Favorite Short Fiction
Explore our curated list of favorite short fiction books. Discover timeless classics and hidden gems perfect for quick reads and literary enjoyment.
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Jigs & Reels
by Joanne Harris
Presents a short story collection in which the author mixes the mundane with the marvelous in twenty-two tales of dolphin women, aging monsters, defiant old ladies, Wolf men, suburban witches, and other characters.
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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003
by Laura Furman
"Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction" (The Atlantic Monthly), an exciting selection of the twenty best short stories, with brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges—David Guterson, Diane Johnson, and Jennifer Egan—on their favorite story. Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories. An accomplished new series editor—novelist and short story writer Laura Furman—has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story. The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff Lush Bradford Morrow God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers The Story Edith Pearlman Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle Meanwhile Ann Harleman Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light The High Road Joan Silber Election Eve Evan S. Connell Irish Girl Tim Johnston What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Kissing William Kittredge Sacred Statues William Trevor Two Words Molly Giles Fathers Alice Munro Train Dreams Denis Johnson
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The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
by Ben Marcus
Edited by the award-winning author of "Notable American Women," this engaging and comprehensive collection contains 29 short stories that show the stylistic variety of the medium in America today. Contributors include Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace, Rick Bass, and Anne Carson.
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The Circus in Winter
by Cathy Day
A unique novel charts the long relationship between the Great Porter Circus and a small town in Indiana, where circus folk and small-town inhabitants mingle in a series of long-term relationships that cross into both worlds.
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Former Virgin
by Cris Mazza
This new collection of stories explores problems and situations caused only by the ordinary people who suffer through them. The stories in Former Virgin circle a question many women have begun asking themselves lately: What have I DONE to myself?
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Drown
by Junot DĂaz
From the beloved and award-winning author Junot DĂaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World. A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot DĂaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made DĂaz a literary sensation.
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Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Editors' Choice A Pulishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.
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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
by Aimee Bender
"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire "Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.
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Bottom of the Ninth
by John McNally
Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself--the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.
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Demonology
by Rick Moody
Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the richest pleasures that fiction can afford.
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Beyond the Curve
by KĹŤbĹŤ Abe
A collection of works including such stories as "An Irrelevant Death," "The Dream Soldier," "Dendrocalia," "The Special Envoy," and "The Crime of S. Karma"
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Japanese Baseball and Other Stories
by W. P. Kinsella
Kinsella weaves his characters into the thrill of the game, be it in Japan, Central America, Canada or the U.S., with a variety of comic, tragic, and mystical results. This collection captures the dazzling wit, compelling insight, and obsession with baseball that have made Kinsella more popular than a ballpark frank.
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Don't Tell Anyone
by Frederick Busch
A collection of short stories explores the connections among people and asks why some succeed and others do not.
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The Stories of Richard Bausch
by Richard Bausch
Few writers of the past quarter-century have so consistently surprised, startled, and delighted their readers as has the masterful Richard Bausch, whom the Washington Post Book World calls "a virtuoso of language and literary grace." His nine critically acclaimed novels have established him as one of the most important fiction writers of his generation, a visionary stylist with an acute eye for the minute detail that illuminates the deepest wells of human experience. Yet it is for his award-winning short fiction that Bausch is perhaps most admired. The Stories of Richard Bausch celebrates the work of a great American artist, a writer the New York Times calls "a master of the short story." By turns tender, raw, heartbreaking, and riotously funny, the many voices of this definitive forty-two-story collection (seven of which appear here for the first time) defy expectation, attest to Bausch's remarkable range and versatility, and affirm his place alongside such acclaimed story writers as John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley.
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The Middle of the Night
by Daniel Stolar
A collection of short stories explores a world of love and loss, desire and longing, as it examines key moments in people's efforts to understand the paths their lives have taken.
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Sometimes I Dream in Italian
by Rita Ciresi
In her acclaimed novels Blue Italian and Pink Slip, Rita Ciresi dazzled both readers and critics with her graceful storytelling and wise, witty insight into the lives of women. Now Ciresi goes home: in a resonant, lovingly written story of two sisters, one family, and the memories of childhood that slip away--only to hold us forever. The plastic Pieta on top of the TV. The condiment dish shaped like a Venetian gondola. The crucifix studded with seashells... Years later, Angel and Lina Lupo would debate: What really was the most hideous thing in their parents' cramped and quintessentially Catholic house? And why couldn't they just forget about being Italian and have a "normal" American childhood? As the sisters argue, memories of their shared past come flooding back: a flirtation with the butcher's cousin, a mysterious photograph of a beautiful woman they once found in their father's drawer, a church-sponsored trip to the Statue of Liberty that detoured into the dark side of human sexuality. Angel and Lina long to flee their parents' heavy accents and dowdy clothes for the glamour of New York and Hollywood. But once they have grown from ragazze to donne--girls to women--they will look back on the time that they billed themselves as the stage sensation called Two Italian Hits! with wistfulness and sorrow. One sister is about to marry a man she met by answering a personal ad. The other is on the verge of divorce. Both have come to crossroads in their lives--as they grapple with a past that seems too present, and a future that seems too far away. Lyrical and bittersweet, rich with nostalgia, Sometimes I Dream in Italian is a story of family and love, of the bonds we are bornwith and those we struggle to create. A book for anyone who has ever longed both to escape and recapture the past, who can still remember a sister spinning in a new skirt, or the roughness of a kiss delivered by an unshaven father, Sometimes I Dream in Italian is a work of artistry by a writer at the peak of her storytelling powers.
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Light Action in the Caribbean
by Barry Lopez
From the author of the National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams comes a masterful work of fiction, a collection of stories that balances the marvelous and the real, intellect and heart, with extraordinary grace. Set variously in Peru, Chine, the Caribbean, California, and the American West, here are tales of men and women exploring the landscapes of their own innocence and desire; confronting violence, estrangement, and the disillusionment of war; or encountering the hope, fierce integrity, defiance, and wisdom of others. A packet of recently discovered seventeenth-century Peruvian love letters presents a twentieth-century man with the paralyzing choice of either protecting or exposing their stunning secret. A man's encounter with a young deaf girl ("eerie in her stillness and independence") rearranges his notions of pity. When some young boys on the lookout for easy money get caught with a truckload of stolen horses, their fates raise questions of justice and redemption. For a group of convicts, a gathering of birds in the prison yard may be the key to transcendence, both figurative and literal. Here are saints who shouldn't touch, but do; sinners who insist on the life of the spirit; a postcard paradise that turns into a nightmare. With "Light Action in the Caribbean," Barry Lopez, whose fiction has been hailed as "haunting... mysterious" (Time) and "superb...exquisitely wrought" (SF Chronicle), carries his central concerns -- place, compassion, memory, the quest of the traveler -- to exciting new frontiers, both geographic and emotional.
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Collected Stories
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog,Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.
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The Bridegroom
by Ha Jin
From the National Book Award-winning author of "Waiting" comes a new collection of short fiction that confirms Ha Jin's reputation as a master storyteller.
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Dillinger in Hollywood
by John Sayles
A collection of short stories by the American filmmaker that explores life on the edge of poverty and fame.