10 Genre-Blending Short Story Collections That Defy Limitations

Almost two years ago (what is time?), I shouted my delight for this collection in my post “10 Speculative Short Story Collections to Enjoy in 2022,” and to this day, it remains one of my favorite collections of all time. Fu artfully explores the breadth and depth of genre in each of these 12 stories, including tales about a girl sprouting wings from her legs, to a vendor selling toy boxes that play with time. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction are all at play here, mirrored against worlds that are—or will be—very much like our own.

This is just a shooting star of a debut story collection. Kolluri crafts nine exquisite tales of deep emotion, exploring the most necessary aspects of our planet: conservationism, environmentalism, and more. That, and every story is from the point of view of an animal. These modern fables, though told by animal narrators, will startle and gut-punch you with the humanity therein.

I think I find a way to show my love for Kelly Link’s genre-defying work in the majority of my Book Riot oeuvre. Link has been foundational for me as a reader and writer. Reading Magic for Beginners in college opened up so many possibilities for me on what stories can do, and she’s reinvented the craft for me time and time again with each new book. Get in Trouble is my favorite, and I’ve read the opening story “The Summer People” countless times, studying how Link manages to pay homage to Shirley Jackson, fantasy, and fairy tales, all at once.

I’ve happy-shrieked about Mohamed’s work many times, and this collection was one of my favorite books of 2023. Honestly, every book Mohamed writes is a genre-bending tour de force, from her Nebula and World Fantasy Award-winning novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight to her recent The Butcher of the Forest. With this particular collection, each story takes a genre that you think you know and turns it on its head. From cosmic horror to dark fairy tales, you will finish each story shaken to your core, but oh, the ideas abound.

Malka Older does it all, both in academia and literature, and this book is just one of many facets of her brilliance. This is a quintessential genre-blending collection because it includes both short fiction and poetry. Stories within stories and stories in poems. These are stories for our future as well as a reflection of our present: from an AI built for empathy to an anthropologist who returns to Earth to study the dying civilizations. These stories will defy your expectations as well as inspire you to think deeply about the world around you.

I still think about this collection and the way Helen Oyeyemi just went for it. Another one of my favorite writers, Oyeyemi, crafts a series of tales that are simultaneously linked, while also unraveling each other. There is a reoccurring theme of locks and keys, and characters that slip in and out of each story. What I love most about Oyeyemi and sometimes she will unsettle you with uncanny details simply because she can. Hold on to your bookmarks, dear readers, because this collection redefines what a collection is and can do.

Published in 2021, this collection remains relevant and necessary for the times. Peynado artfully uses genre elements—from magical realism, to fabulism, to science fiction and fantasy—to explore class differences, xenophobia, and immigration. People in an unnamed dictatorship begin to have parts of themselves disappear, and therefore lose the rights they had when they had those limbs. Suburban homeowners hope their “thoughts and prayers” to the angels on their roofs might protect them from danger. These stories are knives stuck in a bullseye. Let them alter you.

Originally published in 2012, Jagannath arguably redefined speculative short story collection as we know it now, and reintroduced new possibilities to showcase the spectrum of imagination. Karin Tidbeck’s genre-defying novel The Memory Theater probably rearranged the synapses in my brain, and after reading that, I dove into their collection. If you have any doubts, know that Ursula K. Le Guin called these stories “unclassifiable,” and she meant it in a good way. Like Chung’s collection, no two stories are alike, from quirky, darkly fantastical, astounding, strange, to vivid yet restrained.

If you haven’t read a flash story by the great Cathy Ulrich, I demand you start now. There is the short story, and then there is the even shorter story, the flash story. Flash in itself is a genre-bending form, often interweaving poetry and narrative. Ulrich does it all and then some. She’s known for her brilliant Murdered Ladies series of stories, as well as Astronaut Love Stories. “Being the Murdered Mama” in Puerto Del Sol particularly ruined me (again, in a good way). Ulrich’s second collection, Small, Burning Things, continues this exploration of motherhood, desire, and marriage in Ulrich’s signature lyric yet cutthroat prose.