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‘It Will Come Back to You’ by Sigrid Nunez

One of our best, smartest, funniest authors has just published her first collection of short stories at age seventy-five … The volume mixes tone and content: its easy intimacy and impression of casualness exist in fascinating counterpoint to its philosophical heft, existential probing, and sagacious maturity. These stories can be at once effervescent and weighty, straightforward and unsettling, hilarious and eerie … Nunez’s capacity to startle, surprise, even shock her readers is deployed to extraordinary effect in many of the stories collected here. We never end up where we began with a Nunez story … Nunez’s fiction doesn’t shy away from embittering things or from confronting grief head-on, even as it offers its readers humor, warmth, sweetness — comfort in the wake of the truth. Read more

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Andre Alexis Has Won the 2025 Story Prize

Other Worlds so seamlessly traverses the boundaries of time, of nationality, and of genre that such boundaries seem diaphanous,” noted the judges. “This fleet-footed collection is both rooted in oral and literary traditions and yet entirely contemporary. Being many things at once, full of sly innovations, and quietly upending conventions, Other Worlds is wholly original and wholly itself.” Read more

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Lauren Groff’s Newest Stories Prove She’s Among the Best in the Game

The stories in Lauren Groff’s third collection, “Brawler,” largely feature people who’ve hit crisis points in their lives: the abusive partner, the natural disaster, the relapse, the deathbed. This is as it ought to be with short stories, which have to make their points in a relative hurry. Groff, a perpetual bestseller, is gifted at that: Her previous collection, “Florida,” was a National Book Award finalist, along with two of her other books that earned the honor. Read more

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‘The Bewitched Bourgeois’ by Dino Buzzati

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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Announcing the Winners of the 2024 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction

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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