Great, Giftable Short Story Collections
Short-story collections are perfect for a busy reader – you can sit down and enjoy one story at a time without the pressure of returning to finish the novel before you forget the front half. Classics, lesser-known collections, and the in-between to help you find a great gift.
Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
Salinger might be best known for Catcher in the Rye but his short stories are deep and enervating. This book features stories about isolation, growing up, and surviving life post-war. Many of the characters are charming, and one of the stories features the family from his novel Franny and Zooey.
These stories contain the classic, haunting tale of the societal scapegoat with “The Lottery,” but Shirley Jackson’s talent for taking a cold, hard look at people and what drives them rings true throughout the collection. These are simultaneously deeply psychological and have vivid descriptions and dynamic characters.
Carmen Maria Machado experiments with form and function in this beautiful collection that interrogates what it means to be a woman and to exist in a woman’s body. She retells an urban legend of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck; she serializes episodes of Law & Order: SVU; one of her characters makes a slow migration east across America, away from the spread of a pandemic.
These erie, discomfiting stories feature witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women. Enriquez delves into the uncomfortable world of what gets pushed aside and silenced in everyday life. Most of these stories feature gritty, urban settings in contemporary Argentina with the continual return of what has been suppressed, whether that be depravity, grief, obsession, pain, or fear. Gripping and sophisticated, these stories are sure to stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.
This is a highly anticipated collection of translated short stories from Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman. Murata pulls apart societal norms in both funny and horrifying ways, and the collection is overall both strange and charming. Splendid for those who like the weird that feels real.
This collection of short stories follows a Penobscot community and explores how people survive and thrive after tragedy – and in the midst of it. Night of the Living Rez portrays an indigenous community with sharp comedy, compassion, and appreciation for the people that live there.
Devastating and realistic, Taylor reveals the longing for intimacy and connection, the long-lasting ramifications of pain, and the vulnerability of loving and being known by others. This is great for lovers of realistic fiction. The stories are interlinked, connecting a group of creatives in the Midwest. Read or gift this in anticipation of Brandon Taylor’s spring release The Late Americans.
Otessa Moshfegh is perhaps best known for her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but her short story collection is a welcome addition to her works. Moshfegh’s collection of short stories has been compared to the work Flannery O’Connor, and for good reason; she has a sharp eye for the human condition, infusing her stories with a dark undertone while maintaining a sense of compassion. Moshfegh’s characters have to deal with the fallout of their own self-deception and what it means to seek connection; people are often terrible and cruel and funny in practically the same breath, and these stories are not comforting, though they will stick with you and leave you wondering what it means to be a person and how we make sense of our roles and the lives we construct for ourselves. Not for the squeamish, this is certainly a dark collection.
This debut novel-in-stories follows a cast of loosely interconnected characters after the surge of a climate-change virus unearthed in 2030 that changes humanity deeply. This verges on the edge of Corona-virus fiction, but doesn’t feel overwrought and instead sheds light on the ways we adapt – and sometimes too readily accept – catastrophic changes to our ways of life. Closer to a novel than the collections on this list, this book is still easy to step in and out of, with an end-of-life roller coaster operator, a doctor continuing his late daughters research, and the robot dog repairman trying to keep the sound of his late wife’s voice alive through her beloved pet.
This is an award-winning collection of LGBTQ Fiction and, tragically, a posthumous debut for Anthony Veasna So. He writes from his queer Cambodian American identity, and asks questions about living in the aftermath of tragedy – particularly the Cambodian Genocide – not only how people survive, but how they become true versions of themselves. One story follows sisters who reminisce about the father that abandoned them, comparing marriage to the reality-show Survivor. This is a beautiful, searing debut collection that gives both levity and due seriousness to the characters that populate its pages.
Great for the Murakami fan in your life, this is a collection of six stories set following the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Beyond just looking at the fragility of people’s everyday lives, Murakami’s collection introduces the mysterious to people’s post-catastrophe lives as the strange and unearthly enters the scene.
The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and The Best American Nature Writing
These anthologies, published every year, make an excellent gift when you aren’t quite sure just what kind of book someone might like but have an idea of their general reading interests. Each collection – whether it be short fiction or essays – has a new editor each year, bringing a wide swath of experience and a diverse cast of writers to each years’ edition.
For 2022:
The Best American Short Stories 2022 was edited by Pulitzer Prize winning Andrew Sean Greer
The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2022 was edited by Rebecca Roanhoarse, Nebula Award winning short story author
The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2022 was edited by marine biologist and policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Honorable Short Story Mention: “How Far She Went” by Mary Hood
This is just one that I recommend people read because it’s lived rent-free in my head for so long. A surly young woman abandoned in her grandmother’s care attempts to find her place in the world and on the desolate farm until horrible circumstances make apparent how her grandmother truly feels about her.
