Best Short Stories

Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W.

Reading this collection feels like sitting close to a writer who shifts between sardonic comedy and blunt tenderness. Saunders fills spare pages with oddball, vividly sketched characters, attentive sentence-level inventiveness, and recurring moral jolts; the useful part is how language keeps nudging you toward empathy and surprise. Main limitation: the exuberant, digressive voice and insistently emotional payoff can feel repetitive or overwrought if you prefer leaner plots or more restraint, and several stories favor mood over tidy narrative closure.

A dazzling new collection of short storiesthe first major new work of fiction from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami since his #1 bestselling Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, Fantasy, and fabulism.

A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York Cityfor readers of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Junot DiazA fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny…

"I cannot remember the last time I laughed that hard at a book." - David Sedaris