I Don't Have Time to Read a Novel
Short story collections usually require the committment and thought many give to novels. But the advantage, and distinction, of short stories is their length. With the following collections, you don't have to sacrifice content for brevity, though. (Interestingly, short story collections frequently receive the most pretigious literary awards.) Reading short stories gives you the chance to interact with an author's work on a smaller scale; if you like her short story, you might like her novel, too.
Provacative, masterfully written, profound, these collections will challenge you.
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
Subtly surreal, darkly comic, both hilarious and heartbreaking, Fortune Smiles is a major collection of stories that gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear, while offering something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world. In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.
Tenth of December by 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.
Runaway by Alice Munro
In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.
Bark by Lorrie Moore
From The Economist: “Ms Moore’s writing glides. She describes the mundane with precision and grace. . . . Bark simultaneously honours and regrets the messiness of human relationships. Ms Moore is like one of her characters: ‘sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other.’”
Honeydew by Edith Pearlman
In prose as knowing as it is poetic, Pearlman shines a light on small, devastatingly precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life. Both for its artistry and for the recognizable lives of the characters it renders so exquisitely and compassionately, Honeydew is a collection that will pull readers back time and again.
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.
100 Years of the Best American Short Stories
Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Lorrie Moore calls “all its wildnesses of character and voice.”
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