Short Stories

What does it mean to really see the world around you―to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see? A poignant and evocative collection of short stories that delves into the complexities of human relationships, identity and...

Lying alone on the edge of the sidewalk in an abandoned cardboard box, a nameless narrator contemplates the indifferent world around him. With his mother long gone, his only company is the sound of the nearby train. Just as he fears that the end...

Brilliant, poetic, swift with violence and action, his stories clearly illustrate the unique spirit of his unbridled genius. Critics admitted that the young firebrand "while frightfully primitive" was challenging Poe, Kipling and Melville as a one-in-a-million storyteller. The tales in this volume have been...

On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with her...

A master of many literary genres, Arthur Conan Doyle excelled particularly in the short-story form, and was acclaimed in his day as much for his detective stories as for his thrilling tales of mystery and the supernatural. While the adventures of Sherlock Holmes have...

Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over; on Twelfth Night he and his guests gather together and relate the supernatural experiences they have had. The resulting ghost stories thrill,...

In contrast with the epic scope of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola's short stories are concerned with the everyday aspects of human existence and the interests of ordinary people. From the cruel irony of 'Captain Burle' to the Rabelaisian exuberance of 'Coqueville on the Spree',...

It is New Year's Eve, and Nellie, the pretty daughter of a landowning general, is sitting in her room looking in the mirror. Although she is tired and her eyes are half closed, she is spellbound as the reflection in the looking glass dissolves...

“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A...

Despite multiple warnings, Horace B. Otis and his family move to Canterville Chase, a sprawling English manor with a dark history and a lingering guest. From the brilliant mind of Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost is an irreverent mix of horror and humor. Canterville...

The Complete Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde gathers all nine of Oscar Wilde’s whimsical, poignant fabulations from The Happy Prince and Other Tales and The House of Pomegranates. Laced with Wilde’s legendary drollery, these fanciful tales touch on the themes of love, devotion, creativity,...

Dream Angus comes to you at night and bestows dreams. Just the sight of him may be enough to make you lose your heart, for he is also the god of love, youth and beauty. In this mesmerising retelling of the Celtic myth, Alexander...

Eye-opening, razor-sharp, and laced with dark humor, Born Into This offers a powerful indictment of modern colonialism and racism. Set against the harsh Tasmanian landscape, Adam Thompson’s stories follow Aboriginal characters navigating complex choices, systemic prejudice, and cultural loss. Blending biting wit, pathos, and...

The Collected Stories showcases Grace Paley's remarkable gift for capturing the rhythms of everyday speech with warmth, wit, and profound empathy. Moving effortlessly between humor and heartbreak, her stories illuminate the complexities of ordinary lives with honesty and keen observation. Through portraits of marriages...

For the first time, Sigrid Nunez brings together a collection of short fiction spanning three decades of her remarkable literary career. Known for her deeply thoughtful novels and distinctive blend of emotional insight, quiet humor, and philosophical reflection, Nunez reveals another dimension of her...

In this remarkable debut collection, Mahreen Sohail presents twelve compelling stories that illuminate the complexities of women's lives in contemporary Pakistan. Moving through the experiences of daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and women forging their own paths, each story captures moments of love, loss, resilience,...

A chilling collection of interconnected stories in which ordinary lives slip quietly into the uncanny. Across a small unnamed city, strangers cross paths in ways that grow darker with every page. A young writer moves into a new apartment and learns her landlady may have...

A captivating collection of stories from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, exploring the lives we might have lived, the people who linger in memory, and the narratives that continue to shape us long after they end. In this vibrant and deeply moving collection, Ozeki...

A mesmerizing and deeply unsettling collection from one of contemporary literature’s most singular voices, Mouthful of Birds draws readers into worlds where the familiar slips suddenly, terrifyingly out of place. In these haunting stories, Samanta Schweblin explores lives pushed to the brink: women unraveling...

With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the...

Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the short story and a two-time Pulitzer finalist, has earned countless accolades, including the O. Henry and...

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto cracks open the glossy postcard version of Hawai‘i to reveal a world pulsing with ancestral memory, feminine rage, and surreal beauty. This electrifying debut story collection blurs the lines between myth and modern life—where a woman’s body becomes a battleground after...

A selection of six masterful stories from Nobel Prize–winner Alice Munro, each revealing the quiet, unspoken truths at the heart of human life. Vintage Munro gathers some of the most iconic works from across Munro’s celebrated career. Included are the title stories from The...

A poignant collection of short stories delving into themes of loss, alienation and the complexities of contemporary life. The book comprises 11 stories that span over 14 years of Li's writing. Other stories in the collection explore diverse experiences of grief and connection. In...

A directionless woman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a rooftop-party influencer, only to learn that curated glamour hides a hollow center. A first-year college student embarks on an absurdly long sexual encounter with a boy whose name she can't remember. A beloved reality-TV...

In Half an Inch of Water, Percival Everett returns with a haunting collection of stories set across the modern American West. Each piece follows people living at the edge of vast landscapes—fathers, daughters, sheriffs, ranchers—whose ordinary days suddenly tilt into the strange. A deaf...

Visionary and Everyday. Vampires, ghosts, and other uncanny beings haunt the pages of this rich anthology of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and introduced by Italo Calvino—one of the 20th century’s great literary visionaries. Published posthumously, Fantastic Tales gathers a captivating range of eerie, enchanting,...

A brilliant, genre-defying novel that captures the disorienting speed and fragmentation of modern life. First published in 1976 and hailed as a cult classic, the book follows Jen Fain, a sharp, perceptive journalist living in New York City, as she navigates the shifting landscapes...

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long...

First published in 1989 as Children of Wax, The Girl Who Married a Lion includes all but one of the original stories and features six new folk tales, an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith and a letter from the one and only Mma Ramotswe....

Every Short Story (1951-2012) The first sixteen tales in this collection were published by Canongate in 1983 with the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This collection also has fifty-seven tales from later books, plus sixteen new ones written for the hardback publication of this collection....

Supernatural Short Stories: Tales of Murder and Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft One of the main forces in early nineteenth-century literature, Sir Walter Scott was notonly among the greatest novelists of his time, but influenced generations of writers,including literary giants such as Stendhal and...

A rediscovered classic of Hungarian literature, this spellbinding collection vividly depicts the darkest impulses of the human psyche against the backdrop of Europe’s moral and social decline on the eve of World War I. Géza Csáth (pen name of Joszef Brenner) was a writer,...

Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of...

Originally hand-printed at her Hogarth Press in Richmond, Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short stories that Virginia Woolf published during her lifetime, providing a fascinating insight into the early stages of development of themes that would blossom in her later masterpieces.From...

Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or...

Spanning nearly three decades of work, A Wilderness Station gathers twenty-eight masterful stories by Alice Munro, one of the most revered voices in modern fiction. From rural farmsteads to city streets across Canada, Munro captures ordinary lives at the turning point—moments when love falters,...

From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues , a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection. Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these twelve stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of...

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his...

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the...

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a...

An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha. In these seven stories of People from...

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for...

Michel Faber’s short stories reveal an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a deep love of language and an adventurous versatility. Playful, yet profoundly moving, wickedly satirical yet sincerely humane, these tales never fail to strike unexpected chords. ‘Some Rain Must Fall’ juxtaposes the tragic circumstances of...

These dazzling stories from the internationally acclaimed author of Bad Girls erase the fine line between fantasy and reality, and establish her as an impressive literary voice. In the 1990s, a woman makes a living as a rental girlfriend for gay men. In a...

Yiyun Li offers a deeply moving debut collection that spans continents and generations, exploring the quiet complexities of Chinese and Chinese American lives. From Beijing to suburban America, her stories reveal the intimate struggles behind migration, family ties, lost love, and cultural dislocation. Whether...

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the...

In 'The Wave', a young man falls dangerously in love with the tenant downstairs, who is engaged to be married; in 'The Signorina', a flirtatious young woman is caught between her feelings and her parents' desire for a good match; in 'A Friend to...

When her wealthy family prepares to host a lavish summer party, the young, hitherto sheltered Laura Sheridan suddenly feels a kinship with the staff and the helpers hired to set up the venue for the festivities. As she learns of the death of one...

A playful and sharp-witted entry point into Russian literature, Belkin’s Stories presents five brief tales full of love, irony, and the unexpected—each narrated secondhand by the elusive Ivan Belkin. From duels and blizzards to ghostly encounters and ruined romances, Pushkin uses popular 19th-century genres...