself to a heartfelt exploration of a strained father-son relationship.
3. George Saunders
Very few writers โ not to mention short story writers โ make the rounds of late-night television programs, but 2006 MacArthur Grant winner George Saunders is just such a writer, appearing on Comedy Centralโs The Colbert Report** following the publication of his 2010 short story collection, The Tenth of December . Saunders, a former technical writer, has been publishing absurdist, form-bending stories since the early 1990s, tackling issues of commercialism, consumerism, and Americaโs corporate culture. Saundersโ The Tenth of December was nominated for the 2010 National Book Award and won that yearโs prestigious Story Prize.
Story to check out: Indicative of Saundersโ style and thematic preoccupations, The 400 Pound CEO is an absurdist send up of the traditional 9 to 5 office culture โ how can you ignore a story with a title like that? The story was originally published in Harpers in 1994 and collected in the highly-acclaimed collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline .
4. Jennifer Egan
Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for her collection of connected stories, A Visit from the Goon Squad , Brooklyn-based writer Jennifer Egan is the rare writer who can transition from the novel to the short story form with grace and ease. Eganโs collection zeros-in on aging rock music executive Bernie Salazar and the friends and enemies he made during his ascension to the heights of rock music stardom. The bookโs construction had led some critics to question whether it functions as a novel or connected group of stories, and Egan herself has remained relatively mum as to whether the 13 sections of the book should be read as chapters or individual stories.
Story to check out: Following in Robert Olen Butlerโs shoes , Egan used the technology of the day to her advantage by publishing the science fiction short story The Black Box via a series of Twitter posts in May 2012. The story, concerning a spy living in the near future, was tweeted by The New Yorkerโs Twitter account during a span of nine days.
5. Lorrie Moore
A teenage prodigy, Moore won Seventeen Magazineโs fiction writing contest at the tender age of 19. Sparked by her early achievement, Moore went on to study creative writing at the university level and worked as a paralegal in Manhattan following graduation, a time that heavily influenced her early stories. Known for her humorous takes on seemingly mundane situations, Mooreโs big break came in 1983 with the publication of first collection, Self-Help , a group of stories parodying other popular self-help titles of the time. Mooreโs playful take on form and language has helped cement her place as one of todayโs most interesting and surprising short story writers , a moniker further evidenced by the release of 2014 collection, Bark .
Story to check out: Mooreโs How to Be A Writer, collected in Self-Help , is perhaps most famous for its step-by-step instructions on how to become the most bloated, self-important, and boorish writer one could ever hope to be. The storyโs satirical look at the wealth of clichรฉ s surrounding the literary life are incisive, poetic, and so on-point writers themselves have been known to cringe at live recitations of the piece.
6. Joe Meno
Chicago author Joe Meno published his first novel, Tender as Hellfire (1999) with St. Martinโs Press at just 24-years-old while attending graduate school at Columbia College, Chicago and working at a flower delivery shop โ something that seems right in line with his South Side , working class background. Drawing from his own adolescent experiences as a punk teenager in the mid 1990s, Menoโs novels and stories are spun with gritty, realistic voices and characters reflective of a time and place in the American Midwest. Menoโs cult-classic coming-of-age novel Hairstyles of the Damned was released to universal acclaim in 2004, and heโs since followed it with a series of best-sellers, including the collection of stories, Demons in the Spring (2008), and the 2015 novel, Marvel and a Wonder .
Story to check out: From Menoโs 2005 short story collection Bluebirds Used to Croon in The Choir , the story The Use of Medicine is the heartbreaking tale of a brother and sister who sedate squirrels, mice, and other animals around the neighborhood to put on puppet shows for their mother following their fatherโs suicide. The storyโs poetic, dreamlike language and deep emotional core offer moments of great humor and pathos as the children discover how to grieve.
7. Junot Diaz
A Dominican-American writer and professor at MIT, Diaz first broke onto the scene with the publication of his 1995 short story collection Drown โ an exploration of masculinity, the immigrant experience, and coming-of-age for the character of Yunior in New Jersey in the 1980s.
Diaz, who won a Pulitzer for his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2007 and a MacArthur Grant in 2012, is known for pulling punches when it comes to his explorations of identity, sexuality, and the influence of pop culture on young people. Diaz's second collection, This Is How You Lose Her , was released to universal acclaim in 2012.
Story to check out: Perhaps one of the most central stories in Diazโs debut collection, How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) is the authorโs most direct, humorous, emotive look at how Yunior longs to assimilate into American culture while maintaining a connection to his Dominican roots. Rendered as something of a how-to list for dating, the story quickly reveals Yuniorโs vulnerability and discomfort with himself and his adopted homeland.
8. Jhumpa Lahiri
Indian-Bengali-American author Jhumpa Lahiri didnโt see success for years after she began writing. A consummate scholar, Lahiri holds a number of advanced degrees in creative writing and literature from Boston College, so itโs safe to say she knows her stuff. After what sheโs characterized as "hundreds of rejections," Lahiri published her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies , in 1999 to massive critical and commercial success, vaulting her into the stratosphere of todayโs short story writers. Lahiriโs debut was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and she was appointed to the National Committee of Arts and Humanities in 2010 by President Obama.
Story to check out: A Temporary Matter , the gut-wrenching opening story to Lahiriโs debut collection, reveals the intimate portrait of a married coupleโs efforts to grieve the loss of their stillborn child during a four-day electrical blackout in their home. The storyโs masterful use of dialogue and scene give the reader an intimate glimpse at a relationship on the brink of complete collapse and the redemption the husband and wife hope to find.
*A discussion of This is Early Sandt at The Georgia Review blog. **A Huffington Post article featuring a recap and clips from Saunders' appearance on The Colbert Report. ***Source here . ****Source here .
- There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.
About this blog
Get blog notifications per email:.
Recent Posts
Posts by Topic
- American History (122)
- American Literature (255)
- Awarded Books (116)
- Baseball (1)
- Biographies (47)
- Bond Dossier (1)
- Book Care (34)
- Book Collecting (418)
- Book History (83)
- Book Making (42)
- Book News (85)
- Books collecting (7)
- Caldecott Medal (79)
- Charles Dickens (19)
- Children's Books (273)
- Christmas Books (30)
- Civil War (3)
- Collecting guide (10)
- collectors (4)
- Condition (1)
- Dust Jackets (9)
- Fine Press (54)
- First Editions (5)
- Fishing (12)
- History (153)
- Horror (43)
- illustrations (4)
- Interviews (17)
- J. R. R. Tolkien (24)
- James Bond (62)
- Learn About Books (38)
- Legendary Authors (400)
- Legendary Illustrators (60)
- Libraries (7)
- Libraries & Special Collections (73)
- Literary travel (85)
- Literature (481)
- Magical Realism (1)
- Mario Vargas Llosa (1)
- Mark Twain (26)
- Modern First Editions (82)
- Movie Tie-Ins (147)
- Mystery, Suspense & Crime (49)
- Newbery Award (36)
- Nobel Prize Winners (198)
- Poetry (147)
- Pulitzer Prize (64)
- Quizzes (9)
- Rare Book Gift Ideas (48)
- Rare Books (175)
- Science (36)
- Science Fiction (51)
- Thomas Harris (1)
- travel guides (1)
- Umberto Eco (14)
Blog Archive
- February 2024 (3)
- January 2024 (3)
- December 2023 (3)
- November 2023 (3)
- October 2023 (5)
- September 2023 (4)
- August 2023 (3)
- July 2023 (1)
- June 2023 (3)
- May 2023 (4)
- April 2023 (5)
- March 2023 (6)
- February 2023 (7)
- January 2023 (9)
- December 2022 (4)
- November 2022 (3)
- March 2022 (1)
- January 2022 (2)
- July 2021 (1)
- May 2021 (1)
- April 2021 (2)
- March 2021 (1)
- February 2021 (5)
- January 2021 (8)
- December 2020 (9)
- November 2020 (6)
- October 2020 (9)
- September 2020 (9)
- August 2020 (10)
- July 2020 (3)
- June 2020 (3)
- May 2020 (6)
- April 2020 (16)
- March 2020 (16)
- February 2020 (16)
- January 2020 (16)
- December 2019 (16)
- November 2019 (15)
- October 2019 (17)
- September 2019 (16)
- August 2019 (15)
- July 2019 (20)
- June 2019 (16)
- May 2019 (18)
- April 2019 (16)
- March 2019 (16)
- February 2019 (14)
- January 2019 (18)
- December 2018 (18)
- November 2018 (18)
- October 2018 (16)
- September 2018 (15)
- August 2018 (16)
- July 2018 (16)
- June 2018 (15)
- May 2018 (18)
- April 2018 (16)
- March 2018 (17)
- February 2018 (15)
- January 2018 (14)
- December 2017 (18)
- November 2017 (21)
- October 2017 (21)
- September 2017 (23)
- August 2017 (21)
- July 2017 (22)
- June 2017 (21)
- May 2017 (23)
- April 2017 (23)
- March 2017 (23)
- February 2017 (20)
- January 2017 (21)
- December 2016 (23)
- November 2016 (22)
- October 2016 (23)
- September 2016 (22)
- August 2016 (23)
- July 2016 (22)
- June 2016 (22)
- May 2016 (23)
- April 2016 (30)
- March 2016 (32)
- February 2016 (29)
- January 2016 (29)
- December 2015 (29)
- November 2015 (27)
- October 2015 (30)
- September 2015 (29)
- August 2015 (31)
- July 2015 (29)
- June 2015 (29)
- May 2015 (32)
- April 2015 (30)
- March 2015 (29)
- February 2015 (25)
- January 2015 (31)
- December 2014 (27)
- November 2014 (26)
- October 2014 (28)
- September 2014 (27)
- August 2014 (26)
- July 2014 (24)
- June 2014 (28)
- May 2014 (25)
- April 2014 (21)
- March 2014 (18)
- February 2014 (18)
- January 2014 (26)
- December 2013 (22)
- November 2013 (23)
- October 2013 (27)
- September 2013 (8)
- August 2013 (10)
- July 2013 (9)
- June 2013 (8)
- May 2013 (13)
- April 2013 (10)
- March 2013 (9)
- February 2013 (6)
- January 2013 (4)
- December 2012 (6)
- November 2012 (6)
- October 2012 (8)
- September 2012 (7)
- August 2012 (7)
- July 2012 (7)
- June 2012 (5)
- May 2012 (7)
- April 2012 (7)
- March 2012 (4)
- February 2012 (3)
- January 2012 (4)
- December 2011 (2)
- November 2011 (4)
- October 2011 (2)
- August 2011 (4)
- July 2011 (2)
- June 2011 (3)
- May 2011 (4)
- April 2011 (4)
- March 2011 (1)
- October 2010 (1)
- September 2010 (2)
- June 2010 (4)
- May 2010 (2)
- April 2010 (6)
- March 2010 (8)
- February 2010 (5)
- January 2010 (15)
- Books Tell You Why, Inc.
- Fulfillment Operations:
- 1050 Johnnie Dodds Blvd. #1805 Mt. Pleasant, SC 29465
- Administrative Offices:
- 1283 Heron Nest Ct. Columbus, OH 43240
- Signed Books
- First Editions
- New Arrivals
- Featured Books
- Key Categories
- Advanced Search
- Job Opportunities
- Selling Books
- Autographs & Signatures
- Collector's Resources
- Shopping Cart
- Create an Account
- Store Policies
- Privacy Policy
- Loyalty and Rewards
- Scholarships
- Phone: +1 (843) 849-0283
- [email protected]
- Content Marketing by Aspiration Marketing
The Best Short Story Collections That Keep You Reading
Which of these captivating collections will you be picking up next?
Short story collections offer the perfect medium for fiction writers to craft compelling, affecting narratives that simply may not warrant a full-length novel to explore the ideas. The short story collectionโs compact form delivers concise, impactful ideas and can free authors to explore a multitude of themes, characters, story arcs and styles within a single collection. Collections of short fiction have allowed writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery OโConnor and James Baldwin to experiment with different tones, voices and plot devices while providing readers with gripping but approachable standalone stories.
These 8 short story collections are extremely readable, cover a variety of genres and authors and may give you a newfound appreciation of writers you already love.
Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
From one of the most compelling, propulsive voices in contemporary fiction, Moshfeghโs 2017 short story collection is an eclectic compendium of some of her best fiction workโmuch of which was previously published in places like The Paris Review , The New Yorker and Vice . Exceedingly atmospheric and permeated with Moshfeghโs hallmark sordid wit, Homesick For Another World interrogates the ubiquitous afflictions of the human condition and our capacity for cruelty through the collectionโs generally amoral, misanthropic protagonists. A highly anticipated follow-up to Moshfeghโs breakout debut novel Eileen , Homesick was later named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 and drew innumerable comparisons to the work of renowned authors like Mary Gaitskill and Flannery OโConnor.
Earth Angel by Madeline Cash
An electric debut from author Madeline Cash, Earth Angel is a collection of short stories that rockets through the readerโs imagination like a fever dream. Teeming with chimeric vignettes synthesizing the mundanely sinister realities of a capitalist culture with cataclysmic doomsday tropes, Earth Angel manages to be both endlessly funny and deeply poignant without feeling didactic. Cash both parodies and embraces the myopic stylings dominating popular fiction in a way that never feels malicious, but rather like the playful ribbing of a writer that refuses to take herself too seriously. Irreverent, compelling and laugh-out-loud funny, Earth Angel marks the emergence of one of contemporary fictionโs most exciting new figures.
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
A surrealist collection from Severance author Ling Ma, Bliss Montage marks Maโs first published short story collection after her phenomenal debut novel (which has no relation to the recent Apple TV+ series, by the way). Uncanny, otherworldly and above all evocativeโ Bliss Montage contains eight wildly different stories each touching on universal themes of the human experience against phantasmagoric, though eerily familiar backdrops. Ranging from a tale of two friends bonded by their shared use of a drug that turns you invisible to the story of a tourist caught up in a fatalistic healing ritual, Maโs unforgettable collection manages to be both ingeniously unique and undoubtedly universal at once. Somehow both outlandish and quotidian, Bliss Montage keeps readers wrapped up in Maโs captivating prose from start to end.
Daddy by Emma Cline
A thrilling examination of unspoken power structures (predominantly male power in a patriarchal society), Daddy by Emma Cline offers glimpses into the unexamined lives of each story's protagonist, often playfully alluding to, but never explicitly pointing to, a certain moral paradigm. Fraught familial dynamics, imbalanced romantic relationships and moral nuance permeate Clineโs collection, and each story offers a taste of her infectious prose and incisive style. The ten stories on offer often end achingly realistically, rejecting a tidy, personally gratifying endingโmaking each story appear as a certain tableau harkening to an idea rather than a traditional beginning, middle and end. Suspenseful, richly descriptive and engrossingโClineโs collection begs to be devoured.
Skeleton Crew by Stephen King
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
First published in July 2020, First Person Singular is a collection of eight short stories each told from, you guessed it, the first-person singular perspective. Written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular explores themes of nostalgia and lost love through stories from the perspective of mostly unnamed, middle-aged male protagonists believed to be based largely on the author himself, though some are more fantastical than others. Ranging from slice-of-life stories wherein the narrator reminisces on a past relationship, to the tale of a monkey doomed to fall in love with human women, the stories employ a myriad of hallmark Murakami techniques like magical realism, music, nostalgia and aging.
The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dรกvila
The first collection by beloved Mexican author Amparo Dรกvila to be translated into English, The Houseguest is a collection of 12 short stories touching on themes of obsession, paranoia and fear primarily featuring female protagonists and narrators. Often compared to horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson, Dรกvilaโs writing often deals with abstract feelings of dread and paranoia, imbuing them with magical realism to craft jarring, transfixing narratives that seem both eerily familiar and preternatural. Each tale menaced by an unseen, pernicious force, Dรกvilaโs writing revels in its ambiguity with no straightforward answers. The Houseguest is an anxiety-inducing page-turner which will keep readers on the edge of their seats.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Though technically a short story cycle (a collection of self-contained short stories arranged to convey a concept or theme greater than the sum of its atomized parts), Olive Kitteridge consists of 13 stories each taking place in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. The stories predominantly center on Olive Kitteridge, a brusque but caring retired school teacher and longtime resident of Crosby. Other stories show Olive only as a secondary character or in a cameo capacity and are from the point of view of other townsfolk. Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the collection was later adapted into a critically acclaimed miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Zoe Kazan and Bill Murray. Profound, heartbreaking and human, Olive Kitteridge is an unforgettable first-read that will still impact you even if you watched the miniseries before.
@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-o9j0dn:before{margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-right:0.625rem;color:#ffffff;width:1.25rem;bottom:-0.2rem;height:1.25rem;content:'_';display:inline-block;position:relative;line-height:1;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.loaded .css-o9j0dn:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/goodhousekeeping/static/images/Clover.5c7a1a0.svg);}} All the Best Books to Read Next
6 Best Taylor Swift Books for Kids of All Ages
Whoopi Goldberg Shares Personal Book Announcement
Savannah Guthrie Shares Career News with JBH
How to Read the 'Percy Jackson' Books in Order
'Today' Star Savannah Guthrie Reveals New Project
Must-Read Books Before the End of 2023
Turn Up the Heat With These Steamy Romance Books
The Best New Cookbooks That Make Great Gifts
The Most-Anticipated Books of 2024 (So Far!)
GH+ Reads Review: 'Midnight Is the Darkest Hour'
How Women Deal With Sexism on the Open Seas
Download Manorama Online App
- Change Password
- Veena Vijayan
- ICC U19 WORLD CUP
- Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra
- Latest News
- Weather Updates
Today's Epaper
MANORAMA APP
Register free and read all exclusive premium stories.
webExclusive Report --> เดชเดคเดฟเดตเดพเดฏเดฟ เดชเตเดฐเดฃเดฏเดพเดญเตเดฏเตผเดฅเดจ เดจเดเดคเตเดคเตเด; 'เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดณเตเดเต เดเดเตเดเดณเดฎเดพเดฐเตเดเต เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดจเดฟเดจเตเดจเตเด เดคเดฒเตเดฒเต เดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดเดถเตเดชเดคเตเดฐเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฒเดพเดเตเด...'
เดฎเตเดฐเดฟ เดเตเดธเดฟ เดฎเดฒเดฏเดฟเตฝ
Published: February 24 , 2024 06:24 AM IST
3 minute Read
Link Copied
เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตปเดธเต เดฆเดฟเดจเด เดซเตเดฌเตเดฐเตเดตเดฐเดฟ 14 2024 (เดเดฅ)
Mail This Article
เดฎเตเดจเตเดจเดพเด เดจเตเดฑเตเดฑเดพเดฃเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดฑเตเดฎเดฟเดฒเต เดฐเดพเดเดพเดตเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจ เดเตเดฒเตเดกเดฟเดฏเดธเต เดฐเดพเดเตเดฏเดคเตเดคเต เดชเดเตเดเดพเดณเดเตเดเดพเตผ เดตเดฟเดตเดพเดนเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเดคเต เดตเดฟเดฒเดเตเดเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เดฐเดพเดเดพเดตเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดเดคเตเดคเดฐเดตเต เดฎเดฑเดฟเดเดเดจเตเดจเต เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตป เดเดจเตเดจ เดเดฐเต เดชเตเดฐเตเดนเดฟเดคเตป เดเดฎเดฟเดคเดพเดเตเดเดณเต เดฐเดนเดธเตเดฏเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟ เดตเดฟเดตเดพเดนเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเดพเตป เดธเดนเดพเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเต. เดตเดฟเดตเดฐเดฎเดฑเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเตเดชเดฟเดคเดจเดพเดฏ เดฐเดพเดเดพเดตเต เดชเตเดฐเตเดนเดฟเดคเดจเต เดตเดงเดถเดฟเดเตเดท เดตเดฟเดงเดฟเดเตเดเต.
เดคเดเดตเดฑเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดเดดเดฟเดฏเตเดจเตเดจ เดเดพเดฒเดคเตเดคเต เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตป เดเดฏเดฟเดฒเดฑเตเดเต เดฎเดเดณเต เดเดฟเดเดฟเดคเตเดธเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดจเตเดจเตเด เดตเดงเดฟเดเตเดเดชเตเดชเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเดคเดฟเดจเตเดฎเตเดฎเตเดชเต โเดเดจเตเดจเต เดจเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตปโ เดเดจเตเดจเต เด เดตเดธเดพเดจเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจ เดเดฐเต เดเดคเตเดคเต เด เดตเตพเดเตเดเดพเดฏเดฟ เดเดดเตเดคเดฟเดฏเดคเดพเดฏเดฟ เดชเดฑเดฏเดชเตเดชเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเต. เด เดคเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดเตผเดฎ เดชเตเดคเตเดเตเดเดพเดจเดพเดฃเต เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตปเดธเต เดฆเดฟเดจเดคเตเดคเดฟเตฝ เดเดฎเดฟเดคเดพเดเตเดเตพ เดเดคเตเดคเต เดเตเดฎเดพเดฑเดพเตป เดคเตเดเดเตเดเดฟเดฏเดคเดคเตเดฐเต! เดเดจเตเดคเตเดฏเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดธเตเดฏเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเดจเต เดเดฐเต เดฆเตเดตเดพเดฒเดฏเด เดเดฃเตเดเต. เดชเตเดฐเดฃเดฏ เดชเดพเดฒเด เดชเตเดฃเตเดฏเดพเดณเดจเตเดฑเต เดเตเดตเตป เดเดชเตเดชเตเดณ เดเดจเตเดจเดฑเดฟเดฏเดชเตเดชเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดคเต. เดเตเดตเดฏเดฟเดฒเต เดเดฒเดเตเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดเดณเตเดณ saint valentine เดฆเตเดตเดพเดฒเดฏเด เดเดพเดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดฎเตเดเดจเตเดฎเดพเดฐเตเดเต เดเดเตเดเต เดชเตเดฐเดฟเดฏเดชเตเดชเตเดเตเด เดเดฐเต เดเดเดฎเดพเดฃเต. เดเดคเต เดเดฐเดฟเดคเตเดฐเด.
เดญเตผเดคเตเดคเดพเดตเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดฎเตเดเดคเตเดคเตเดเตเดเต เดตเตเดเดฟเดฏเตเดคเดฟเตผเดคเตเดคเดคเต เด เดเตเดเตเดตเดเตเดเด, เดเตเดฒเดฏเตเดเตเดเตเดถเตเดทเด เดเดจเตเดจเตเด เดฎเดฟเดฃเตเดเดพเดคเต เดเดฑเต เดตเตผเดทเด
เดเดจเดฟ เดเดฐเต เดเตผเดฎเตเดฎเดเตเดเตเดฑเดฟเดชเตเดชเต... เดเดฐเต เดจเดพเดเตป เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตป..
1970-เดเดณเตเดเต เด เดตเดธเดพเดจเด เดเดฐเต เดนเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดธเดเดธเตเดเดพเดฐเด เดเตเดฐเดณเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฒเตเด เดเดคเตเดคเดฟเดจเตเดเตเดเดพเตป เดคเตเดเดเตเดเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เดคเดฒเดฎเตเดเดฟ เดจเตเดเตเดเดฟเดตเดณเตผเดคเตเดคเดฟ, เดเตเดณเดฟเดเตเดเดพเดคเต, เดจเดจเดฏเตเดเตเดเดพเดคเต, เดเตเตปเดธเตเด เดเต เดทเตผเดเตเดเตเด เดงเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดฐเต เดเดฟเดฑเตเดฑเดพเดฑเตเด เดคเตเดณเดฟเดฒเดฟเดเตเดเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเตพ เดชเด เดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจ เดเตเดณเดเดฟเดจเต เดฎเตเดฎเตเดชเดฟเตฝ เดเดคเต เดชเตเดฒเตเดณเตเดณ เดเดจเตเดจเตเดฐเดฃเตเดเต เด เดเตเดคเดเตเดเดณเต เด เดเตเดเดพเดฒเดเดเตเดเดคเตเดคเดฟเตฝ เดเดพเดฃเดพเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เด เดตเดฐเดฟเตฝ เดชเตเดฐเดงเดพเดจเดฟเดฏเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดเดจเตเดจ เดตเดฟเดณเดฟเดชเตเดชเตเดฐเตเดณเตเดณ เดเดฐเต เดเตเดฑเตเดชเตเดชเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตป. เดฑเตเดฌเตผเดเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเดพเดฌเดฟ เดเดจเตเดจเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเดฒเตเดฒเต เดธเดฟเดเดฌเดพเดฌเตโเดตเตเดฏเตเดเต เดชเตเดฐเดงเดพเดจเดฎเดจเตเดคเตเดฐเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เดชเตเดฐเต. เด เดคเต เดฒเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดฃเตเดเดพเดฏเดคเดพเดฃเดคเตเดฐเต เด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ. เดธเดพเดเตเดทเดฐ เดเตเดฐเดณเด เดเดฃเดฒเตเดฒเต เดจเดฎเตเดฎเตเดเตเดคเต. เดเดฑเตเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฐเตเดฃเตเดเต เดเตเดฐเตเดฃเตเด เดฎเตเดเดฟเดฏเตเดณเตเดณ เดคเดเดฟเดฏเตป เดเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เด เดนเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ.ย ย
โเดฎเตเดถ เดฎเดพเดงเดตเดจเดฟเดฒเตโ เดฎเดพเดงเดตเดจเต เดชเตเดฒเต เด เดตเตป เดเดฐเตเดฏเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดจเตเดเตเดเดฟ เดฎเตเดถ เดชเดฟเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเดพเตฝ เด เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เด เดจเตเดจเต เดฎเตเดทเดฃเดคเตเดคเดฟเดจเต เดเดฏเดฑเตเด เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฑเดชเตเดชเดพเดฃเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดฏเตเดจเตเดจเดคเตเดชเตเดฒเต เดเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เดเดพเดฐเตเดฏเด. เด เดตเตป เดเดคเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดณเต เดจเตเดเตเดเด เดเดเตเดเดพเตฝ เด เดตเดณเต เดเดฐเดพเดดเตเด เดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดตเดณเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดฐเต เดเตเดฑเดฟเดจเต เดชเตเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเต เดตเดฐเตเดฎเดคเตเดฐเต! เด เดคเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเตเดคเดจเตเดจเต เดชเตเดฐเดพเดฏเดฎเดพเดฏ เดชเตเตบเดฎเดเตเดเดณเตเดณเตเดณ เด เดฎเตเดฎเดฎเดพเดฐเตเดเต เดจเตเดเตเดเดฟเดจเตเดณเตเดณเดฟเตฝ เดคเต เดเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เด เดคเต เดตเดฟเดเดพเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดณเตเดเต เดชเด เดฟเดชเตเดชเต เดจเดฟเตผเดคเตเดคเดฟ เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดเดฐเตเดคเตเดคเดพเดจเตเด เดชเดฑเตเดฑเดฟเดฒเตเดฒเดฒเตเดฒเต? เดเดฐเตเดฏเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดจเตเดเตเดเดฎเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดจเตเดจเดฑเดฟเดเตเดเดพเตฝ เดชเด เดฟเดชเตเดชเต เดเดเตเดเต เดเดจเดฟ เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเตเด เดเดเดพเด เดเดจเตเดจเตเด เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เด เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เดตเตเดเตเดเตเดเดพเตผ เดชเตเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดจเดเดคเตเดคเตเด. เดเดคเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เด เดเดพเดฒเดเดเตเดเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฒเต เดจเดพเดเตเดเตเดจเดเดชเตเดชเต.
14 เดตเตผเดทเด เดฌเดพเดเตเดเต เดเดฆเตเดฏเตเดเดธเตเดฅเตป, เด เดฎเดฟเดคเดพเดญเต เดฌเดเตเดเดจเตเดชเตเดชเด เด เดตเดคเดพเดฐเดเตป; เด เดฎเตเดทเต เดคเตเดฐเดฟเดชเดพเด เดฟ เดเดจเตเดจ เดธเตเดชเตเดชเตผ เดนเดฟเดฑเตเดฑเต เดเดดเตเดคเตเดคเตเดเดพเดฐเดจเต เด เดฑเดฟเดฏเดพเด
เดเดจเตเดจเดคเตเดคเต เดชเตเดฒเต โเดฎเดธเดพเดฒ เดฆเตเดถ เดตเดพเดเตเดเดฟ เดเตเดเตเดเตเดเดพเดฎเตเดจเตเดจเตโ เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดชเตเดกเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเต.. เดตเดฟเดตเดพเดนเดตเดพเดเตเดฆเดพเดจเด เดจเตฝเดเดฟ เดชเตเดกเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเต.. เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเตเดฏเดฎเดจเตเดคเตเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเต เดชเดฐเดพเดคเดฟ เดชเดฑเดฏเดพเดจเตเดจเตเดจเตเด เดชเดฑเตเดฑเดฟเดฒเตเดฒ. เดเดฒ เดตเดจเตเดจเต เดฎเตเดณเตเดณเดฟเตฝ เดตเตเดฃเดพเดฒเตเด เดฎเตเดณเตเดณเต เดตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฒเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดตเตเดฃเดพเดฒเตเด เดเตเดเต เดเดฒเดฏเตเดเตเดเดพเดฃเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเตเดเดฏเต เดจเดฟเดตเตผเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฏเตเดณเตเดณเต! เดเตเดณเดเต เดตเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดฑเดเตเดเดฟ เดตเดฐเตเดจเตเดจ เดชเตเดฃเตเดฃเตเดเตเดเดณเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดชเตเดฐเดฃเดฏเดพเดญเตเดฏเตผเดฅเดจ เดจเดเดคเตเดคเตเด. เดเดฟเดฒเดชเตเดชเตเตพ เดเดฐเดพเดดเตเด เดเดเตเดเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดณเตเดเต เดเดเตเดเดณเดฎเดพเดฐเตเดเต เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดจเดฟเดจเตเดจเตเด เดจเดฒเตเดฒ เดคเดฒเตเดฒเต เดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดเดถเตเดชเดคเตเดฐเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฒเตเด เดเดเตเด. เดชเดฟเดจเตเดจเต เดเดเดจเต เดเตเตพเดเตเดเดพเด เด เดชเตเดฃเตเดฃเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดเดฏเตเดจเตเดจเต!ย
เดชเตเดฐเตเดกเดฟเดเตเดฐเดฟ เดเดเดฎเตเดช เดเดเตเดเดจเตเดฏเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดเดพเดเดฟเดเตเดเดเดจเตเดจเต เดกเดฟเดเตเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเตเดฐเตเดจเตเดจ เดฎเดฃเตเดเดฟ เดชเตเตบเดชเดฟเดณเตเดณเตเตผเดเตเดเต เดกเดฟเดเตเดฐเดฟ เดฎเตเดจเตเดจเต เดตเตผเดทเด เดคเตเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเดคเดฟเดจเต เดฎเตเตปเดชเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดจเดเดเตเดเตเดฃเดฎเตเดฏเตเดจเตเดจเดพเดฃเต เดชเตเดฐเดพเตผเดฅเดจ. เดเดพเดฐเดฃเดย เดฌเดฟ.เด.เดฏเตเดเตเดเต เดชเด เดฟเดเตเดเตเดฎเตเดชเตเตพ เดเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดฏเดพเดฎเดฒเตเดฒเต? เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเดคเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดชเดฟเดจเตเดจเต เดชเด เดฟเดเตเดเดพเตป เดเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฒเตเดฒ, เด เดฒเตเดฒเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดชเตเดทเตเดชเดเดชเตเดฒเต เดเดพเตป เด. เด. เดเดธเต. เดเดดเตเดคเดฟเดฏเตเดเตเดคเตเดคเตเดจเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดฏเตเดเดฏเตเด เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเดพเด. เด เดเตเดเดจเต เด เดจเดพเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเต เดเดฐเตเดชเดพเดเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดณเตเดเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดเดพเดฐเดฃเด เดจเดเดจเตเดจเดฟเดเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเตเดจเตเดจ เด เดฐเดฎเดจ เดฐเดนเดธเตเดฏเด เด เดเตเดเดพเดเดฟเดชเตเดชเดพเดเตเดเต เดเดฃเต.
เดฎเดเตพ เดเตเดฒเดพเดธเต เดฎเตเดฑเดฟเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดคเดฒเดเดฑเดเตเดเดฟ เดตเตเดฃเต, เดเดถเตเดชเดคเตเดฐเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฒเดพเดฃเต; 'เดเดเดฏเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเดฏเตเดเตเดเต เด เดฎเตเดฎเตเดฎเตเดฎ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฟเดฑเตเดชเดฟเดฑเตเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเตเดฃเตเดเต...'
เด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเตเด เดเดฐเดฎเตเดฎ เดชเตเดฑเตเดฑ เดฎเดเตป เดเดฃเดฒเตเดฒเต? เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดเดฃเตเดฃเตเดฐเตเด เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเตเด เดชเตเดฐเดพเตผเดฅเดจเดฏเตเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟ เดชเดณเตเดณเดฟเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดเดฏเดฑเดฟ เดเดฑเดเตเดเดฟ, โเดฆเตเดตเดฎเต เดเดจเตเดฑเต เดฎเตเดจเตเดฑเต เดฎเดจเดธเตเดธเต เดฎเดพเดฑเตเดฑเดฃเต, เดจเดพเดเตเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตเดเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดฎเตเดดเตเดตเตป เดชเดฑเดฏเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเดพเดคเต เด เดตเดจเต เดเตเดฑเดฟเดเตเดเต เดจเดฒเตเดฒเดคเต เดเตเตพเดเตเดเดพเตป เดเดจเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเด เดตเดฐเตเดคเตเดคเดฃเตโ เดเดจเตเดจเตเดเตเดเต เดเดฐเดเตเดเต เดชเตเดฐเดพเตผเดฅเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจ เดธเดฎเดฏเด. เดเดฐเต เดฆเดฟเดตเดธเด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเต เดคเดฟเดฐเดเตเดเดฟ เดเตเดณเตเดณเดพเดตเตเดจเตเดจ เดเดฐเต เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟ เดเดคเตเดคเดฟ. เดเดฑเตเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฐเตเดฃเตเดเต เดคเดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดชเตเดเตเดเด เดเตเดฑเดเตเดเต เดเดพเดฃเดพเตป เดตเดฒเดฟเดฏ เดธเตเดจเตเดฆเดฐเตเดฏเด เดเดจเตเดจเตเดฎเดฟเดฒเตเดฒเดพเดคเตเดค เดเดเดคเตเดคเดฐเด เดเตเดเตเดเดฌเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฒเต เดเดฐเต เด เดเดเด เดเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต เดธเตเดธเดฎเตเดฎ. เด เดคเตเดญเตเดคเดชเดฐเดคเดจเตเดคเตเดฐเดฏเดพเดฏ เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดธเตเดธเดฎเตเดฎเดฏเต เดธเตเดตเตเดเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเต เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเดฟเดฐเตเดคเตเดคเดฟ เดเดเดฎเดจเตเดฆเตเดฆเตเดถเด เดเดจเตเดคเตเดจเตเดจเต เด เดจเตเดตเตเดทเดฟเดเตเดเต. เดเดพเดฐเดฃเด เดเดจเตเดจเตเดตเดฐเต เด เดตเดจเต เด เดจเตเดตเตเดทเดฟเดเตเดเต เดจเดฒเตเดฒเดตเดฐเดพเดฐเตเด เดตเดจเตเดจเดฟเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเดฒ. เดเดฟเดฒ เดเดเตเดเดพเดตเต เดธเตเดนเตเดคเตเดคเตเดเตเดเดณเต เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดชเตเดฒเตเดย เดเดฏเดฑเตเดฑเดพเดฑเดฟเดฒเตเดฒ.
เดธเตเดธเดฎเตเดฎ เดเดพเดฐเตเดฏเด เด เดตเดคเดฐเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฟเดเตเดเต. "เดเดพเตปย เดฌเดฟเดฐเตเดฆเดตเตเด เดฌเดฟเดฐเตเดฆเดพเดจเดจเตเดคเดฐเดฌเดฟเดฐเตเดฆเดตเตเด เดเดเตเดเต เดเดเตเดคเตเดคเต เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเต. เดชเดฒเดตเดดเดฟเดเตเดเตเด เดเดฐเต เดเตเดฒเดฟเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดเดฏเดฑเดพเตป เดถเตเดฐเดฎเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเตเดฃเตเดเต. เดชเดเตเดทเต เดเดจเตเดจเตเด เดถเดฐเดฟเดฏเดพเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเดฒ. เดเตเดเต เดชเด เดฟเดเตเดเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจ เดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเตพเดเตเดเตเดเตเดเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเดตเตเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดฐเดฃเตเดเต เดฎเดเตเดเดณเดพเดฏเดฟ. เด เดชเตเดชเตป เดฎเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเดคเดฟเดจเต เดฎเตเดฎเตเดชเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฒเตเดฏเดพเดฃเด เดเดดเดฟเดเตเดเต เด เดฏเดเตเดเดพเดจเตเดณเตเดณ เดชเดฃเด เดเดจเตเดจเตเด เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดจเดฒเตเดฒเตเดฐเต เดคเตเด เดเดจเตเดฑเต เดชเตเดฐเดฟเตฝ เดฌเดพเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดเดเตเดเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เดชเดเตเดทเต เดชเด เดฟเดเตเดเดพเตป เดตเดฒเดฟเดฏ เดฌเตเดฆเตเดงเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฒเตเดฒเดพเดคเตเดค เดฐเดฃเตเดเต เดเดเตเดเดณเดฎเดพเดฐเตเด เดเตเตผเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฐเต เดฌเดฟเดธเดฟเดจเดธเต เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเดพเตป เดเดฃเตเดจเตเดจเตเด เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เด เดเดพเดถเต เดฎเตเดดเตเดตเตป เดเดเตเดคเตเดคเต เด เดฑเดฟเดฏเดพเดคเตเดค เดชเดฒเดคเดฐเด เดฌเดฟเดธเดฟเดจเดธเตเดธเตเดเตพ เดเตเดฏเตเดคเต เดเดชเตเดชเตเตพ เดชเตเดเตเดเดฟเดชเตเดชเตเดณเดฟเดเตเด เดจเดฟเดฒเดฏเดฟเดฒเดพเดฃเต. เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดธเดนเดพเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเดฃเด" เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดเตเดเตเดชเตเดชเดฟ.ย
48-เดพเด เดตเดฏเดธเตเดธเดฟเตฝ, เดฎเดเตพ เดจเตฝเดเดฟเดฏ เดเตเดฏเดพเดฎเดฑเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดคเตเดเดเตเดเด; เดเตเตฝเดเตเดเดคเตเดคเดฏเดฟเตฝ เดเดจเดฟเดเตเด เดฌเตเดฐเดฟเดเตเดเดฟเดทเต เดซเตเดเตเดเตเดเตเดฐเดซเตผโ
เดธเตเดธเดฎเตเดฎเดฏเตเดเต เดเดฅ เดเตเดเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟเดฏเตเดเต เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดเตเดฆเดฟเดเตเดเต. "เดเดคเดฟเตฝ เดเดพเตป เดเดจเตเดคเต เดเตเดฏเตเดฏเดพเดจเดพเดฃเต?" "เดตเดดเดฟเดฏเตเดฃเตเดเต. เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเตเดฐเตเดฎเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดจเตเดฑเต เดตเตเดเตเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตเดเตเด เดจเดพเดเตเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตเดเตเด เด เดฎเตเดฎ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเดฑเดเตเดเดพเตฝ เดฎเดคเดฟ. เด เดจเตเดฏเตเดธเตโ เดจเดพเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เดชเดฐเดจเตเดจเดพเตฝ เดเดเดตเดเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตเด เดตเตเดฃเตเดเดชเตเดชเตเดเตเด เดฌเดจเตเดงเตเดเตเดเดณเตเด เด เดชเตเดชเตเตพ เดคเดจเตเดจเต เดชเตเดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดฒเตเดฒเดพเดคเตเดค เดเดพเดถเต เดเดเด เดตเดพเดเตเดเดฟ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฐเตเดเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเตเดเตเด." เดเดจเตเดจเต. เดเดฐเต เดชเตเตบเดเตเดเตเดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดคเดพเดฒเดฟ เดญเดพเดเตเดฏเด เดเดฃเตเดเดพเดเดพเตป เดเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดเดฐเต เดเดพเดฐเดฃเด เดเดเตเดฎเดฒเตเดฒเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดฐเตเดคเดฟ เด เดฎเตเดฎ เด เดคเดฟเดจเต เดธเดฎเตเดฎเดคเดฟเดเตเดเต. เดจเดพเดเดฟเดจเตเด เดตเตเดเดฟเดจเตเด เดชเตเดฐเดฏเตเดเดจเด เดเดฒเตเดฒเดพเดคเตเดค เด เดตเดจเต เดเตเดฃเตเดเต เดเดเตเดเดจเต เดเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเด เดเดฐเต เดเดชเดเดพเดฐเด เดเดฃเตเดเดพเดเดเตเดเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดคเตเดฎเดเดคเด เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เด เดตเตผ เดธเตเดธเดฎเตเดฎเดฏเต เดฏเดพเดคเตเดฐเดฏเดพเดเตเดเดฟ.
"เดจเดฟเดจเตโเดฑเต เดฎเตเดจเต เดฎเดฐเตเดฏเดพเดฆเดเตเดเต เดตเดณเตผเดคเตเดคเดฟเดฏเดฟเดฒเตเดฒเตเดเตเดเดฟเตฝ เด เดเดฟเดเตเดเต เดเดพเดฒเตเดเดฟเดเตเดเตเด, เดชเดฒเตเดฒเต เดเตเดดเดฟเดเตเดเตเด" เดเดจเตเดจเตเดเตเดเต เดชเดฑเดเตเดเต เดเตเดฃเตเดเตเดณเตเดณ เดเตเดเตเดตเดฟเดณเดฟเดฏเตเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเดพเดฃเต เดธเดพเดงเดพเดฐเดฃ เด เดตเตเดเตเดเดฟเดฒเตเดเตเดเต เดเตพเดเตเดเดพเตผ เดเดเดจเตเดจเต เดตเดฐเดฟเด. เดเดฆเตเดฏเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟเดเตเดเดพเดฃเต เดเดฐเดพเตพ เด เดชเตเดเตเดทเดฏเตเดฎเดพเดฏเดฟ เดตเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเดคเต. เด เดคเดฟเดจเตเดฑเต เดเตเดฑเดฟเดฏ เดเดฐเต เดธเดจเตเดคเตเดทเดย เด เดฎเตเดฎเดเตเดเตเดฃเตเดเดพเดฏเดฟเดฐเตเดจเตเดจเต. เด เดเตเดเดจเต เดตเดฟเดตเดพเดนเด เดจเดเดเตเดเดพเดคเตเดคเดตเดฐเตเดเตเดฏเตเด เดชเตเดฐเดฃเดฏ เดฆเดพเดนเดฟเดเดณเตเดเตเดฏเตเด เดฎเดงเตเดฏเดธเตเดฅเดจเดพเดฏเดฟ เดจเดฎเตเดฎเตเดเต เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ. เดเตเดฐเตเดเตเดเดฟเดชเตเดชเดฑเดเตเดเดพเตฝ เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดจเดฎเตเดฎเตเดเต เดฎเดฑเตเดฑเตเดฐเต เดจเดพเดเตป เดตเดพเดฒเดจเตเดฑเตเตป เด เดฒเตเดฒเต?
Malayalam Short Story ' Valentines Dinam February 14 2024 ' Written by Mary Josy Malayil
- Short Story Short Storytest -->
- Writers Blog Writers Blog test -->
- Malayalam Writing Malayalam Writingtest -->
- Malayalam Author Malayalam Authortest -->
- Malayalam Literature Malayalam Literaturetest -->
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) I will leave it to Kurt Vonnegut, who famously wrote, "I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce. It isn't remotely political.
The Jaunt [read it for free here ] The House on Maple Street [read it for free here ] (More Stephen King short stories here .) Haruki Murakami Short Stories Kino [read it for free here ] Scheherazade [read it for free here ] Samsa in Love [read it for free here ] Yesterday [read it for free here ] Town of Cats [read it for free here ]
John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardam's 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters. Reading this gleeful story in...
Edgar Allan Poe The influential short story writer was born in 1809. At 24, he wrote " The Murders in the Rue Morgue ," which set him on course as one of the most critically acclaimed writers ever. Edgar Allan later gained fame for his dark tales such as: The Tell-Tale Heart The Cask of Amontillado The Raven
From Voltaire to George Saunders, a complete list of the greatest short story authors who have written works in English or whose works have been translated into English. Usually, short fiction features a small cast of characters and is focused on one incident or anecdote and one overall mood, such as , or .
'The Signal Man' is a short story written by one of the world's most famous novelists, Charles Dickens. Image Credit: James Gardiner Collection via Flickr Creative Commons. 9. 'The Happy Prince' Author: Oscar Wilde Year: 1888
Indira Birnie and Sam Parker 24 September 2021 The short story, says Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steven Millhauser, has powers the novel only dreams of. "The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature," he wrote in his essay, The Ambition of the Short Story. " [And yet] the short story apologises for nothing.
There's the Hugos and Nebulas for SFF, not to mention the World Fantasy Awards; the Shirley Jackson Award, the Stoker, the Edgar, and the O. Henry; the Ignyte and the Locus. Then there are anthologies such as The Longlist Anthology, Year's Best Science Fiction, and the Pushcart Prize. And of course, we have a few more recs for you in our ...
๐ Which short story should you read next? Discover the perfect short story for you. Takes 30 seconds! Start quiz Free Short Stories to Read Right Now These individual short stories are the best of the best โ and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse.
Here are some famous short stories that you can read online for free: 1. 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson. Best known for her horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson's short story is not any less chilling. It starts by describing a village and its annual lottery.
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ' The Yellow Wallpaper '. 'The Yellow Wallpaper', an 1892 short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), has the structure and style of a diary.
The Little Match Girl The Gift of the Magi (1905) by O. Henry This tender story -- one of the most famous titles in the short story genre -- is a must-read. The story is about a young couple and how they meet the challenge of buying each other a Christmas gifts when they don't have enough money.
And some of the greatest fiction-writers of the last two centuries have written memorable short stories which stretch to little more than a few pages: short enough to be read in a coffee break. Below, we introduce ten classic short stories - very short stories - from some of the finest authors in the literary canon.
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl Roald Dahl is better known for children's books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but these creepy, tense and dark stories are a real treat for adults. A...
1. Katherine Mansfield, ' The Garden Party '. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was the one writer Virginia Woolf was jealous of, according to Woolf herself. Mansfield never wrote a full-length novel, but wrote a number of classic modernist short stories.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, The Twits and Matilda are some of his classic works. He also wrote short stories and novels meant for adults. 2 Ernest Hemingway (American Literary Icon Who Was Known for His Straightforward Prose & Use of Understatement) 35 11 Birthdate: July 21, 1899 Sun Sign: Cancer
This list of must-read contemporary short story collections is sponsored by Random House's Buzziest Short Story Collections of 2018. From New York Times bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld's dazzling first collection, You Think It, I'll Say It, to National Book Award winner Denis Johnson's final collection, The Largesse of the Sea ...
American best short story authors, O Henry who was born on 11 September 1862 is regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in the world. The Gift of Magi is his classic work that makes him famous. Final Thoughts. Short stories are as interesting as novel; thus, you can pick this kind of literature if you only have a limited reading time.
Short Stories. " The Tell-Tale Heart " by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe published this classic short story in 1843. The narrator of the story argues that he is not mad as he explains how he killed an old man. " To Build a Fire " by Jack London. Jack London's story is set in the Yukon. A man and his dog have ventured out into the dangerously ...
A Dominican-American writer and professor at MIT, Diaz first broke onto the scene with the publication of his 1995 short story collection Drown โ an exploration of masculinity, the immigrant experience, and coming-of-age for the character of Yunior in New Jersey in the 1980s. Diaz, who won a Pulitzer for his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2007 and a MacArthur Grant in 2012 ...
A surrealist collection from Severance author Ling Ma, Bliss Montage marks Ma's first published short story collection after her phenomenal debut novel (which has no relation to the recent Apple ...
เดฎเตเดเตเดเดพเดชเตเดชเดฟ เดเดจเตเดจเต เดชเตเดฐเตเดฎเดฟเดเตเดเตเดจเตเดจเต เดเดจเตเดจเต เดเดจเตเดฑเต เดตเตเดเตเดเตเดเดพเดฐเตเดเตเด ...