Short Fiction / Short Stories

Israeli author Etgar Keret is back with "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door," another collection of ultra brief, absurdist stories that combine humor with human frailty to great effect.

Hot Pink by Adam Levin 3 ½ stars Hot Pink is a collection of ten short works by Adam Levin, author of 2010's magnificent novel The Instructions. These stories provide brief, wry glimpses into an array of troubled lives, all trapped somewhere on the brink of adulthood.

In The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo collects nine stories that he wrote between 1979 and 2011. Individually taken, these nine narratives are tightly-woven masterpieces, but ordered chronologically, they tell a global tale that is simultaneously about how far we've come and how bad it's gotten.

The stories in Quim Monzo's Guadalajara veer from re-imaginings of classic tales - Robin Hood, The Trojan War, The Metamorphosis - to original tales probing the existential within the mundane.

Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar is full of compelling stories that cover the gamut of work: types of jobs, emotions about work, and varieties of employees.

The 2011 edition of the Mystery Writers of America’s annual anthology is edited by Nelson DeMille and features 20 new stories by some of the best mystery writers working today.

Julian Barnes' Pulse is a well-tempered anthology of subtle dramatics. By dividing the stories in Pulse between two distinctly different sections, Barnes reminds readers that a short story collection can have a remarkable amount of craft in its structuring.

Jim Shepard's story collection features an wide array of well-conceived short fiction. Readers are introduced to the filmmaker responsible for Godzilla, the lives of avalanche scientists circa 1939, a near-future Netherlands flooded beyond previously established high-water marks, and more, all crafted with meticulous research. Yet, Shepard is...

Gryphon is a collection of twenty-three stories, written by Charles Baxter between the early eighties and today, all of which are packed with a slow-paced poetry that riffs on the flatness - and oftentimes frozenness - of middle American landscapes.

Joyce Carol Oates' work is often violent, and her topics often include rural poverty, sexual abuse, and female childhood and adolescence. Give Me Your Heart includes these elements and adds in a dose of survivorhood. Although terrible things happen, and some protagonists are guilty, some are plucky and lucky enough to escape certain tragedy.

In nearly all of these short stories included in this collection, characters face a chasm, either emotional or geographical, and struggle with adjusting their lives around it. Some fight to reconnect with a distant homeland, some with distant friends and family, while others try to embrace the rift and grow stronger despite its presence.

In his new book of stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, David Sedaris proves that he's a master at pushing the limits of whatever genre he chooses to write.

In the four novellas that make up Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King has crafted some of the most accessible, engrossing gothic tales that showcase his literary bravado while maintaining a firm hand on the suspense.

This book began when neuroscientist David Eagleman questioned why humans limit our conceptions of heaven to those handed us by the world's major religions when the possible scenarios are endless? Over the course of seven years, Eagleman crafted 40 vignettes, each of which colorfully imagines a possible life after death.

The struggle of intellectual man with his primal, animal nature is a recurrent theme in T. C. Boyle's stories. Over and again we see humans doing just what their animal instincts tell them to do, even in the face of clear and logical evidence that they would be better served by doing something else.

Fourteen new and previously unpublished short stories that sparkles with the wit, the sarcasm, and the dark observations that only Kurt Vonnegut can offer.

The twenty stories in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 are wide-ranging in their styles and themes, and - much like the 2008 collection - are short stories first, mysteries second. In fact, solid as they are as stories, many aren't all that mysterious, choosing instead to take the reader along on the ride.

Among varied experimental short fiction are the brief interviews of the title in which a variety of self-absorbed, deviant, and abhorrent male figures speak openly with a female interviewer.

Drug addicts, mythical creatures, hurricanes, stars, political fugitives - they're all here, within the pages of this book. The guest editor and final selection maker Alice Sebold has assembled twenty stories, each of which in her own words "deserves to be read."

These six short stories all feature Russian immigrants who eat together and whose lives are uniformly depressing with occasional moments of joy. The joy is often connected with food.

Elizabeth George has brought together 23 authors to use narrative to explore lust and greed, two of the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins.

'The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009' lives up to its literary legacy by bringing together twenty knockout stories that will take readers around the world and into the lives of its fascinating characters.

Wells Tower captures a variety of experience that is as far-ranging as it is close to home. These stories of Viking marauders, teenage girls, and fractured families are violent and tender.

George Pelecanos edits this 12 installment of stories that while generally falling into the realm of mystery, refuse to be further categoized.

Once again a new edition of Holmes stories has come before us with tales that are a treat to the eye and ear.

All of these stories are well-written and make for enjoyable reading, more than half are somewhat exceptional, and three or four will probably have the kind of profound effect on readers that they hope for, but dare not expect, when picking up a collection like this.

Joe Meno's inspired second collection of short fiction is full of sad and broken characters who have a way of getting inside your head and staying there.

Featuring fiction, nonfiction, journalism, comics, and humor, The Best American Nonrequired Reading is doubtlessly the most eclectic of Houghton Mifflin's Best American series.

Kelly Link's third collection of short stories, is billed as her first for young adult readers, though it works just fine on adults as well.

In Steven Wingate's thirteen short stories, the relationships-whether real or imagined-face what Amy Hempel describes in her foreword as "The Flaw, the excuse to back out, to tear down the picture of a life together."

The O. Henry Prize Stories series has an extensively proven track record (89 years) in the selection of terrific short prose, and the pieces in the 2008 volume uphold that reputation.

Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection of short stories reveal a clear progression of her literary power from 'Interpreter of Maladies' and 'The Namesake.'

Miranda July's characters are slightly awkward and dysfunctional. Aren't we all?

Advances many heretofore unexplored discoveries and opinions, including squid dating dos and don'ts, and why squid are not at all able to watch television in black and white.

Neil Gaiman's "Fragile Things" contains approximately twenty previously published pieces of short fiction - stories, verse, and an American Gods novella - plus one new piece written especially for this volume.

Already a well-known phenomenon in Israel, Etgar Keret blends the ordinary with the surreal to great effect in his often extremely short stories.

Satirically smart Saunders returns to further skewer our out of control consumer society in his latest collection of short stories.

A group of stories Dave Eggers wrote over the past four years including many never-before-published stories, along with a number of pieces that first appeared in magazines, both well known (Zoetrope, The New Yorker) and small and independent (h2s04, Ninth Letter).

Each of Jonathan Lethem's tales highlights his imagination as a story crafter, and his ability to infuse every story with his unique humor and wit is what makes "Men and Cartoons" an immensely pleasurable collection.

There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for celebrating the contemporary short story.

Michael Chabon and friends are back with a brandnew collection that reinvigorates the stayupallnight, edgeofthe seat, fingernailbiting, pageturning tradition of literary short stories.

The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a uniquely-themed anthology in that it's theme is the reader. This compendium offers reading material to fill those moments of waiting for something to happen. Organized by the time that the reader has available at that moment, the anthology provides a poem for that elevator ride to the lawyer's office; a short story for the thirty-minute commute; a novella for the three-hour plane ride.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind.

Fishing the Sloe-Black River, the short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude.

Naked brings together thirty-one pieces by writers who examine and challenge the way people live with our environment. Edward Abbey's newly published correspondence rants against passive nonresistance. Stacey Richter mines the questionable legacy of John James Audubon and T. C. Boyle suggests we are all wild at heart, and not particularly well-groomed.

Inspired by Cornell's avian-themed boxes, twenty writers have generously contributed original pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative. Accompanied by tipped-on plates, this volume is a soaring tribute.

In her impressive literary debut, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, author Danielle Evans emerges as a smart, funny and strong new voice in fiction. Readers of this story collection will find themselves alternating between laughing out loud and trying to fight off tears as Evans's characters navigate through the rough waters of their...