How to Read a Short Story (and Where to Find Some)

The quick answer is that I had no idea how to read them. The things I learned in school about reading short stories were all focused on the technical aspects of short stories. While interesting, they didn’t help me enjoy short stories. I didn’t want to think about the technical aspects of short stories, I just wanted to have fun reading them.

Part of the issue is that I have always loved long-form fiction. Novels, especially giant chunky ones, call to me. I am largely a character-driven reader. Obviously, short stories are, well, short. Which means that character development and plot necessarily unfold at a different pace in short stories than in novels. But different doesn’t mean bad.

Expectations

My expectations were simply unrealistic. After all, if you order waffles and expect to receive pancakes, you’re going to be disappointed. The same goes for short stories: if you pick up a short story and expect to read a novel, you’re not going to get what you’re looking for.

So what can you expect? Amazing things, I hope. My aim here is to help you find the kinds of short stories that you love. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that for myself, and I hope by sharing a little bit about what I learned, you can skip the wait.

Two short story collections — Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and Charles Yu’s Sorry Please Thank You — helped me realize how much I enjoy short stories.

These collections appealed to me for different reasons. Oyeyemi’s collection is organized around keys (sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric). When I read that in the description on the book, I was fascinated. Oyeyemi’s book isn’t the only one organized around a central concept or image like this, it’s just the first one that I connected with.

As for Yu’s collection, it was the premise at the heart of each short story that fascinated me. A call center where employees are paid to feel callers’ pain? Wow. Each of his stories is that way — building from a highly original and wholly unexpected premise (for this reader).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that to read a short story, it helps to think about what you like. Sounds obvious, I know, but let me explain.

What Are You Looking For?

Some people are drawn to particular genres of writing, like fantasy, romance, science fiction, westerns, or other genres. If that’s you, try seeking out stories that align with your genre preferences.

Or maybe you’re the kind of reader who likes to read works by authors you can identify with, or who offer you ways to think about identities other than yours. If that’s the case, there are lots of anthologies and publications that collect together stories by writers of different backgrounds.

Perhaps you like stories that help you think about certain issues. As with identities, there are lots of places you can find short stories focused on specific social, cultural, or political issues.

Maybe most simply of all, what are you in the mood for? I often find this to be the most effective question. Want something creepy? Contemplative? Cozy? Out of this world? There’s a collection or magazine out there serving up exactly what you’re looking for.

Where to Find Short Stories

There are lots of different ways to get your hands on short stories. The internet is a treasure trove. You can subscribe to online magazines. Some of the big names are The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, each of which has a long history of publishing fiction; you can read a handful of pieces for free on these websites before running up against a paywall.

Another paid route to short stories is to purchase a book — either an anthology or a collection.

Anthologies curate works by different authors into one book. Each year, you can find a book of American short stories published in various places during the previous calendar year in the form of (for this year) The Best American Short Stories of 2024. Similarly, you could grab the recently released and very hefty tome A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 as a great jumping-off point for short stories, classic and contemporary.

Many novelists also publish short stories, so if there are writers whose books you like, then you might luck out and discover that they’ve published a short story collection or two, as well. These will be stories that are all penned by the same author and then bound into a book (like the ones by Oyeyemi and Yu I mentioned above). Two such recent works that have garnered a lot of positive attention are Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People and Gina Chung’s Green Frog.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of some of the websites and online magazines that make short stories available to readers free of charge. Electric Literature is one of my favorite sites for free fiction. Magazines like Strange Horizons (speculative fiction), Nightmare Magazine (horror), and Reactor Magazine (sci-fi and fantasy). (If you want even more places to find free short stories online, check out this list of resources.)

If there’s a particular author you like, it’s worth clicking around on their website to see if they’ve published any short fiction. One of my favorite authors, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, consistently publishes short stories in a wide array of publications, and a quick trip to her website provides links to some of those stories. Going this route can connect you directly to a specific author’s works online, and it has the added benefit of introducing you to places online where you can locate stories by other writers whose works share similarities with a beloved writer’s work.

So wherever you go to satisfy your craving for short stories, I hope I’ve provided you with some strategies for locating the stories that will appeal to your own particular tastes. Enjoy some short stories this May and maybe — just maybe — beyond!