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2026

Day 20: You Know Nothing ~ Yasmina Din Madden

Questioning the roles of women’s bodies and the emotions that drive them in Madden’s debut story collection Following women and girls as they navigate everyday life in contemporary America, You Know Nothing explores the experiences of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and lovers whose inner worlds are animated by a tangle of emotion—from desire to rage and everything in […]

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2026

Day 19: My Dear You ~ Rachel Khong

Throughout MY DEAR YOU, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is […]

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2026

Day 18: Please Don’t Touch the Body ~ Emily Doyle

By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body are thrillingly concerned with the devastation-and power-of being alive today. In the collection’s first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades. In the […]

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2026

Day 17: It Will Come Back to You ~ Sigrid Nunez

It Will Come Back to You takes in thirteen stories – never before collected together – from a career spanning three decades, which has seen Nunez become one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices. Moving from an inappropriate teenage crush to a therapist’s second chance at love, in this collection Nunez maintains her irrepressible humour, […]

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2026

Day 16: The Memory Museum ~ M Lin

Stretching from the present to the future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing debut collection depicts characters finding beauty amidst the disorientation of migration, the contradictions of living between cultures, the perverse realities of race and class, and the delicate dance between survival and resistance. In “Scenes from Childhood,” an elderly woman […]

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2026

Day 15: Wasteland Girls ~Anna Bailey

Wasteland Girls is a collection of lyrical, incisive and luminous stories by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Tall Bones and Our Last Wild Days. These stunningly powerful stories explore the wildness and beauty of the American heartlands, a place where lives are lived on the margins, but also where there is dignity, hope, revenge […]

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2026

Day 14: The Body of the Thing ~ Karishma Jobanputra

A lyrical and visceral short story collection, The Body of the Thing unpicks the hierarchies that thrum under our relationships, from first loves and lusts to motherhood and miscarriages, from sexual awakenings to final confrontations with death. Traversing bougie neighbourhoods in Manhattan, sun-drenched piazzas in Italy, coastal Maine, and the bustle of London, these stories […]

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2026

Day 13: Getting the Electric ~ Louise Hegarty

Are you ready to play? Have you ever found yourself doom-scrolling, worrying about that weird pain in your leg, only to have your plans for the day completely trashed by the appearance of a literal axe-wielding troll? What about that time you came across a perfect double of yourself in the street? Or the gorilla […]

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2026

Day 12: The Pelican Child ~ Joy Williams

Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a […]

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2026

Day 11: The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners

The prestigious annual anthology features prize-winning stories by an international array of talented writers, including Weike Wang, Colm Tóibín, Louise Erdrich, Samanta Schweblin, Jenny Xie, Kevin Wilson, Brandon Taylor, and Catherine Lacey. Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year’s edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over […]