There’s something about short stories that just makes them addicting to read.  Maybe it’s the fact that they’re usually so concise, or that they pack a punch in a small amount of pages.  Whatever the reason, if you’re looking for a great short story collection to dive into, look no further than these five books.  From funny and heartwarming tales to dark and suspenseful reads, there’s something for everyone among these pages.  So go ahead and add one (or all!) of these collections to your reading list – you won’t regret it!

A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life–immersive and comic, yet unsparing–that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities.

New Teeth by Simon Rich

Laugh till you cry in this new collection of stories from the award-winning “Serena Williams of humor writing” (New York Times Book Review) about raising babies and trying not to be one.

You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union

Remember when we hit it off so well that we decided We’re Going to Need More Wine? Well, this time you and I are going to turn to our friend the bartender and ask, You Got Anything Stronger? I promise to continue to make you laugh, but with this round, the stakes get higher as the conversation goes deeper.

Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent

Voiced by an off-kilter chorus of the young and desperate to belong, Benjamin Nugent’s provocative collection pries the fraternity door off its hinges, daring us to peer inside with amusement, horror, and also love.

The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

A collection of raucous stories that offer a panoramic view of New Orleans from the author of the “stunning and audacious” (NPR) debut novel We Cast a Shadow.

Skinship by Yoon Choi

An exquisite collection from a breathtaking new voice–centered on a constellation of Korean American families.

If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now by Via Bleidner

If You Lived Here You’d Be Famous by Now is an insider’s collection of funny and warmhearted stories about coming of age in the Los Angeles suburb famed for birthing the Kardashian-Jenners and the Bling Ring.

Give My Love to the Savages by Chris Stuck

A provocative and raw debut collection of short fiction reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s Drown.  

Animal Spirit by Francesca Marciano

From the author of the acclaimed story collection The Other Language comes a fresh collection of six colorful, richly realized stories told with inimitable humor, exactitude, and heart.

The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado

A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia.

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, this revelatory story collection honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary “grunt work of the world.”

Excuse Me While I Disappear by Joanna Scott

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and “greatly gifted and highly original artist” comes a masterful collection of stories about the timeless universal struggle to connect (New York Times).

The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date. In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified.

Daddy by Emma Cline

In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a hotly charged, deeply satisfying new work of fiction from the author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life.  In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest.

We Two Alone by Jack Wang

Praised as “utterly remarkable” and “deeply resonant” by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Robert Olen Butler, a bold and brilliant debut collection, in the vein of The Refugees, which dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years.

I'm Waiting for You by Kim Bo-Young

In this mind-expanding work of speculative fiction, available in English for the first time, one of South Korea’s most treasured writers explores the driving forces of humanity–love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence–in two pairs of thematically interconnected stories.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, Translated by Philip Gabriel

A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami.  The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself.

Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone

A sharp, witty book about brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount wrong.  Whether diving into complicated relationships or wrestling with family ties, the girls and women who populate this collection–misfits and misanthropes, bickering sisters, responsible daughters, and unhappy wives–don’t always find themselves making the best decisions.

Cosmogony by Lucy Ives

An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life–deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more.

Kink Edited by R.O. Kwon, Garth Greenwell

Kink is a groundbreaking anthology of literary short fiction exploring love and desire, BDSM, and interests across the sexual spectrum, edited by lauded writers R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, and featuring a roster of all-star contributors including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.

Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch

A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston

From “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)–the author of Barracoonand Their Eyes Were Watching God–a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time.

Sudden Traveler by Sarah Hall

Featuring her signature themes of identity, eroticism, and existential quest, the stories in Sarah Hall’s third collection travel far afield in location and ambition — from Turkish forest and coastline to the rain-drenched villages of Cumbria.

To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss

In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.

Grand Union by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world.

The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley’s most accomplished short stories to showcase the full range of his remarkable talent.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye.

F*ckface by Leah Hampton

A brassy, bighearted debut collection of twelve short stories about rurality, corpses, honeybee collapse, and illicit sex in post-coal Appalachia.

Monstress by Lysley Tenorio

A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines.

Have you read any of these short story collections?

Are any of these books on your TBR?  Have you read any books from this list?  What books would you add to this list?