Category: 2025

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, and series editor Nicole Lamy. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the […]

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an ‘accidental’, an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast […]

A mysterious black crate arrives at an ISIS command centre in the heart of occupied Mosul, leaving the soldiers and their captives guessing at its contents… A refugee travels to a remote ‘Northern’ town to study race relations, only to discover one of its bridge-building initiatives is, in fact, a trap… Drifting from job to job in […]

A. K. Herman’s wondrous debut story collection imbues people on the periphery with power hardly visible to outsiders — where no one conforms to type. In these stories, we encounter predatory churches, doomed lovers, babies born in secret and boys with wings. “The Believers” is an unforgettable collection that lingers. In the title story, to […]

One night, you will calmly put a knife to your husband’s private part and promise to cut it off. It will scare him so much that the next day, he will call his family members for a meeting in the house. He will not call your family members, but you will not care. You won’t […]

In “Machine City” a college student’s chance role in a friend’s movie blurs the line between his character and his true self. (Is he a robot?) In “Slide to Unlock” a man comes to terms with his life via the passwords he struggles to remember in extremis. (What’s his mom’s name backward?) And in “Weird […]

In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his […]

The Leicester Writes Short Story Prize was set up to celebrate the short story form. The prize, open to writers all over the world, invites short stories of up to 3,500 words on any theme or subject. Our 2025 judging panel included writers Kathryn Aldridge-Morris and Melanie Carvalho. This anthology presents original new writing by […]

Across thirty striking tales, Monika Radojevic weaves together the surreal with the everyday, confronting the experiences of contemporary womanhood with a tender ferocity shot through with humour. A woman walks into a bar, and nobody notices. A newly married couple are punished for their childlessness with an unsettling nocturnal invasion. A girl trades her vocal […]

Most of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and […]