12 Short Story Collections

Published on by Cornelius Reed

If you enjoy reading fiction but are in the mood for bite size vignettes rather than an ongoing epic, consider checking out one of these short story collections!

Short story collections are books that contain multiple stories. Sometimes the stories are interconnected, and sometimes they are are all separate pieces. Whether you flip through and only read the stories that stand out to you, or you read it cover to cover, short story collections are a great option. Here are some suggestions:

Cover of Love in Color: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold

Love in Color: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold

Summary from our catalog: A high-born Nigerian goddess, who has been beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover, longs to be truly seen. A young businesswoman attempts a great leap in her company — and an even greater one in her love life. A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether she should uphold her family’s politics or be true to her heart. In her debut collection, internationally acclaimed writer Bolu Babalola retells the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology with incredible new detail and vivacity. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places. With an eye towards decolonizing tropes inherent in our favorite tales of love, Babalola has created captivating stories that traverse across perspectives, continents, and genres.

Cover of The Office of Historical Corrections

The Office of Historical Corrections

Summary from our catalog: Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into the complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief–all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history – about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight. In “Boys Go to Jupiter” a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a confederate flag bikini goes viral. In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington DC is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.

Cover of Uncommon Type

Uncommon Type

  • By Tom Hanks
  • Where to find it: Adult Fiction under “FIC Hanks,” Large Print under “LP Hanks,” or Adult Audiobooks under “V HANK”
  • View it on our catalog

Summary from our catalog: A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country’s civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game–and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN’s newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!

Cover of The Last Suspicious Holdout

The Last Suspicious Holdout

Summary from our catalog: The thirteen gripping tales In The Last Suspicious Holdout, the new story collection by award-winning author Ladee Hubbard, deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a “sliver of southern suburbia.” Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of “welfare Queens,” “crack babies,” and “super predators” abounded in the media. In “False Cognates,” a formerly incarcerated attorney struggles with raising the tuition to keep his troubled son in an elite private school. In “There He Go,” a young girl whose mother moves constantly clings to a picture of the grandfather she doesn’t know but invents stories of his greatness. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing a stunning testament to the enduring resilience of Black people as they navigate the “post-racial” period The Last Suspicious Holdout so vividly portrays.

Cover of Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Summary from our catalog: In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston was living in New York as a fledgling writer. This collection of stories, found in archives after her death, reveal African American folk culture in Harlem in the 1920s. This book includes eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem gems.

Cover of How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

Summary from our catalog: N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.

Cover of Five Tuesdays in Winter

Five Tuesdays in Winter

Summary from our catalog: Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs.

Cover of If It Bleeds

If It Bleeds

  • By Stephen King
  • Where to find it: Adult Fiction under “FIC King,” Large Print under “LP King,” or Adult Audiobooks under “V KING”
  • View it on our catalog

Summary from our catalog: The four never-before-published novellas in this collection represent horror master King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend’s cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,’ which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an EC Comics vibe. In the profoundly moving ‘The Life of Chuck,’ a series of apocalyptic incidents bear out one character’s claim that ‘when a man or a woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin.’ ‘Rat’ sees a frustrated writer strike a Faustian bargain to complete his novel, and in the title story, private investigator Holly Gibney, the recurring heroine of King’s Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, faces off against a ghoulish television newscaster who vampirically feeds off the anguish he provokes in his audience by covering horrific tragedies.

Cover of The Moment of Tenderness

The Moment of Tenderness

  • By Madeleine L’Engle
  • Where to find it: Adult Science Fiction under “SF L’Engle”
  • View it on our catalog

Summary from our catalog: This powerful collection of short stories traces an emotional arc inspired by Madeleine L’Engle’s early life and career, from her lonely childhood in New York to her life as a mother in small-town Connecticut. In a selection of eighteen stories discovered by one of L’Engle’s granddaughters, we see how L’Engle’s personal experiences and abiding faith informed the creation of her many cherished works. Some of these stories have never been published; others were refashioned into scenes for her novels and memoirs. Almost all were written in the 1940s and ’50s, from Madeleine’s college years until just before the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. From realism to science-fiction to fantasy, there is something for everyone in this timeless, magical collection.

Cover of Seasonal Work

Seasonal Work

Summary from our catalog: The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories – including one never-before-published novella. These brilliantly crafted stories of deception, murder, dangerous games, and love gone wrong – irrefutable evidence that Laura Lippman’s riveting fiction will more than satisfy any crime reader.

Cover of Innards

Innards

  • By Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
  • Where to find it: New Adult Books under “FIC Makhene”
  • View it on our catalog

Summary from our catalog: This incendiary debut of linked stories narrates the everyday lives of Soweto residents, from the early years of apartheid to its dissolution and beyond.

Cover of How to Pronounce Knife

How to Pronounce Knife

  • By Souvankham Thammavongsa
  • Where to find it: Adult Fiction under “Fic Thammavongsa”
  • View it on our catalog

Summary from our catalog: In her stunning debut, Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and above all, the pursuit of a place to belong. An ex-boxer turned nail salon worker falls for a pair of immaculate hands; a mother and daughter harvest earthworms in the middle of the night; a country music-obsessed housewife abandons her family for fantasy; and a young girl’s love for her father transcends language. Uncannily and intimately observed, written with prose of exceptional precision, the stories in How to Pronounce Knife speak of modern location and dislocation, revealing lives lived in the embrace of isolation and severed history – but not without joy, humour, resilience, and constant wonder at the workings of the world.

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What’s your favorite short story collection? Let us know in the comments!