Need inspiration? Whether you’re trying to come up with ideas for your next novel, or just looking for that sense of euphoria that comes after reading a great book, these short story collections can truly give you that sense of awe.
All of these authors are masters of their craft with distinct styles you’ll appreciate. Some are Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning legends, while others are part of the new generation of up-and-comers inspiring change throughout the world. Rest assured—each of these anthologies are the kind that make you sit back in wonder and just think.
Start with our recommended story with each collection, or read them straight through from beginning to end. Either way, you’ll find inspiration in every page.
Jorge Luis Borges loves books. It’s not just ideas, concepts, and stories that make up the thematic depth of this two-part collection, but the actual physical objects themselves. When characters visit endless libraries or come across ancient scrolls, you get the sense that Borges himself has touched and read these mysterious works, even though they’re quite literally unreal.
Borges’ style manages to be simultaneously hard to penetrate and yet totally accessible. Little seems to be lost in translation as the Nobel prize-winner’s passion for literature and the human need for fiction shines through some of the most expressive works ever created. The books and even the places in Borges’ work may be infinite, yet the Argentinian laureate manages to convey an incredible amount of philosophical content in each of his works. This is one to challenge the mind and your perceptions.
Recommended Story: “The Secret Miracle.” A man sentenced to death asks God for one year in which to finish his magnum opus. Like much of Ficciones, “Miracle” was written during WWII and shares the same setting, mincing no words in portraying a violent reality. Borges’ offers immense inspiration in his story without falling into melodrama—a rare feat for any author, but one that recurs throughout his collection.
Saunders has a particularly unique ability to create situations that seem absurdly hilarious from the outset before drawing us into a world darker and more difficult than it seems. It’s that mixture of the outlandish and the difficult that gives his work such a human quality rarely seen in fiction.
Saunders—perhaps most famous for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo—is distinctly modern in the lowercase-m sense of the word. His understanding of life in both our technology and our paranoiac age hints at an underlying calm that could be mistaken for cynicism. It’s the faith in humanity—both rich and understated in each story—that gives this collection its moving quality.
Recommended Story: “Victory Lap.” Thriller novelists wish they could pack this much page-turning tension into their openings. While an abduction drives the main plot of this story, Saunders’ style and tone keep the focus on the characters rather than the crime. In fact, the choice of whether to act or not is at the heart of this tale—a dilemma common to human life, and one Saunders is not afraid to unpack.
Sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, Muslims and Christians—Adichie’s ability to cast two opposite but not entirely opposing characters beside each other, then let the story unfold from their divergent backgrounds, is remarkable in its realism. Her characters are introspective yet foolish, cruel yet well-meaning, contradictory yet honest. In short, they’re human.
Many authors writing about Africa in English face the challenge of rendering life on the continent realistically without losing their Western audiences. Adichie pens her stories in a way that keeps the reader’s focus on the characters, reflecting our opinions on society in her tightly-crafted stories.
Rest assured, this is a distinctly Nigerian collection in terms of its setting. The themes, like in all lasting works, are entirely universal.
Recommended Story: “A Private Experience.” Caught in the middle of a riot, two women of divergent class and religious backgrounds take shelter in an abandoned shop. You’ll sense the tension outside the makeshift refuge while, inside, the characters achieve a level of calm despite their fear. There are no easy wins or simple answers here; just a poignant portrayal of loss and love that will make you a fan of her work well before those final words.
O’Connor published two short story collections in her short yet prolific life. This anthology collects both anthologies alongside several previously-unpublished stories. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more encompassing display of a short story writer at her peak.
O’Connor is considered a Southern author, particularly for her stories portraying racism and intersexuality at a time of upheaval in the United States. It’s rare for an author to so richly recreate the atmosphere, attitudes, and anger of the 1950s and ‘60s with characters who seem so contemporary. The elderly in her stories carry with them notions that seem so out of date, but the younger generation don’t fare much better in making sense of modern life.
These stories have a sardonic approach that never seems insulting or cruel; in fact, O’Connor’s deep love for America shines through in every story—even if you have to work a bit to find it.
Recommended Story: While “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” remains her most analyzed work, the themes of redemption in “The River” will leave you with a renewed sense of purpose long after you’ve finished this sizable collection.
It’s tough to pick just one Carver anthology. Virtually everything the man wrote could be used as an example of a great story. Deeply conceived, expertly plotted, and richly realized in unvarnished prose, any Carver work is worth the time you’ll spend reading.
Yet there’s a bottomless depth to Cathedral that’s drawn readers in time and time again. It’s both his most accessible collection and his most introspective, with characters that seem plucked from a mundane reality to show us what life is like—if not for us, then for the people we could have been.
Carver draws humor from the often misanthropic attitudes of some of his characters. Friendship is still the major theme here, and the manner in which human relationships are drawn can seem all too real at times.
There’s a hopeful attitude in every story that makes them ripe for analysis, and indeed, Carver is a mainstay of university English classrooms. You don’t need to write an essay about these stories to see their brilliance, but you’ll definitely want to discuss what you think about them with someone you love.
Recommended Story: Even Carver considered the title text, “Cathedral,” to be among his most distinctive works. It fits thematically with the other stories while being just a bit outside of them, giving us a more obvious epiphany for the main character without really revealing just how deep or life-changing his realization will be. This is the kind of story that leaves you wanting more in the most satisfying way possible.
Let’s not mince words: These stories will make you cry. Like her stories, Berlin’s backstory is an elegant tragedy: she fought alcoholism, health issues, and failed relationships throughout her life until her death in 2004. In 2015, 11 years after her death, her stories were republished as A Manual For Cleaning Women.
Berlin writes from experience. The author worked several menial jobs as she honed her literary craft, and her characters—maids, cooks, switchboard operators—have that distinct sense of realism that only comes from writers who know their subjects better than we know ourselves. The poignancy of each tale is such that some, like “The Jockey,” need only five paragraphs to leave us in quiet awe.
It’s not entirely clear just how Berlin’s posthumous work rose to such popularity, dominating Best-Of lists as well as Amazon charts throughout the mid-2010s. Her stories have of course been with us all along, waiting for the day they’d receive their due. Now that they’ve finally found their place in our canon, you need not wait any longer to find what so many others missed.
Recommended Story: There are 43 stories in this collection, and it’s a testament to Berlin’s mastery that picking just one is so difficult. “Mama,” with its sharp one-liners and deceptively simple plot, makes a good case for being among her most poignant—particularly when you reach those bleak final lines.
Hemingway’s outsized reputation in modern American literature has given him an almost-mythical aura. His notoriety for short, simple sentences is such that a popular writing app bears his name, promising to do to your work what Hemingway painstakingly did to his.
It’s not the “tip of the iceberg” style that makes Hemingway’s work essential, though the sparse prose has kept his work from seeming dated. The First Forty-Nine Stories show Hemingway at a variety of points in his life—from a young veteran of the First World WAr in “My Old Man” to a growing stylistic master in “Fathers and Sons” and a living legend in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
There’s a wide range of story lengths in this collection, some of which feature Hemingway’s self-insert character Nick Adams. All of the 49 are tied together not only by the author’s famous style, but by a sense of purpose and self-worth shaken yet strong in the years following WWI.
Hemingway would go on to develop some of these themes in A Farewell to Arms and, later, The Old Man and the Sea. Each of those novels prominently feature loss; The First Forty-Nine Stories are about keeping the things we love while struggling with the reality that nothing lasts forever.
Recommended Story: It’s not hard to find an inspiring boxing story. The fact that no prize-fight tale has ever topped “Fifty Grand” tells us something about Hemingway’s passion for the sport, his adherence (in literature) to moral codes, and the well-developed sense of self evident in his work.
Anyone who loved Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a kid (or adult!) should not overlook Dahl’s adult work. The undercurrent of the macabre and dark humor present in his children’s stories comes to the forefront in Kiss Kiss. Most of these stories are, in fact, tales of horror.
Dahl’s stories don’t just leave you with a brief scare. Between the margins of the cruelty and the supernatural is a deeper understanding of the way people mistreat each other—and how that mistreatment can backfire in surprising ways.
These are not the kind of stories you eagerly promote for your next book club—and maybe that’s a good thing. There’s a certain delight in reading these alone, perhaps by lamplight at night, and wondering just what was going on in the head of The BFG author that gave him such a fondness for bloody tales and black humor. If this is Dahl at his most personal, then we all might have to look inside us to see what we’ve been keeping bottled up.
Recommended Story: “Lamb to the Slaughter.” Rejected by The New Yorker in 1953, this story took on a new life when Alfred Hitchcock directed a TV adaptation in 1958. It works stunningly well for TV, but even better when the events play out in your own head. After “Lamb,” you’ll either put the book back where you found it, or hungrily devour (no pun intended) every last one of the stories in this wonderfully dark collection.
“An Eden of dangerous things.” America’s Sunshine State has never been quite so accurately depicted as it is in Groff’s anthology. You don’t have to be a Florida resident to take inspiration from these tales of hurricanes, poverty, and yes, an alligator or two.
Groff’s greatest strength as an author is in her sentences, which stretch and twist like a climbing aster across a floodplain swamp. On the whole, her stories richly portray the characters in the midst of their dangerous situations, yet analyzing her words and structure reveals the introspective nature that sets this collection apart. When fantastical events occur in her stories, you don’t feel as though you’ve left Earth—you’re just discovering Florida.
Recommended Story: A woman on vacation falls and hits her head. Her two young sons use what they’ve learned from TV to see the situation through. The situation is dire, yet Groff’s look into the woman’s mind is rife with humor and observation that will keep you guessing throughout.
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