DESCRIPTION: In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl […]
DESCRIPTION: The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its twelfth year. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether […]
DESCRIPTION: Alison Moore’s debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, gathered together stories written prior to the publication of her first novel. Eastmouth and Other Stories is her second collection, featuring stories published in the subsequent decade, including stories that have appeared in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror, […]
DESCRIPTION: Animal Truth and Other Stories is a collection of eco-fabulist tales in which adventures with fantastic animals and real science lead to metamorphoses of the heart. Familiar legends, from Faust and Oedipus to werewolves and time travel, appear in radically new ways: An artist obsessed with species extinction unwittingly summons a demonic double when he creates a “banquet” […]
DESCRIPTION: Established in 2005, the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University was originally conceived to highlight a literary genre regarded as undervalued and under threat. Its aim was to recognise and celebrate the very best writers of short fiction who had no prize equivalent to major literary awards like the Man Booker Prize. Fifteen years […]
DESCRIPTION: Travelling from Pittsburgh to Washington to Tamil Nadu, these astonishing stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. In ‘Malliga Homes’ selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses […]
DESCRIPTION: A woman feeding a baby late at night listens to the animal sounds in the city around her. A grieving widow encounters an injured jellyfish on a deserted beach. A young woman can’t shake the image of dying hare she finds at the side of the road. A dairy farmer hears her herd bellow […]
DESCRIPTION: The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas-a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. […]
DESCRIPTION: Bold, beautiful and spiky, Angela Readman’s stories are both magical and real. Following her acclaimed debut Don’t Try This at Home, in this new collection, she approaches the fairy tale with a scalpel. The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles reads like a love letter to girlhood and a ransom note to all the fairy tales we have been […]
DESCRIPTION: Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged trucker turned yogi. Along with their community of exes, in-laws, and coworkers, Babbie and Donnie share a longing to reforge their lives, a task easier […]