Best Short Stories Books

Saunders's most celebrated story collection brings together ten pieces including the title story — a dying man and a boy converge on an icy pond — and 'Escape from Spiderhead.' Winner of the Story Prize, called 'the best book you'll read this year' by the New York Times. The best introduction to what Saunders does: satirical surfaces, genuine moral feeling, linguistic invention that earns its sentiment.

Fifteen stories of Dublin life, from childhood through public life to death, structured as an account of paralysis — the inability to escape, to act, to live fully. The collection ends with 'The Dead,' one of the greatest short stories ever written.

Jorge Luis Borges's most celebrated collection of stories — including The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel, Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote, and The Lottery in Babylon — stories that read like philosophical thought experiments and have influenced nearly every significant fiction writer since.

The title story — in which the narrator discovers a point in space that contains all other points simultaneously — is Borges's most ambitious and most affecting piece, alongside 'The Zahir,' 'The Dead Man,' 'The Theologians,' and other stories engaging with infinity, identity, and the impossibility of complete knowledge.

Three short masterpieces: 'A Simple Heart,' in which a servant woman's life of devotion is rendered with complete moral seriousness; 'The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,' a medieval tale of guilt and redemption; and 'Hérodias,' a retelling of the story of Salome.

Nine stories including 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,' and 'The Laughing Man.' Salinger's story collection is the best American short fiction of the postwar period — each story structured as an epiphany that withholds its epiphanic content, leaving the reader in the resonant space of what is not quite said.

The title novella follows two employees of a cave-people theme park required to behave as prehistoric humans and file daily reports on each other's authenticity. Also includes 'Sea Oak,' in which a dead aunt returns to demand her family improve their lives, and 'The Falls.' Pastoralia is the darkest of Saunders's collections and the one most directly engaged with economic precarity.

The second Witcher short story collection introduces Ciri — the child of destiny whose fate becomes the central thread of the entire saga — and deepens the relationships between Geralt, Yennefer, and the world they inhabit.

A series of linked stories following the colonisation of Mars by humans fleeing an increasingly troubled Earth — a work less concerned with the science of space travel than with what humanity brings with it, and what it destroys in the process.

Saunders's debut collection establishes his signature mode: corporate dystopia rendered in the language of the corporation itself, with genuine human feeling trying to survive inside systems designed to prevent it. The title story, set in a failing Civil War theme park besieged by gangs, demonstrates the absurdist logic at full stretch. Neither the title story nor the novella 'Bounty' has dated.

The title story — in which birds throughout England turn on the human population without warning or explanation — gave Hitchcock one of his greatest films. But du Maurier's original is more disturbing than the movie: the birds are never explained and the ending refuses resolution.

Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century masterpiece. As the Black Death ravages Florence, ten young men and women flee to the countryside and pass the time telling stories — one hundred tales of love, wit, fortune, lust, and folly that founded the European prose tradition.

Tadeusz Borowski's devastating Auschwitz stories. Drawn from his own survival in the camps, these unflinching tales depict a world where the will to live overrides all compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep yards from where others are murdered — a masterwork of Holocaust literature.

Chopin's second collection of Louisiana stories deepens her exploration of desire, independence, and social constraint in the Creole and Cajun communities, with a new boldness in rendering women's inner lives.

Ten stories of Dominican-American life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic — the father who abandons his family, the brother who sells drugs, the immigrant boy who discovers he is too Dominican for America and too American for the Dominican Republic. Díaz's debut introduced Yunior and the code-switching prose that would define his voice.

Stories including 'I CAN SPEAK!™' and 'Jon' take Saunders's corporate satire to its extreme: fiction that uses the language and logic of advertising to anatomise what advertising has done to human interiority. The most formally experimental of his collections.

Ursula K. Le Guin's collection of five stories and an essay deepening the world of Earthsea. Ranging across the archipelago's history — from the founding of the wizards' school on Roke to the eve of the events of The Other Wind — these tales enrich one of fantasy's most beloved creations.

Eleven interconnected stories set in Firozsha Baag, a Parsi apartment complex in Bombay — a community portrait that introduces many of the themes and the compassionate vision that would define Mistry's later novels.

Nikolai Gogol's immortal short story, one of the most influential ever written. A poor, downtrodden St. Petersburg clerk scrapes together everything he has for a new overcoat — only to have it stolen, with devastating and uncanny consequences. A founding masterpiece of Russian fiction.

Nine stories, most narrated by Yunior, about the serial infidelity that destroys his relationships. Díaz's second collection extends the world of Drown and Oscar Wao into a sustained examination of masculinity, Dominican machismo, and the specific ways men sabotage the love they need.

Kate Chopin's first short story collection captures life in the Louisiana Creole and Cajun communities of Natchitoches Parish, rendering race, desire, and social constraint with extraordinary sensitivity and precision.

Wallace's second story collection, including the title series of interview transcripts with monstrous men and pieces like 'The Depressed Person,' 'Adult World,' and 'Forever Overhead' — his most formally varied collection and his most direct engagement with the damage contemporary culture does to interiority.

Two stories about Seymour Glass: 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,' narrated by Buddy on Seymour's wedding day when he fails to appear, and 'Seymour: An Introduction,' in which Buddy tries and fails to describe his brother. The second story is a meditation on the impossibility of capturing a person in language, and a portrait of obsessive love as a form of artistic blockage.

Thirteen short stories from Joe Abercrombie's First Law world, mixing reprints with new tales. The thief Shevedieh and the barbarian Javre bicker their way across Styria, while cameos from Glokta, Logen, Shenkt and Curnden Craw fill the gaps between the trilogy and the standalones.