62 of Your Favorite Short Story Collections
This Riot Rec is sponsored by Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh.
An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time.
There’s something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.
A good collection of short stories is such a perfect thing. Some are made for powering through, others are best read one story per day or even week. They require a precision of language and thinking and world-building that you sometimes can’t find in novels.
We asked you to share your favorite short story collections, and you responded. Here are 62 of your favorites!
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie
Give Me by Irina Denezhkina
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Salsa Nocturna by Daniel Jose Older
The Last Animal by Abbi Geni
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
Stay Up With Me by Tom Barbash
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
The Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allen Poe
In the Garden of North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks
A Different Bed Every Time by Jac Jemc
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks
Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder
Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
Partial List of People to Bleach by Gary Lutz
Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience – Short Fiction from Then to Now: A Century of Short Fiction from the Many Americas, edited by Ishmael Reed
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Twelve Tomorrows by MIT Technology Review
Ford County by John Grisham
How To Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
Eye to the Sky: Storytelling on the Edge of Magic by Bobby Norfolk
Just Waiting for the Bell by David Wehmeyer
A Hamster is Missing in Washington DC by Ed Spivey Jr.
Homemade Love by J California Cooper
Miss Muriel and Other Stories by Ann Petry
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
Smoke & Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
October Country by Ray Bradbury
Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury
Impossible Things by Connie Willis
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
The Barrens and Others by F. Paul Wilson
Le Città Invisibili by Italo Calvino.
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mosses From an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthoren
The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki
Selected Stories of Wallace Stegner by Wallace Stegner
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
