Short stories have started to become more popular as the internet has given more opportunities for creativity and exposure through digital options. One single narrative, Story of Your Life, was even adapted into the 2016 film Arrival starring Amy Adams. Flip through The Paper Menagerie if you'd like a taste of the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi and fantasy stories that earned Liu critical acclaim. Anthologies and edited collections of short fiction, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition, The complete poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. 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. It won’t ever be possible to fully account for the stories and novels that went unheralded and untaught in a literary culture geared toward canonizing the anxieties and insights of well-to-do white guys, but at least in Berlin’s posthumous collection—and its frank rendering of women’s lives—we have a small correction to the record. The title story, for example, is about a world ravaged by climate change, where a group of scientists try, by the creation of a “formula,” to undo what has been done and make it so the human body can defy gravity. 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.

Yet “parties” can also suggest festivity, and her women, for all the horror around them, have moments of happiness and release, too. Throughout her thought-provoking narratives, she seamlessly takes readers to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and the Jim Crow South. 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. Arimah blends magical realism and fable into her narratives to illuminate as she says, the “baser instincts” of humankind, to watch humanity “turn grotesque.”, Also Read: 5 Books every Teenager should read Before they turn 18. Top 10 Best books to read for beginners to start reading habit. List RulesAnthologies and edited collections of short fiction. 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. 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. The Best Audiobook That can change your life, The 49 Best Historical Fiction Books to Bring You Back in Time, All the Harry Potter Book list in Order By J.K. Rowling. Winner of the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction, O'Connor's collection includes 12 stories that were previously unpublished. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

Oprah Magazine participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. 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. –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. “Good Hunting” begins as a folktale about a demon-hunting father-son duo in a small Chinese village and ends with a critique of British colonialism and modernity in Hong Kong, as well as a surprising reversal of misogynistic narrative tropes. by N.K. It may not be my actual favorite, but the story I think about most often from this collection is “The Beach Boy”—which may be because, as a committed hypochondriac, I am in constant fear of dying the way Marcia does in this story, but also because of the expert unspooling of her husband once she’s gone. The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the BOOKPULP staff. 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.

This collection is as remarkable for its range of emotional registers as it is for its formal variety.

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. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the publication of Dear Life, in 2013; the Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. Take, for example, “State Change,” a bleak office rom-com set in a world where people’s souls are physical objects—an ice cube, a cigarette pack, a beech tree branch—that must be protected from mundane things like hot weather and nicotine addiction. Read an Original Short Story by Kristen Arnett, 20 Scary Short Stories That Will Terrify You, The 10 Most Popular Books Based in the South, Read a Haunted House Story You Won't Forget, The 16 Most Comfortable Bras to Wear All Day, Read Helen Phillips's Original Short Story.

These individual short stories are the best of the best — and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse. This list asks, “What is the best collection of short stories?” with authors ranging from all time periods and covering various topics. 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.

Clarice Lispector, tr. 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. If you can't decide which new novel or nonfiction book to pick up, here's another idea: try reading a short story collection.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Benjamin Moser, The Complete Stories 2015. 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. A short story is a well-told story: efficient, impressive, and self-contained, like a rare gem. From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories … How Long 'Til Black Future Month? 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. Rather than focus on a singular narrative, these unique options weave together the voices of several writers, or focus on multiple stories by an author you know and love. The collection also includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”—we are told. 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. 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. That being said, when I read Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved four years ago, I remember thinking it was my ideal collection. 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. “Coherence is mutilation,” a character reflects at one point, “I want disorder”—an urge that Lispector understands and brings to life with more power than almost any writer I can think of, and perhaps with more relevance and urgency in these times than in any other in the four decades since her death. The flaws in this hubristic, quick-fix mindset are immediately revealed when the eponymous man falls from the sky.

Also Read: 10 Best Horror Books of All Time- Scariest books to read. “Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.”. These short story collections will be ordered depending on their ranking by voters. There is the steady inescapability of failure and loss, and every so often there are moments of soaringly lyrical writing. This collection of sci-fi writer Chiang's first eight stories leads readers through various fantastical worlds and ideas, such as that of a man building a tower to heaven. This collection of sci-fi writer Chiang's first eight stories leads readers through various fantastical worlds and ideas, such as that of a man building a tower to heaven. This is despite the fact that, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of the common man. 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. Your email address will not be published. The Paper Menagerie gathers some of Liu’s most celebrated stories, summaries of which do little to convey the scope of his imagination. 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.

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.

Theme: Newsup by Themeansar. 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. To get you started, we asked Goodreads to compile the most celebrated picks—all of which have at least a four- out of five-star rating. A list of the best collections of short stories, either anthologies with stories by multiple authors or collections with stories by one author. In one particularly aching story, a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash, and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-sided correspondence with their owner, onto whom he superimposes the identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. 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?

The list is categorized by the first publication date for these short story collections. Free Short Stories to Read Right Now. Salinger may be best known for The Catcher in the Rye, however, some of his most popular prose—including For Esmé—with Love and Squalor and A Perfect Day for Bananafish—is packed into this collection.

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