The Gnome Stories by Ander Monson
★★★★☆ “Unless you’re a freak,” Ander Monson writes in his freakishly good short story “Our Song,” “you don’t remember books word for word. You remember what they were to you, what you brought to...
Category: Short Fiction
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
★★★★☆ An unnecessary but quietly pleasant return to the world of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is another collection of related short stories loosely centered around old Mrs. Kitteridge, the...
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri
★★★★★ Compiled and edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is an astonishing and academic collection of forty works by significant Italian writers. These authors will be new to most...
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
★★★★☆ In Everything Inside, with movement comes creation: characters go from Haiti, to Miami, to New York City, and back, building families and love. Like Danticat’s other works, the Haitian diaspora is the continuing...
Orange World by Karen Russell
★★★★☆ For a long time, it felt like there was no place for magic in contemporary literature. Ghosts, spirits, and devils were a thing for comics and chunky TOR paperbacks; highbrow fiction didn’t deal...
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian
★★☆☆☆ When it was first published in The New Yorker in December 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” went viral. Its buzz is well-deserved (although maybe not worth the subsequent seven-figure book deal): the story...
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin
★★★★★ Haruki Murakami may be the most important thing to have happened to contemporary Japanese literature in translation, but he’s also become one of the most important things for the genre to overcome. “Murakami-esque”...
The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila
★★★★☆ Reading Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest is an experience of recognizing the ineffable: feelings of dread, paranoia, and angst adopt eerie and familiar forms in these twelve excellent stories. Dávila’s work echoes Nikolai Gogol...
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin
★★★☆☆ In 2015, Lucia Berlin’s (1936-2004) posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women was a sensation. FSG presented her short stories as the work of an under-recognized master and readers reveled in her lost-in-time...
