The Best Short Stories 2024
the O. Henry Prize Winners
- General Recommendations
- Staff-Created List
Getting Started with Short Stories
Explore some of the most exciting voices in short fiction. The collections below include established authors and newcomers alike.
25 items
- This masterfully inventive collection weaves literary fiction, Korean folklore, and science fiction elements into deeply revelatory narratives that reframe how readers contemplate the human condition.
- Six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction. (Also…
- This electrifying collection of interconnected stories opens on a young Brazilian writer who meets and sleeps with the Devil at a Halloween party. After their encounter, the writer keeps in touch with the Devil and writes him a series of haunted…
- Startling, funny and imaginative, eleven interconnected stories, in which nothing is what it seems, are sharp observations on human nature and pack an emotional--and satisfying--punch.
- The author of three critically acclaimed novels including Infinite Home returns with collection of prizewinning stories starring women confronting the hidden perils of class ascension and the emotional debts still owed from their past lives.
- The internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale presents this stunning collection of short stories that showcase both her creativity and her humanity as she explores family relationships, marriage, loss and memory and what…
- From a National Book Award finalist comes a collection of stories about actions taken and not taken.
- The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings 12 glittering stories of love--friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts--in all its forms, both ridiculous and…
- In 12 stories, Good Women follows the lives of Black women through Appalachia and the Deep South, examining what forces shape their realities and what force they carry with them.
- This collection includes that book's title story as well as "The Long and Painful Death" from Walk the Blue Fields and a revised and expanded version of "So Late in the Day," originally published in The New Yorker in February 2022.
- Nine mesmerizing stories saturated in the details of Roman life that showcase Jhumpa Lahiri's extraordinary range and virtuosity.
- The nine stories in The Book of Disbelieving open portals to fabulist worlds and magical objects: a village built on the back of a whale, a holiday that requires literal leaps of faith, a tower that houses an entire civilization, a diary that blurs…
- Set across the temples, slums and gated estates of late 20th-century Bangkok, three families -- a Thai Elvis impersonator and his only daughter, a family abandoned by their white American patriarch and an adopted brotherhood of orphaned boys --…
- The electric, unsettling, and often surreal stories in LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO explore the alienated, technology-mediated lives of restless Asian and Asian American women today.
- From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and…
- Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge.
- In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from…
- A mind-bending collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories…
- An exhilarating debut by a young writer from Pakistan: Provocative, funny, disarmingly original stories that upend traditional notions of identity and family, and peer into the vulnerable workings of the human heart.
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