Lists
by Kelsey Ford, May 10, 2023 9:15 AM
This year for Short Story Month, I wanted to pull together a selection of some of my favorite story collections that teeter on the precipice of the uncanny — books that play with the rules and boundaries of our world and use genre to explore the very-real horrors we face every day. These collections are so fun, so peculiar, and brimming with the strange: a woman who turns into a deer at night, a mourning ritual via cannibalistic hot pots, cults and a home haunted by ex-boyfriends, naked grandparents and vanished children, goddesses and umbilical cords. This May, give yourself the gift of otherworldly stories.
by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
I’ve been a fan of Bynum ever since her kaleidoscopic, slippery book, Madeline is Sleeping. The nine stories in Likes exist in that liminal space between the real and the unreal — some of the stories may tip more in one direction, but there’s always the suggestion and threat of the other. These are stories filled with characters trying to find a foothold in a world that’s opaque and startling, trying to forge deeper relationships with each other even as those connections become more and more impossible, trying to understand the inscrutable. School fairs and Instagram posts, creepy dolls and burgled homes. Everything is fair game in this absolutely delicious book.
by Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
The twelve stories in this collection press the mundane up against the bizarre — similar to her slim novella, Convenience Store Women, which made her main character more inscrutable the more she insisted on continuing her monotonous routines. In all of her books, Murata explores social customs, morals, taboos, and consumer culture in a world where what seems acceptable and normal is constantly shifting like tectonic plates. Life Ceremony is visceral and lovely, erotic and thoughtful, distressing and consuming. More than anything: this collection is fun.
If you need more convincing, you can read my Powell's Picks Spotlight on Life Ceremony.
by Samantha Hunt
I’ve been diligent about documenting my obsession with Samantha Hunt, so let me use this opportunity to reiterate: I am obsessed with her and think this collection might be a perfect short story collection. (With the added bonus of an incredibly creepy book cover. Find the secret deer!) The stories in The Dark Dark are concerned with sexual desire and dissatisfaction, insidious technology and infidelity. Unnerving, thrilling, and shot through with a thickly beating heart — in that sense where hearts are filled with love and empathy, but are also literally creepy. So good! More soon ASAP, please, Samantha Hunt.
by Amber Sparks
Maybe you can tell from the bright pink cover and that subtitle, “and other revenges,” but this collection is fun. There are ghosts both literal (a new incorporeal friend!) and metaphorical (a suddenly absent, former friend); video games and cults and the collapse of Western Civilization; stories reimagined, reworked, and dismantled. And I Do Not Forgive You is blissfully surreal in places and achingly real in others. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for not forgiving you if you don’t pick this one up.
For more, read the original essay Amber Sparks wrote for the Powell's blog: The Scrambled Clock: My Favorite Books That Screw Around with Time.
by Laura van den Berg
I have followed Laura van den Berg’s career ever since stumbling across her first collection and becoming absolutely obsessed with its title: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. She was bound to become one of my favorite authors, and with each subsequent book, I’ve become more and more obsessed. This latest collection is another rung on her ladder of work about women navigating loss and grief in a world whose rules continue to shift around them. In I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, the women perform sorrow for men over the phone or dress up as their dead wives; they come to terms with loss only to be buffeted back into the belly of grief all over again; they confront hard truths and mysterious vanishings. This collection is scary in the way that our world is scary, even as many of its elements slip into the surreal. Masterful; incredible.
by Mariana Enríquez (tr. Megan McDowell)
In her writing, Mariana Enríquez deftly blends horrifying reality (missing children, male violence, living under a military dictatorship) with horrifying surreality (ghosts, Ouija boards, witches, rotting flesh). The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is horrifying and filled with glimpses at how deeply entrenched our world is with true evil, and Enríquez’s sharp use of language makes her stories all the more visceral and intimately horrific. I promise: once you finish this collection, you’ll be coming back for more from this wildly talented Argentinean author.
by Gwen E. Kirby
If you support women's rights and women's wrongs, this is the book for you. This collection is as funny as it is furious, filled with stories about women on the brink, whether they live in Hellenic times or now. It’s clear that Kirby had a great time writing these stories, and that sense of fun comes through on the page. There are stories about affairs and unclaimed baggage and a summer music camp; stories told via Yelp review and WikiHow; stories that deliciously punish men who tell women to smile (bad) and men that call women whores (bad!!). There are goddesses and prostitutes and someone named Gail. And then there’s my personal favorite story, "Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” — I love a good, smart skewering of an overused trope. Shit Cassandra Saw is smart and furious and terrific fun.
by Ling Ma
One of my favorite parts of speculative writing is when it swerves through the fantastic, only to double back to something so alarmingly intimate that it cuts through skin and muscle to bone. In Bliss Montage, you’ll find a home filled with ex-boyfriends, toxic friendships and drugs, a yeti with a pamphlet on how to make love, secret worlds and the bores of academia. It’s a collection filled with stories at once familiar (the odd compulsion to follow a man home even after he’d emotionally and physically abused you? I mean, who wouldn’t) and uncanny.
Read the rest of my Powell's Picks Spotlight on Bliss Montage.
by Samanta Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell)
Samanta Schweblin’s work is so consistently uncanny, evocative, occasionally abrasive, beautifully startling, and satisfyingly surprising, and yet this story collection still managed to exceed my expectations. I haven’t stopped thinking about: the mom who wanted to know what to do about those people with the three living rooms; the naked grandparents in the window; the wheezing, agoraphobic wife. Schweblin’s brain is fascinating and labyrinthine; I’m so grateful we get these little (house)keys into it. And McDowell’s translation is, as ever, beautifully done.
by K-Ming Chang
Gods of Want is a voracious collection. K-Ming Chang, author of the incredible debut, Bestiary, has written sixteen stories about the immigrant experience, adolescence, and the hunger that sits heavy in all of our guts. The characters in these stories are feral and multitudinous: an infestation of dead cousins, a serpentine goddess, an incessant train of widows, and insistent, ever-present families. That Chang is also a poet will come as no surprise when you read these stories. The language is infectious and incredible and manages to imbue these stories with even more dread and wonder and sorrow. As hungry as the characters in it are for each other, you’ll be hungry for more from Chang — guaranteed.
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For more short story recommendations, check out 7 Recommendations Based on 7 Collections We Love and A Long(ish) List of Recent Short Story Collections.
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