The Story Prize is an annual book award established in 2004 that honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up receives $5,000. Read more
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Mavis Gallant wrote short stories full of brutal humor that examined the hell of other people. Read more
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Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century. Read more
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The volume is shot through with genuine pathos and astute social commentary, and Reyes shifts effortlessly from absurdism to satire to sci-fi. These dynamic tales herald the arrival of a promising new talent. Read more
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Watson’s stories—those in the volumes published in his lifetime and the new ones—are wry, tender, darkly funny, and deeply idiosyncratic. Read more
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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 the previous year. Guest editor Amor Towles has brought his own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices. Read more
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The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. These characters reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures, moments that infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon… Read more
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Johnson plumbs great depths in her third short story collection, full of bittersweet tales of the fantastic. This pleasingly varied anthology of fantasy and homage collects 14 works, many of which were previously published elsewhere, including the Nebula and Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award–winning “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.” … While the entries are uniformly excellent in pacing and prose, the standouts may be the collection’s opener and closer. “Tool-Using Mimics” spins out a half-dozen explanations for a vintage photo of a young girl with tentacles that lead to piercing questions about how much we can know about the past, other species, and each other. The titular novella, which also won a World Fantasy Award, is a compelling fairy tale about a little orphan girl and her talking hen that poignantly interrogates the ways we determine which stories take center stage. Read more
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A previously unknown short story by Truman Capote, discovered written in pencil in a notebook then carefully deciphered and transcribed, will be published on Friday. Read more
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Millhauser reminds you of Borges sometimes, of Calvino and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. Millhauser has a Nicholson Baker-like gift for meticulous, closeup description of the ordinary, but his world is also one that may be inhabited by ghosts, a realm where paintings and postcards come to life, where people can vanish or fly on carpets, and where it’s possible for someone to cohabitate with a frog. Read more
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