Best Short Stories Books

Bowles's first and most celebrated short story collection — tales of North Africa, Central America, and the American South that share a preoccupation with violence, dissolution, and the encounter between Western consciousness and alien cultures.

Seventeen short stories ranging from the title piece — in which a municipal elephant and its elderly keeper vanish without trace — to encounters with sleeping women, disintegrating marriages, and the surreal textures of ordinary Japanese life. The best single collection for encountering Murakami in concentrated form: all the themes, all the tonal shifts, all the American music, in pieces that can be read in a sitting.

Eight stories, each narrated by a reflective, often-lonely man who keeps blurring into Haruki Murakami himself. Memory, jazz, the Beatles, baseball and a name-stealing talking monkey weave through a late-career collection preoccupied with aging, identity, and the elusiveness of the past.

A short story retelling the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion, told from the perspective of the marble statue brought to life by the sculptor who loves her — and controls her.

Three stories — the title story originally published in The New Yorker — examining the space between men and women: what they want from each other, what they withhold, and what the distance costs.

Ann Beattie's collected New Yorker stories, spanning 1974 to 2006. Forty-eight spare, wry, precisely observed tales chronicle the drift, disappointments, and quiet epiphanies of the American middle class — the work of a master of the short story whose name became an adjective: 'Beattiesque.'

Eight stories exploring the lives of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants caught between cultures — the ghost-haunted, the displaced, the American-born, and those who never made it out — drawn from two decades of Nguyen's work.

Hawthorne's first major collection includes 'The Minister's Black Veil,' 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' 'The Gray Champion,' and 'Wakefield' — stories of Puritan guilt, scientific hubris, moral allegory, and the stranger who removes himself from human society.

Six stories set in the weeks following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, all featuring characters who are not in Kobe but are affected by the disaster at a psychological distance. The earthquake becomes a figure for the ruptures in ordinary life that expose what is missing underneath. Murakami's most politically engaged fiction — a meditation on collective trauma and individual isolation in Japan in the 1990s.

Twenty-four short stories spanning twenty-five years of Murakami's career, many translated into English for the first time in this collection. A frog saves Tokyo, a man's dead wife appears as a crab, a couple separates over a mysterious birthday present. The full range of his imagination in a single volume.

Seven stories united by a single condition: men who have lost women — through departure, death, separation, or the gradual erosion of connection. A doctor whose wife has had an affair; a man who receives a phone call from the husband of a woman he loved twenty years ago. Murakami's most emotionally concentrated story collection.