Short Story, Long's fave story collections of the year!

Some fave short story collections, chosen by our contributors, some released in 2024 year, some just read and appreciated this year.

All the short story collections, new & old, I (Aaron) read/reread this year.

I don’t want to say I fell even more in love with short stories this year than ever… but I definitely feel like I doubled down on that love. I published 19 stories here on Short Story, Long (one every other Tuesday, with a a couple months off for a very productive and fun and regenerative summer), I wrote a few, and I (maybe 80-90%?) followed through on a goal of reading a short story every day (a practice I so enjoyed, and found so fulfilling, I’m going to keep it going, and in fact just started a second, personal Substack as a “reading log” for said daily stories:

I also feel like I became even more vocal on social media championing the form, jumping at almost any chance presented to rave about and recommend and highlight individual short stories and story collections.

All that had me thinking about my favorite reads of the year, and asking friends about their favorites… and I realized I had this amazing collection of writers and readers and I thought putting together a list of our faves would be a fun way to wrap-up the year. I mean, I know almost everyone does some version of this at the end of the year, but still. This isn’t a normal end-of-the-year list, it’s a cool end-of-the-year-list.

Hope some of you pick up some of these books. I already have myself!

— Aaron Burch

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Ghost Roots by 'Pemi Aguda
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
Ordinary Love and Good Will by Jane Smiley

'Pemi Aguda’s Ghost Roots — I loved these surprising stories of familial—primarily maternal—hauntings. Lots of unexpected ways of introducing the lingering ghosts of lost or deprived feelings here.

Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People — My favorite short story writer working today does it again. The best story, in my opinion, “Face of Disgrace” is still lingering near the front of my mind. And there's a great story that combines the disappearance of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel and LA Mountain Lion P.22.

Jane Smiley’s Ordinary Love and Good Will — This one was not new! It’s from 1989! But it's two novellas, and both stories were really great and timely, I thought. There’s so much icky complexity in the characters. Highly recommend this throwback.

—Jac Jemc, “The Listing” (June 2023)

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Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car: Comics for Beautiful, Awful, and Ordinary Days by Jordan Bolton

My favorite story collection of the year was actually a collection of comics: Jordan Bolton's Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car: Comics for Beautiful, Awful, and Ordinary Days. I discovered Bolton earlier in the year through his Instagram page (@jordanboltondesign), where I was really impressed by his consistent ability to make me sob uncontrollably in 30 seconds or less. I pre-ordered this book as soon as the link went up, and then sat around dreaming about it for months until the glorious day finally arrived and it was delivered into my greedy little hands and I got to sob over these beautiful, heartbreaking little comics all over again, this time running my hands over the actual paper pages in hopes of absorbing a little more of the magic. I'm always looking for writers who really know how to nail an ending (which I know from experience is no easy feat!), and Bolton is just ungodly good at it, time after time after time. I am in awe.

—Ben Loory, “Man Woman Egg Bird” (June 2023)

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories edited by Sarah Coolidge

As much as I would like to make Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir my pick, I'm not going to do that because I have a story in it (though you should definitely check it out). The collection that made the deepest dent in my brain is Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories edited by Sarah Coolidge for Two Lines Press. There are some weird fucking stories in this book and I loved every one of them. If you'd like some more info about the book, I interviewed Coolidge for my newsletter earlier this year.

—Jim Ruland, “The House on Dead Confederate Street” (July 2023)

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Tender Hoof by Nicole Rivas

When Nicole Rivas sent me the ARC for her debut story collection, TENDER HOOF, life was busy and chaotic. I told myself I’d read the first story and then get to the rest soon. That first story held me in kind of a trance and before I knew it I’d read the next story and the next until I’d finished the entire book in just a couple of days. Humanizing a couch until you feel guilty and nostalgic for every piece of furniture you’ve ever abandoned, taking you along for the ride home with a girl bicyclist and filling you with anxiety for all the treacherous possibilities—it was a thrilling and surprising read and I was honored to write a blurb for her. Though the book was short and so were the stories, the characters and her words have lingered ever since. This was a gorgeous and haunting collection full of sentences delivered with the sharp precision of a knife. They’re almost like modern day fairy tales that are as unsettling as they are beautiful. How she pulls off the intertwining of dread and humanity on every page makes you excited to read and to write. I loved this collection and hope so many more people read it!

—Anna Vangala Jones, “The Legend of the Convenience Store Cashier” (September 2023)

Cartoons by Kit Schluter
Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler

There were, in fact, two story collections I read this year that knocked my socks off: Cartoons by Kit Schluter and Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler. In Cartoons, Schluter has mastered the high arts of narrative swerve, madcap invention, and not making sense. Reading it already feels like reading a forgotten cult classic. It's like a fever dream you want to blissfully hide in, away from the dominating senses of the world. As for Early Sobrieties, yes I know it says "A Novel" on the front cover, but Deagler so expertly shapes the exploits of Dennis Monk—recently sober and drifting around South Philly—into some of the most quietly soul-baring, epiphanic confessional vignettes, that it's hard to think you aren't reading some of the best short stories of the last few years.

—Shane Kowalski, “I Hope You Are Happy” (October 2023)

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Sad Grownups by Amy Stuber

I’ve been a fan of Amy Stuber’s stories for years, so I was thrilled when I found out that her first collection, Sad Grownups was coming out this year. And when it arrived it didn't disappoint. It somehow surpassed my high expectations and — in one of those rare, marvelous writer-reader confluences — was exactly the book I needed when I read it. What a gift! Stuber faces the terribly uncertain and the certainly terrible with a far-seeing, generous eye, and I was mesmerized as I saw my own middle-aged American anxieties explored with her deft storytelling. She’s also so, so funny. I’ve been feeling so alone in the world, so sad for the world, and these stories gave me more than a shoulder to cry on; they, like all great stories, gave me a prism to place over my reading glasses, allowing me to see different facets of great joys, fears, and absurdities. Sad Grownups gave me an experience to treasure but also, like the best art, an object to return to and re-examine as I continue to evolve, persist, and decay.

— Mike McClelland, “Not Another Time L∞p!” (October 2023)

Unbend the River by Devin Murphy
What We Tried to Bury Grows Here by Julian Zabalbeascoa

Devin Murphy’s Unbend the River came out in January on Black Lawrence Press, and it’s wonderful. I loved Murphy’s first two books—the novels The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans (which is sort of a novel-in-stories)—and Unbend the River knocked me out, too, but in very specific short story-kinds of way. It’s the quiet moments, the closeness, the steadiness of the detail and language, the tight and quirky plots, the dignity of the characters as they meet strangers in weird and unexpected and charged encounters. If you like stories about characters who are wrestling with great loss or who are seeking big, hard-to-define answers, or both, then these are stories for you. A couple stories also feature very memorable canine companions, which is a plus.

My second rec is sort of a cheat, because it has the word “novel” on the cover, but I’m recommending it because it really operates as a novel-in-stories; further, I was fortunate enough to read this book in manuscript form some time ago, when it was basically a short story collection. And this book is What We Tried to Bury Grows Here by my friend Julian Zabalbeascoa (came out in November, Two Dollar Radio). Chapters from this book originally appeared as short stories in magazines like American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and Boulevard, among others, and together they comprise an absolutely epic and heartbreaking tale of the Spanish Civil War. This book reminds me of Babel’s Red Cavalry. It is just as unflinching and ambitious. Exquisite prose and rich characters and themes that matter more than ever.

— Nicholas Mainieri, “Armadillos” (November 2023)

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Invaginies by Joe Koch

Joe Koch’s Invaginies, published by Clash Books, pushes the boundaries of body horror farther than any book this year. So far, perhaps, that it may not be to everyone’s liking. This is not a book for the faint of heart, or the weak of stomach. But if you’re a sicko like me, this book offers a thrilling, visceral reading experience. 17 stories that explore the horror of existing in a body, and of enduring the world’s conceptions of gender and normalcy projected upon it. Proving once again that horror speaks to the concerns of the moment as deeply as any other genre.

— Adam Fleming Petty, “The Good News Caboose” (March 2024)

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is hardly an unknown voice, but this particular collection of slightly longer stories allows her to show off her complete mastery of the craft (I mean, she's so good at writing in English she's had to move onto Italian to keep it interesting, which tells you everything you need to know). The way I know if a story is great is if I feel like my soul is being sucked out in the last couple of paragraphs, and Lahiri achieves this in every tale in this collection, which is no mean feat. And, as someone of Indian descent (albeit Punjabi rather than Bengali), the stories resonate in a way that few others can, but I have plenty of friends from other backgrounds who have been moved by her writing. The book contains 8 stories, and changed my outlook 8 times. What more could you want?

— Sandeep Sandhu, “Barack Obama Says the N-word” (May 2024)

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The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C.D. Rose

My favorite—or at least the most fun—collection of stories I read this year was C.D. Rose’s satirical book of mini-portraits of the artist, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. I really liked the intellectual cleverness of this, combined with both silliness and genuine pathos in its meditation on the could-have-beens of great literature. Rose has compiled (ok, invented whole cloth) 52 “failed” writers whose work has eluded us for many reasons, often involving its disappearance (burned by an anti-Max-Brod-like executor; forgotten on a train; consumed by its bibliophilic {paper-eating] author; fed by a farmer to his pigs). Other times, the work is never written at all (a favorite entry involves an aristocrat with literary pretensions who spends 27 years building a library to house his works, but never gets around to writing them; another writer can only write first lines, and compiles 1,937 of them in notebooks throughout his lifetime, never to be followed up; yet another whittles a long book down, through merciless editing, to a blank sheet of paper) or is discarded by gatekeepers (in the case of “Hans Kafka”, who lived down the street from his more famous namesake and sent his work to the same publisher who told Franz to knock off sending inferior work via dumb alias) or is used to literally beat its author to death. This book is a delightful enactment of the possibilities of writing, as expressed through paths not taken.

— Matt Leibel, “Martha” (August 2024)

Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight by Sara Gran

If you love mysteries, and wonder why, this book is for you.

I love when discovering a book feels a little bit like fate. In November I came to Sara Gran’s work through one of her early novels, Come Closer, and have rapidly been working my way through everything else she’s written. While on this journey I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Little Mysteries, her forthcoming (and first!) story collection, which’ll be out on February 11^th. Contents include a Choose Your Own Adventure, Five-Minute Mystery, and even a foldable fortune-teller.

If you read Nancy Drew as a kid, and now you’re a grown-up who sometimes wonders about the meaning of life, I bet you’ll fall in love with this collection the same way I did. More good news: Little Mysteries is coming to us via the press Sara founded, Dreamland Books. Support small presses, celebrate mysteries, and preorder this book!

—Abigail Oswald, “You Are Still Allowed Your Dreams” (October 2024)

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Sad Grownups by Amy Stuber

Stuber's Sad Grownups is everything I want short fiction to be—sharp, funny, thoughtful, absurd, and (yes) sad. But sad in the way that makes you think about the world, not sad in a way that makes you want to go back to bed. There are fascinating reflections on performance, relationships, and parenthood here, delivered via layered and complicated characters and gorgeous, surprising language. This book reminded me of why I fell in love with short fiction in the first place.

—Leah Christianson, “Plain Sight” (November 2024)