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The Best Short Story Collections for Great Literature in Small Portions
Works by revered writers like Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, as well as breakthrough names like Emma Cline and Carmen Maria Machado
Short stories are more than just a quick fix of fiction for the time-strapped. When crafted well, short stories are like grenades which quickly explode in front of us. They let us dip our toe into strange minds and foreign worlds, or conceal something which lurks behind the pages before sliding into view.
Here we round up the best classic and modern short story collections that should be on everyone's radar, whether you're looking to get more into the form or discover some hidden gems.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
When it was first published in 2009, this debut short story collection by the American writer Wells Tower was something of a sensation. Here was a practitioner who seemed to have sprung fresh out of the traps already in possession of an innate mastery of his form: a gift for shaping intriguing, funny and occasionally devastating tales – about disaffected American schoolboys and disaffected marauding Vikings alike – which contained laser-sighted observations about human behaviour. Over a decade later, Towers’ book has lost none of its power or its poise.
Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
It is hard to underplay the legacy of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, of which she wrote 32 in her relatively brief life (she died of lupus at 39, in 1964). Winning the National Book Award for Fiction for this collection (posthumously) in 1972 might be one of them, though in 2009 it was named the best book ever to have won the award (commiserations to John Cheever and Eudora Welty). A devout Catholic with an ear for the sardonic who came to epitomise the Southern Gothic, Flannery’s world view, once deemed progressive, has come under closer scrutiny of late – particularly around race – but for understanding the development of the short story in mid-century America this collection is essential.
Pastoralia by George Saunders
If there’s one thing that George Saunders nails in his short stories (and there’s not one, there are many) it’s his imaginative eye for the absurd. Thus the title story of Pastoralia, his second short story collection, published in 2000, is an account of the inner neuroses of a failing father with difficult co-workers, who just so happens not to work for an accountancy firm, but for a nightmarish evolution-of-mankind-themed visitor attraction at which he earns his living by grunting like a caveman and pretending to eat bugs. It’s typical of the pathos and humour that Saunders is so good at eliciting, so that even the bleakest, most ridiculous scenarios are still infused with delight.
Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
The Central Valley of California is the backdrop of this psychedelic debut from Anthony Veasna So, a Cambodian-American writer who tragically died before the book was published. In it, So tells tales that ricochet between being tenderly moving and darkly amusing, drawing on his own race and sexuality to create characters with many different, and sometimes clashing, identities.
[An earlier version of this entry included incorrect information about the circumstances of the author's death.]
Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery
The buzzy debut from Irish writer Nicole Flattery inspired a bidding war ahead of its publication in 2019, and reading the collection it feels as though she has inhaled the absurdity this strange collective moment and let it out in one steady plumes. One story finds a woman maniacally dating during an apocalypse, while another watches a plucky teenage girl trying to seduce her parent's builder by watching The Exorcist together.
Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich
In eleven distinct but spiritually interwoven stories, New Yorker editor Clare Sestanovich finds women at different crossroads in their lives. In the title story, a woman finds herself unable to move on from her ex and questioning the life she has built since leaving him, while another focuses on a woman who finds herself on the outskirts of a polyamorous relationship, berating herself for not being in the middle of the action.
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor's electric novel Real Life, which offered a Black perspective on the pernicious yet subtle racism entrenched in American college life, earned him a Booker Prize nomination in 2020. His next work is a collection of linked short stories set in the Midwest, including an outbreak of violence amongst a group of teenagers, a girl who pushes her babysitter to the edge, and a man in a precarious open relationship with two dancers.
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South
As the dismembered body which features on the cover might suggest, Mary South's pitch-black collection of stories is not exactly a jolly read. Here you'll find Black Mirror-esque tales about a moderator for grim online videos of suicide and beheadings, a rehabilitation camp for internet trolls where one guest goes astray, and the tale of an architect who finds her work inspired by her daughter's birth defect. An alluring collection of stories about the ways our pain manifests and the polarised world we live in.
Daddy by Emma Cline
The author of the best-selling The Girls, inspired by the Manson family and killing of Sharon Tate, finds equally dark territory in this collection of stories about who holds power between men and women, adults and children. In one story we visit a family at Christmas time who are trying to move past the abuse of the father figure, while in another a violent incident brings a father and son together. Cline's understanding of the darkness inside human beings bringing each story to life.
Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg
This acclaimed collection of six stories, the first release from Eisenberg in 12 years, is brilliantly droll and crackling with life. Whether dismantling our relationship with money or the lasting wounds which grief leaves us on, Your Duck is My Duck is both moving and amusing.
Sam The Cat by Matthew Klam
The breakthrough collection from Matthew Klam, who went on to write the brilliant Who Is Rich?, goes deep, often uncomfortably so, into the male psyche. Painting a vivid portrait of modern life through fumbled wedding speeches and longing stares across a party, Klam's writing on men is as relevant and alive as it was 20 years ago.
The Office Of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
This celebrated 2020 collection is an exploration of race which takes you on a journey alongside the conflicted characters which Evans presents. From the story of a white university student who finds that a photograph in which she's wearing a Confederate flag bikini has gone viral, to the tale of how a wedding takes an unexpected twist, Evans tiptoes through uncomfortable topics with enjoyable and impressive results.
To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss
Krauss, author of acclaimed novels such as Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, here takes the long view of life. These stories connect a moment in a girl's adolescence to the feeling of youth felt by a woman in later life, linking up the sons, husbands and friends in a woman's life to question the differences between the sexes.
You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
In an age rife with hustles and scams, Sittenfeld's You Think It I'll Say It looks not at those trying to con us, but at the acts of self-deception we engage in. Whether that means the ways which we misread other people or our tendencies to unknowingly dupe ourselves, these ten stories feel timeless yet knowing of the current zeitgeist.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The debut book from Machado explores the various violences inflicted in women's bodies, her writing walking a tightrope between the erotic and horrific, the amusing and the macabre. In 'The Husband Stitch' she explores the body-wrenching pain of labour and the joke of men asking the surgeon for an extra stitch when putting their wife back together, while 'Eight Bites' digs into the fairytale promises of weight-loss transformation.
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
Having mastered the novel and essay formats, British literary stalwart Zadie Smith turned her pen to short stories in 2019. The 19 different tales in Grand Union are sprawling in their reach, touching on everything from single motherhood to the free speech debate in universities, objectifying men to the urban myth of Michael Jackson leaving New York with friends on the morning of 9/11, all told in Smith's commanding prose.
Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill
Long, long before Phoebe Waller-Bridge caused a stir with Fleabag, Mary Gaitskill was dissecting the power dynamics of sex and relationships between men and women with her intense tone of voice. Bad Behaviour burns with longing and passion, from stories about ex partners haunting a city to a woman waiting for a date to show up while he watches her from across the street. These stories are uncomfortable, prescient and fascinating.
Florida by Lauren Groff
Snakes, crocodiles and lizards stalk the pages of this 2018 collection from one of America's most celebrated novelists, in which the muggy, murky state of Florida is always a principle character. Groff's mastery of language, plot and dialogue are on full display in a set of stories that linger long after you've closed the last page.
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
In his unmistakably brash style, Díaz pulls you into the life of his recurring protagonist Yunior at the point of his break-up with his long-term girlfriend, then when a woman that comes into his life fleetingly then dumps him and an older woman he has an affair with who becomes his teacher. Despite the message of how flawed our relationships are, Díaz reminds us that “ love, real love, is not so easily shed.”
The Love Object by Edna O'Brien
One of great modern Irish writers, this 2014 collection spans five decades of brilliance from O'Brien whose prose style is among the most revered of any living author. Her characters range from lonely nuns to single mothers to modern millionaires and are consistently brilliantly.
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
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