Read Stories: 11 Short Story Collections to Encourage You
I was listening to The New Yorker Fiction Podcast with Deborah Treisman, and in that episode, “Miriam Toews reads Raymond Carver.” There’s something spellbinding about Carver’s “Elephant,” a story about family: the guilt and responsibility that weighs the narrator as he cares for his mother, ex-wife, daughter, and brother. Listening to Toews read and discuss it with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman was another beautiful experience.
Carver’s storytelling is simple yet powerful, so alluringly authentic. It makes you consider your family, consider your neighbor and how they are dealing with family.
His storytelling makes you appreciate the beauty of the short story form.
That listening experience made me find Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From on my shelf. I flipped through it to find and reread “Elephant.”
As you can imagine, I started Where I’m Calling From and wouldn’t dare put it down. It is now added to the North America Books Page.
Reading Short Stories During National Literacy Month
September is National Literacy Month, which was established in 1967 by UNESCO to remind the world that literacy is a human right.
This month, in my own small way, I join in raising awareness of the power of reading. I started with poetry, some literary fiction, and now I’m moving to short stories.
While talking to fellow readers, I’ve realized that some readers hesitate because they find the short story form unfamiliar. Since National Literacy Month is all about fostering reading and discussion, perhaps this is your month to read short stories.
The short story can transform storytelling into a powerful reading experience because it helps you connect with settings, characters, and tension more quickly. As a writer who has published short stories, I can say that writing them enables me to connect readers with a story in an emotional and transient way that is also deep-rooted.
Where to Start
- Read free short stories online. For starters, you can access short stories for free using Project Gutenberg’s website.
- Borrow a short story collection from your library. You could borrow a physical short story collection from your local library, or electronically by using the library app Libby.
- Download a free short story podcast. My favorite short story podcast and one I would wholeheartedly recommend is The New Yorker Fiction Podcast.
- Purchase a short story collection for your home library. At Reading Around the World, I advocate strongly for physical copies—your notes in the margins, your highlights on the page, your favorite translation preserved. So, if you are building your personal home collection of books, below is a list of short story collections to choose from.
11 Short Story Collections to Choose From
#1 Going to Meet the Man, by James Baldwin
I ended 2020 with this book, a small pour of Uncle Nearest, jazz and reggae music—these actions alone should explain the mood of this collection.
This collection is an intense and stylistic dance that is engrossing. I read most of it around midnight, one of my favorite times to read. And just like the midnight sky, the darkness and absurdity of the world during that year filled the air around me, but with Baldwin in conversation, I had good distraction.
With each story, there is an elegant storytelling pace that explicates themes of displacement, loneliness, and resilience so aptly. It is as if Baldwin’s stories decode the ugliness of the world and by doing so, help us exist in it. My favorites: “Sonny’s Blues“—my goodness!—has a song of its own, and so does “Come out the Wilderness” and “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.”
#2 The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr
These finely crafted stories read as if they were edited with the picks of a small-teethed comb. You will think of the natural world around you when you read this collection. Like nature, these short stories are quiet and layered; on occasion, hefty and alarming.
In some way, each story illumines what we contribute to the earth, what we inherit, and the widening gulf between us and the natural world that deepens our misconceptions and mistreatment of the natural world. But they also show the way in which the natural world can provide the sort of solace that human beings cannot.
As a survivor of the Liberian Civil War, I gravitated towards “The Caretaker,” which is my favorite in the collection. It is a story about a Liberian orphan and displaced survivor of war who buries his trauma on a beach when he memorializes dead whales by burying their hearts close to the ocean they called home. It is a story that frighteningly captures loneliness, regret, trauma, homelessness and the ways in which we react when we misunderstand one another.
#3 The Granta Book of the African Short Story, edited by Helon Habila
This short story collection is so special to me that I don’t know how to accurately summarize the feeling. It reintroduced some of my favorite writers (like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Uwem Akpan) and introduced me to new ones. If you haven’t been introduced to the vibrancy and nuance of the African short story form, I strongly suggest adding this book to your home library.
The collection includes short stories from different countries and authors in Africa. There are too many favorites to list, too many highlights to note; however, I’ll mention a couple. In Akpan’s “An Ex-Mas Feast,” a young boy in Kenya watches helplessly as his underage sister sells her body to provide for the family. Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s “Faeries of the Nile” is a story told from the perspectives of husband and wife about “the woman who lives in the stone house hugged by the Nile.” It is graceful in its elucidation of isolation, grief, and regret.
I was introduced to the beautiful writing of Laila Lalami, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Zoë Wicomb through this collection (you can browse my Africa Bookshelf to see which of their books stole my heart). Arranged generationally, the stories in this collection embody multiplicity of themes, settings, and symbols—a reflection of the continent’s complexity, its nuanced people and varied cultures.
#4 Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang
Come, will you please, let us light “pungent chips of aloeswood” in a “copper incense brazier”—I wasn’t prepared for the strange starts, the calls to action in some of these stories, the syntax. But with a few pages, these stories engulf and enthrall you.
I became intrigued by “Aloeswood Incense,” that ephemeral and delicate scent, which symbolizes the character’s Ge Weilong’s brief attempt at gaining social stratum.
These stories highlight characters intent on breaking the rules of social structures and conventions, the search for love and agency, despair and regret.
#5 Happiness, Like Water, by Chinelo Okparanta
When I first read her spellbinding short story “Fairness” in 23 Great Stories, I knew I had to get Okparanta’s collection. The layered simplicity is alluring.
Drama dazzles in each story. How Okparanta varies drama with dialogue is even more appealing. At times the stories start simply and then suddenly they yank you into surprising territory. The negatives and positives of cultural conformity are running themes. These stories will make you confront your own conformity.
One of my favorite stories is “Wahala,” about a couple pressured by their community to have a child and a wife who must suffer the repercussions.
#6 23 Great Stories, edited by David Leavitt and Aaron Thier
This is another of those collections near to my heart. Years ago, when I taught a college program at an underserved high school, I added this book to my class syllabus and my students raved about the size of the book—small enough to carry in a purse or read on the bus—and the selection of stories that seemed so close they could have been their personal stories.
The class favorites were Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” about the social awkwardness of a young officer who receives a mysterious kiss in the dark; Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman suffering from depression who is confined by her husband in a mansion with disconcerting yellow wallpaper; and Chinelo Okparanta’s “Fairness,” a lyrical story about two young girls who struggle with definitions of beauty and try to bleach their skin.
This group of students were not avid readers. Their schools hadn’t offered special literature courses. They hadn’t studied Shakespeare or James Joyce. They were new readers open to learning new stories and new forms of storytelling. And this collection introduced them to Tolstoy, Kipling, Chekhov, De Maupassant, Paley, Borges, Munro, Wharton, Okparanta, and Joyce.
#7 Dubliners, by James Joyce
Dubliners is a good short story collection to read on a quiet Sunday evening, if only to disappear from the rest of the world and into Joyce’s version of Dublin, Ireland.
“Eveline” one of my favorites, deals with a young woman who must choose whether to leave her drunken and abusive father by escaping with her sailor fiancée, or to abide by the promise she made to her dying mother: to stay home and take care of the home; notwithstanding the fact she’d thought her mother “pitiful” to have led such a life.
I found Joyce’s short stories easy to teach because not only do they have the layered and crisp writing a student digests eagerly, but a few of the stories also deal with the theme of choice, which makes for great discussions. You don’t read any of these 15 stories without pausing for reflection.
#8 White Walls, by Tatyana Tolstaya
In these lyrical and fantastical short stories, characters watch the world go by and although they’ve been partakers for years, they don’t feel as if they have played a role.
To these characters, life is as much about dissatisfaction as it is about desire, and dreams are sometimes daydreams in which love is true and tangible. They grow older and consider the paths they have taken in life.
Longing is palpable, a running theme throughout these stories, as characters seem to long for something or someone and desperation awaits them at each story’s climax.
#9 Tales from Firozsha Baag, by Rohinton Mistry
These stories are about the everyday life that we take for granted because it seems dull, until we dissect the underpinnings—and Mistry does just that.
One of my favorite stories is “Of White Hairs and Crickets:” As a young boy tweezes the grays out of his father’s head daily, he thinks it a cruel task until he is introduced to his friend’s dying father, and then he realizes that if tweezing is how he helps his father sidestep aging, he’ll never abandon his task again.
This collection showcases community, the laughter and pain that accompanies everyday life, the nuances of culture, and those moments that we think are simple until we understand how they provide meaning to our lives.
#10 The Necklace and Other Tales, by Guy de Maupassant
Is it even possible to teach the short story without teaching “The Necklace” from the writer considered the expert of the short story craft? His stories feel like real life.
“The Necklace” is about a woman who wants to live a lavish lifestyle with modest means. She borrows an extravagant necklace to attend a ball, but when she loses the necklace, she and her husband face dire consequences. The story’s irony is unsettlingly and makes a person consider the choices we make for societal validation.
The stories in this collection are realist tales that punctuate social pretensions, and, conversely, accentuate the rich surprises of modest living.
#11 Dear Life, by Alice Munro
I love the title of this collection. When I first read this book, I wrote in the margins that it seems like a graceful and pensive letter to life, in short story form.
These are stories of domestic life that take place in small Canadian towns around Lake Huron. These stories not only show how choices can change the course of a life but they also highlight how one’s life can be haunted by those pivotal indecisions never discussed.
With clean and understated prose, these short stories depict characters affected when a dear life suddenly changes course and a person is faced with new plans and reroutes.
To challenge yourself to read more books and visit literary cities, please join me on my reading around the world trail. Cheers to reading!
