May is Short Story Month! Every month is Short Story Month! Happy Short Story Month!
Short Story Month was launched in 2007 by Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network to encourage both reading and writing short fiction. Modeled loosely on National Poetry Month, it shines a spotlight on a dynamic form often unjustifiably overshadowed by the novel. Its core aim is to celebrate and sustain the short story as a vital, flexible, and often underappreciated literary form, through daily readings, curated recommendations, and creative challenges.
There are plenty of ways to take part, but one of the most rewarding is to lean into the strange, boundary-pushing edges of the form. Instead of staying with the familiar, seek out writers who fracture narrative, expand or compress language, and/or otherwise reimagine what a “story” can be. You might wander through the metafictional spirals of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, the witty collage-like atmospheres of Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, the philosophical labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions, the radical brevities of Lydia Davis’s The Collected Stories, the brilliantly dismantled histories of John Keene’s Counternarratives, the combinatory brilliance of Italo Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics, the unsettling ellipticals of Christine Schutt’s Nightwork, the restless inventions of César Aira’s The Musical Brain, and the distilled parables of Osama Alomar’s Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories, each collection marvelously offering a different “map” of narratological potentialities.
Elsewhere, the speculative and the strange take hold: Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories bends genre to engage intimacy and power, J. G. Ballard’s The Complete Stories maps psychic landscapes, and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber rewrites myth with lush precision. You might encounter the uncanny in Leonora Carrington’s The Complete Stories, the recursive architectures of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, or the tonal and temporal dislocations of Brian Evenson’s Fugue State, alongside the irreal ruptures of Julio Cortázar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories and the philosophical fictions of László Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories stretch narrative into something closer to contemplation, as do the speculative meditations of Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass/Starshards.
At the same time, innovation can be disorienting in subtler ways: the emotional minimalism of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the moral intensities of James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, and the shifting, shifty voices of Junot Díaz’s Drown each reconfigure realism from within. Meanwhile, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and Diane Williams’s The Collected Stories push tone, structure, and voice into unexpected registers, as do the compressed intensities of The Complete Gary Lutz and the disquieting miniatures of Dawn Raffel’s In the Year of Long Division.
You might also explore the dense lyricism of William H. Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, the conceptual play of Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants, and the eerie precision of Amber Sparks’s The Unfinished World, alongside the baroque intensity of Barry Hannah’s Airships, the archival strangeness of Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque, and the hybrid experiments of Lance Olsen’s How to Unfeel the Dead. The tradition stretches both backward and outward: from James Joyce’s Dubliners and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Other Stories to Vladimir Nabokov’s Collected Stories and Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege, and onward into the fragmentary, genre-defying work of Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle, Lidia Yuknavitch’s Real to Reel, and Jason Teal’s We Were Called Specimens: An Oral Archive of Deity Marjorie.
Further outward still, you might encounter the essayistic fictions of Helen DeWitt’s Some Trick, the destabilized interiors Robert Lopez’s Asunder, the conceptual assemblages of Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter, the dense inquiries of Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities of Intimacy, or the layered textualities of Rob Hardin’s Distorture and Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels. Even more voices—Leon Forrest’s Meteor in the Madhouse, Victoria Redel’s Where the Road Bottoms Out, David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair—continue to complicate and expand the field.
However you approach it, the month is an invitation not just to read more stories but to encounter how radically inventive the form can be: how it resists containment, how it thrives on risk, and how, at its best, it subverts the very expectations it appears to fulfill.
You can also celebrate by reading the ninety-plus short fictions I published over the years in Big Other:
Harold Abramowitz’s “(Our Real Limbs)”
Roberta Allen’s “A Way to Go”
Osama Alomar’s “Four Fictions”
Carmen Bardeguez-Brown’s “Roots and Routes”
Martine Bellen’s “The Doctrine of Notions”
Margo Berdeshevsky’s “Tattoo Tribal”
Sarah Blackman’s “The County Coroner” and “Centralia Mine Fire”
Tobias Carroll’s “An Oblation”
Olivia Kate Cerrone’s “Where They Bury the Waste”
Kim Chinquee’s “Four Fictions,” “Three Fictions,” “Five Fictions” and “Four Fictions”
Jane Ciabattari’s “Acqua Alta” and “Air and Fog, Light and Flight”
Lynn Crawford’s “Same Sky”
Debra Di Blasi’s “Otherwise (Eulogy for Diane)” and “Every Fly’s Ascendant”
Lyn Di Iorio’s “Blessed Believers in the Unreal”
John Domini’s “Fish Story, Hoodie Howl”
James W. Fuerst’s “El Hueco”
Tina May Hall’s “Three Fictions” and “The Extinction Museum #506: Home Pregnancy Test, c. early 2000s”
Alissa Hattman’s “Three Fictions”
Karen Heuler’s “Words, Words, Words, in Other Words”
Noy Holland’s “Colossal”
Tim Horvath and Rafaele Andrade’s “Chop”
Andrew Joron’s “Lunagrad: Mek,” “Lunagrad,” and “Lunagrad: The Prison Notebooks”
Belle (Bom) Kim’s “Seven Comics”
Cao Kou’s “1/5040” and “Father,” translated by Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant
Babak Lakghomi’s “Here to Forget”
Karen An-hwei Lee’s “A Ballad of the Lost Octopodes,” “Love Chronicles from the Octopodes: Episodes of the Emily Diaspora,” “Herstory Manifesto as a Mazy Cloudiness…” and “Einspänner”
Hillary Leftwich’s “Past Hertz”
Norman Lock’s “A Minotaur in Bellevue” and “The Age of Flesh and Fire”
Robert Lopez’s “However Many Sayings to Live and Die By,” “The Future Home of the Wymans,” and “Say No More”
Peter Markus’s “In This Tree” and “This Boy’s Tongue”
Michael Martone’s “Two Fictions” and “Follies, Ruins, Ducks”
Dev Murphy’s “Six Comics”
Yannick Murphy’s “Four Hours”
Stephen O’Connor’s “And One by One They Disappeared”
David Ohle’s “Lunch with a Dead Beat”
Lance Olsen’s “Beautiful Boy Falling,” “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” “Absolute Away,” “Cuddly Doll Caught on Barbed Wire,” and “The Room Without Dreams”
Aimee Parkison’s “Three Fictions” and “What Goes on Near the Water” “Lethal Conversations,” and “Tree Ears and Velvet Feet”
Aimee Parkison and Meg Pokrass’s “Disappearing Ink”
Meg Pokrass’s “Three Fictions”
Nick Francis Potter’s “Regarding” and “Ten Cigarettes My Cigarette Parts Open Up My Throat Doctor”
Ernesto Quiñonez’s “The Ugly Roach Killer Guy”
Dawn Raffel’s “Three Cities”
Doug Rice’s “A Refusal to Disappear”
Charles Rice-Gonzalez’s “Deep Salvage”
Luis Othoniel Rosa’s “History of Human Migrations,” translated by Katie Marya
Joanna Ruocco’s “Eight Microfictions”
Pamela Ryder’s “Fiction”
John Schertzer’s “Two Fictions”
Jason Schwartz’s “Carrion Bull”
Peter Selgin’s “Penny Sufferings”
Rone Shavers’s “Four Crônicas“
David M. Sheridan’s “Some Chairs at the Art Museum”
Lisa Russ Spaar’s “As Far into the Dark”
Laurie Stone’s “Letter”
Terese Svoboda’s “Now So Closed and Dark”
Steve Tomasula’s “Z, The Turning”
J. A. Tyler’s “Strange Weather: Dispatch #X24”
Michel Vachey’s “Tribute to the Killer,” translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
Chris Vaughan’s “Prospero’s Nephew’s Notebook” and “Dead Hare Explains”
Curtis White’s “An Autofiction”
D. Harlan Wilson’s “The Protocols of People and Other Monsters” and “Like a Sermon in the Mud”
Can Xue’s “Young Tide,” translated by Karen Gernant
Yi Zhou’s “When No One Was Sure About the World,” translated by Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant
And here’s a list of my favorite short story collections! Over one hundred sixty strong! More will likely come to mind; so I’ll be adding more collections to this list as the days go by. (Post your favorites in the comments!):
César Aira’s The Musical Brain (New Directions)
Roberta Allen’s The Princess of Herself (Pelekinesis)
Osama Alomar’s Fullblood Arabian; and Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories (New Directions)
Gary Amdahl’s Visigoth (Milkweed Editions)
James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man (Vintage)
J. G. Ballard’s The Complete Stories (W. W. Norton & Company)
John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (Anchor Books)
Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories; Forty Stories (Penguin Group); and Flying to America: 45 More Stories (Counterpoint)
Paul Beckman’s Peek
Matt Bell’s How They Were Found
Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions (Penguin Group)
Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories (Seven Stories Press)
Amina Cain’s Creature (Dorothy)
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and The Complete Cosmicomics (Mariner Books)
Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities of Intimacy; Tales from the Next Village; The Star Cafe (Scribner); Five Doubts; and All Fall Down (Coffee House Press)
Leonora Carrington’s The Complete Stories (Dorothy)
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (Penguin Group)
Gabriel Blackwell Corrections (Rescue Press)
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral (Vintage)
John Cheever’s The Stories of John Cheever (Vintage)
Peter Cherches’s Whistler’s Mother’s Son and Other Curiosities (Pelekinesis)
Kim Chinquee’s Oh Baby; Pretty (White Pine Press); Shot Girls; and Wetsuit
Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants (Grove Press); In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters; and A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This; Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions (W. W. Norton & Company)
Julio Cortázar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories (Pantheon Books)
Lynn Crawford’s Shankus & Kitto: A Saga
Susan Daitch’s Storytown (Dalkey Archive Press)
Guy Davenport’s Tatlin!; Da Vinci’s Bicycle (New Directions); and Eclogues
Lydia Davis’s The Collected Stories (Picador)
Samuel Delany’s Driftglass/Starshards; Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories (Vintage); Tales of Nevèrÿon; and Atlantis: Three Tales (Wesleyan University Press)
Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner)
Helen DeWitt’s Some Trick (New Directions)
Junot Díaz’s Drown (Riverhead)
John Domini’s Movieola! (Dzanc Books)
Deborah Eisenberg’s The Collected Stories (Picador)
Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures; Van Gogh’s Room at Arles and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (Dalkey Archive Press)
Julia Elliott’s The Wilds (Tin House Books)
Brian Evenson’s Altmann’s Tongue (Bison Books); Fugue State; Windeye; and Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press)
Leon Forrest’s Meteor in the Madhouse (Triquarterly Books)
William H. Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (New York Review of Books); Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (Dalkey Archive Press); and Eyes (Vintage)
Carol Guess and Aimee Parkison’s Girl Zoo (FC2)
Barry Hannah’s Airships; Captain Maximus; Bats out of Hell; and High Lonesome; and Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories (Grove Press)
Rob Hardin’s Distorture (FC2)
Amy Hempel’s The Collected Stories (Scribner)
Noy Holland’s The Spectacle of the Body
Tim Horvath’s Understories (Bellevue Literary Press)
Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children: Stories (Amistad Press)
James Joyce’s Dubliners
Laura Ellen Joyce’s The Luminol Reels (Calamari Press)
Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner)
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
John Keene’s Counternarratives (New Directions)
László Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On (New Directions)
Hillary Leftwich’s Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (The Accomplices)
Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (Random House)
Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive (St. Martins Press); and The Fun Parts
Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (New Directions)
Norman Lock’s Grim Tales; Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions (Spuyten Duyvil); and Love Among the Particles (Bellevue Literary Press)
Robert Lopez’s Asunder (Dzanc Books); and Good People (Bellevue Literary Press)
Gary Lutz’s Stories In the Worst Way; Divorcer (Calamari Press); I Looked Alive (Black Square Editions) Partial List of People to Bleach;; Assisted Living (Future Tense); and The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books)
Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Brick House (Awst Press)
Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (Dalkey Archive Press)
Peter Markus’s We Make Mud (Dzanc Books)
Megan Martin’s Nevers
Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter: Fictions (FC2); Seeing Eye; The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone (BOA Editions), and Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (Baobab Press)
Leonard Michaels’s The Collected Stories (FSG)
Albert Mobilio’s Games & Stunts (Black Square Editions)
Rick Moody’s The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (Back Bay Books)
Bradford Morrow’s The Uninnocent (Pegasus Books)
Vladimir Nabokov’s Collected Stories
Dorthe Nors’s Karate Chop (Graywolf)
Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories (FSG)
Lance Olsen’s How to Unfeel the Dead: New and Selected Fictions (Teksteditions)
Grace Paley’s The Collected Stories (FSG)
Aimee Parkison’s Suburban Death Project (Unbound Edition Press)
Nick Potter’s New Animals (Subito Press)
Padgett Powell’s Typical (Henry Holt); Aliens of Affection (Open Road Media); and Cries for Help, Various (Catapult)
Natanya Ann Pulley’s With Teeth (New Rivers Press)
Dawn Raffel’s In the Year of Long Division and Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc Books)
Mark Richard’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World (Anchor Books)
Victoria Redel’s Where the Road Bottoms Out
Jordan A. Rothacker’s Gristle: Weird Tales (Stalking Horse Press)
Pamela Ryder’s Paradise Field (FC2)
Salman Rushdie’s East, West (Vintage)
Joe Sacksteder’s Make/Shift (Sarabande)
George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Random House); Pastoralia; In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead Books); and Tenth of December (Random House)
Davis Schneiderman’s there is no appropriate #emoji (MadHat Press)
Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (Penguin); and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque (Counterpoint)
Christine Schutt’s Nightwork (Dalkey Archive Press); A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (Mariner Books); and Pure Hollywood (Grove Press)
Robert Scotellaro’s What Are the Chances? (Press 53)
Peter Selgin’s Drowning Lessons (University of Georgia Press)
Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies; and The Unfinished World (Liveright Publishing)
Gregory Spatz’s What Could Be Saved (Tupelo Press)
Donna Baier Stein’s Scenes from the Heartland (Serving House Books)
Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle (Graywolf Press)
Laurie Stone’s My Life as an Animal (Triquarterly Books)
Theodore Sturgeon’s The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (North Atlantic Books)
Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert (Mad Creek Books)
Jason Teal’s We Were Called Specimens: An Oral Archive of Deity Marjorie (Kernpunkt)
Meg Tuite’s White Van (Unlikely Books)
Robert Vaughan’s Askew (Cowboy Jamboree Press)
Ed Vega’s Mendoza’s Dreams
David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair (W. W. Norton & Company); Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; and Oblivion (Back Bay Books)
Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories (New York Review of Books)
William Walsh’s Ampersand, Mass
John Edgar Wideman’s You Made Me Love You: Selected Stories, 1981-2018 (Scribner Book Company)
Diane Williams’s This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate; Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear; Romancer Erector; It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature; Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine; and The Collected Stories of Diane Williams (SOHO Press)
Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (Vintage)
John Dermot Woods’s The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things (BlazeVox Books)
Lidia Yuknavitch’s Real to Reel (FC2)
Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator (Open City Books)
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage)