If you can't decide which new novel or nonfiction book to pick up, here's another idea: try reading a short story collection. There is drink and there are drugs and moments of shocking violence. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor, Your email address will not be published. A short story is a well-told story: efficient, impressive, and self-contained, like a rare gem. By BOOKPULP Team Sep 14, 2020.

In his critically acclaimed second short story collection, Saunders  uses his thrilling imagination to write about an odd, alternate version of America that, at times, strikingly resembles our own. Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful reimagining of what the gothic can do and be, creating a world in which the tremendous weight of being a woman is chillingly palpable throughout nearly all of the stories. Disclaimer: I would rather read Middlemarch or In Search of Lost Time than a short-story collection. Women are harassed in the stories, as much by people as by the unsettling atmospheres around them.

Labeled in 2015 as "one of most addictive books of the last 25 years" by O, this Pulitzer Prize-winning debut highlights the challenges both Indians and Indian Americans face while abiding by old and new traditions. Barrett’s mastery of the short story form won him the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honor. Some authors show up on the list multiple times, so be sure to vote on the author’s work and not just the author themselves.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection—which includes a sixty-page novella that takes place during the 1848 Gold Rush and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s involvement in the Manson Family during the late ’60s—is as starkly beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert frontier through which its stories roam.

Here, he encourages readers to imagine the otherworldly, offering exciting and disturbing prose with one story even set in the world of The Matrix. –Gabrielle Bellot, Staff Writer.

With a tenderness and generosity that catalyzes satirical clarity rather than the cloudiness of sentimentality, Saunders lets his characters puzzle their way through the confines of their own fictional lives, as wounded and joyous and magnificently broken as any among us, the living. The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the BOOKPULP staff. From the aching, class-conscious pathos of “Puppy,” in which two families intersect around the possible purchase of a dog, to the grim, neo-futurist allegory of “Escape From Spiderhead,” in which clinical drug trials go way too far, Saunders sets his characters down in a series of bespoke narrative dioramas, a wry and loving god forever suspicious of the disappointments his creations engender, yet unable to resist setting little boobytraps to see how they’ll react. This posthumous collection of the Nobel Prize winner's work contains classics such as Hills Like White Elephant and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories … Score A book’s total score is based on multiple factors, including the number of people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book.

This is despite the fact that, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of the common man. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief.

All 41 stories published in this 1983 winner of the National Book Award for Fiction accurately depict the rich diversity of life in the American South. The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the BOOKPULP staff. She writes: “I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.” They too are wonderful.

Celebrated fantasy and sci-fi writer N.K. Another story in the collection “What Is A Volcano?” reflects a similar human urge to play god, drawing on myth and literally presenting feuding gods who argue over each other’s primacy. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below. There is the steady inescapability of failure and loss, and every so often there are moments of soaringly lyrical writing. From the title itself, Machado makes it clear that collection will focus on women’s bodies–and her deployment of the dispassionate-sounding “parties” as the title’s second half suggests the cool detachment with which male harassment, for instance, so often involves equating women’s worth to their bodies.

It’s not quite surrealism—maybe I would call it slime-coated realism. There’s an enviable fearlessness to Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look away from the despair that lies within the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy trajectories or tidy resolutions. Most of the stories in Dear Life were previously published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta; they all display Munro’s uncanny ability to take a lifetime—or even generations of a single family—and shrink it into a thirty-page text—not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering a character so textured, and a series of moments so precise, that we can’t help but feel we know all about them. by N.K. That being said, when I read Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved four years ago, I remember thinking it was my ideal collection. Though not all the stories here are quite as moving as this one, The Paper Menagerie cemented Liu as one of the decade’s most inventive (and popular) short story writers, adept at infusing his shapeshifting work with a touch of Charlie Kaufman-esque hyperreality and Eastern Asian folklore. Jemisin, The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter, A Rose for Emily and Other Stories by William Faulkner, The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, 10 Books About Paris That'll Make You Swoon, This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. The collection also includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”—we are told. Is it all that remarkable that a short story collection by a writer who died in 2004 should, in fact, be one of the best collections of the decade that followed?

Jemisin's debut short story collection includes an excerpt from her Hugo Award-winning trilogy, Broken Earth. Short stories and the collections of them can be more popular as readers are busier and only have time to devote to a short story instead of a novel. The titular story, which won Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, shows Liu in top form. Only one person, Alice Munro, has won a Nobel Prize in Literature solely for writing short stories, a significant nod to the fact that it takes great talent to create a fictional world in 4,000 words or less.

Many of the stories in Her Bodies and Other Parties contain echoes of the images and themes that so often constellate gothic literature and “the gothic” as a mode or atmosphere of writing: ghosts, beheadings, violence, trauma, claustrophobic environments, a pervading sense of unease or uncertainty. Aside from the earthy brilliance of Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women itself, the fact of its phenomenon—at least among those who consume multiple story collections a year—speaks to a great gap in our literary culture.

Barrett’s characters live hard lives in the aftermath of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years, an economic boom time that happened to other people but the effects of whose abrupt end are felt everywhere.

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Her follow-up collection of short stories strays beyond the boy-meets-girl premise into much darker territory. List of the best collections of short stories with most written by one author or stories edited into a compilation that have the same theme. List RulesAnthologies and edited collections of short fiction. These stories and characters are not flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept; it’s simply that Munro knows people, and represents them so accurately, so wisely, and so humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. They are all basically realist, if dark, psychological portraits, but there’s something fabulistic about them—Moshfegh pushes humanity to its logical extension, and the results are grotesque and poignant. But while many classic tales of gothic literature—with a few exceptions—have portrayed women as tropes at best and monsters at worst, Machado’s stories beautifully and poignantly focus on what it means to be a woman, to inhabit a woman’s body, in a gothic landscape that, for all its ghosts and mysterious plagues, feels all too terrifyingly, traumatically like the world we live in. For Berlin, these are not places we pass through, to mine for epiphany or authenticity, but rather the locations in which life happens: as one reviewer put it, the stories in this collection are “all beginnings and middles with no ends,” and one only wishes Berlin had lived long enough to see the beginning of her own renaissance. The Paper Menagerie gathers some of Liu’s most celebrated stories, summaries of which do little to convey the scope of his imagination. Required fields are marked *. For his second collection, Carver digs deep into the themes of friendship and love while sending one clear message of hope—even in the darkest of times. Lists of celebrated short fiction by author and region and curated collections you should add to your home library. | These short story collections will be ordered depending on their ranking by voters. When Berlin writes of last-chance bus depots or cheap borderland hotels or third-rate nursing homes she does so minus the literary tourist’s appropriative bravado, that triumphalist wild boy tick that seems to define so much of the fiction of her male contemporaries.

Nearly all stories are based in the exact small town where Faulkner was born and lived during his lifetime, offering insight into the mind of a literary legend. “Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.”. The flaws in this hubristic, quick-fix mindset are immediately revealed when the eponymous man falls from the sky. Authors included are James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, David Sedaris, Stephen King and many more.