Short Stories: Adult Core Collection

A short story can be read in one sitting, but can have the power to stay with you the rest of your life. Check out this Core Collection that contains short prose pieces that are both episodic or anecdotal in a variety of genres and styles.

Girls at War and Other Stories Book Cover
Achebe, Chinua

Twelve stories by the internationally renowned novelist which recreate with energy and authenticity the major social and political issues that confront contemporary Africans on a daily basis.

The Thing Around Your Neck Book Cover
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

A collection of twelve stories includes the tale of a medical student in hiding with a poor Muslim woman, and a woman who discovers a devastating secret about her brother's death.

Say You're One of Them Book Cover
Akpan, Uwem

This singular collection of five stories takes the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa.

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Book Cover
Atwood, Margaret

In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle - and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

Going to Meet the Man Book Cover
Baldwin, James

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories Book Cover
Berlin, Lucia

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form.

The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq Book Cover
Blasim, Hassan

The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective, The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, Hassan Blasim offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.

Collected Fictions Book Cover
Borges, Jorge Luis

This edition at last brings together all of Borges' magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in a superb translation by Andrew Hurley. Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and the perfect introduction to the master's work for all those who have yet to discover him.

The Illustrated Man Book Cover
Bradbury, Ray

Classic Bradbury, this collection of tales offers images that are as keen as a tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that stain the body. Featuring a new Introduction, The Illustrated Man presents 18 startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin.

Bloodchild and Other Stories Book Cover
Butler, Octavia E.

Bloodchild and Other Stories is renowned author Octavia E. Butler's only collection of shorter work and features the Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories "Bloodchild" and "Speech Sounds." These works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. Butler proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature's strongest voices.

Invisible Cities Book Cover
Calvino, Italo

So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take

Stories of Your Life and Others Book Cover
Chiang, Ted

Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder.

The House on Mango Street Book Cover
Cisneros, Sandra

Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

Collected Stories Book Cover
Dahl, Roald

Containing all the stories from Roald Dahl's world-famous books – Over to You, Someone Like you, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch – plus eight further tales of the unexpected, this is the definitive collection by one of the great masters of the short story. Macabre, unsettling and deliciously enjoyable, these stories make the perfect bedtime read – but be warned, once you've started reading you won't be able to stop . . . 

This Is How You Lose Her Book Cover
Díaz, Junot

Presents a collection of stories that explores the heartbreak and radiance of love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Book Cover
Doyle, Arthur Conan

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases, including 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Blue Carbuncle', and 'The Speckled Band'. Although Holmes gained a reputation for infallibility, Conan Doyle showed his own realism and feminism by having the great detective defeated by Irene Adler - the woman - in the very first story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia'.

The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories 1978-2008 Book Cover
Erdrich, Louise

A stunning collection of short stories selected by the author herself from over three decades of work. A veritable masterclass in the art of short fiction, The Red Convertible features 31 previously published stories and 5 never-before-published pieces. Presented in one collection for the first time, the stories of The Red Convertible cement Louise Erdich’s position in the pantheon of consummate, innovative writers of the American short story alongside such luminaries as Flannery O’Connor and Charles Baxter. 

Sabrina & Corina: Stories Book Cover
Fajardo-Anstine, Kali

Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado--a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite--these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Book Cover
Gaiman, Neil

This third collection of short fiction by Gaiman includes previously published pieces of short fiction -- stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013 -- as well "Black Dog," a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods.

Difficult Women Book Cover
Gay, Roxane

Telling the stories of strong, imperfect, fully realized women, award-winning author Roxane Gay offers diverse protagonists and settings and unusual, often troubling situations in which women are haunted by pain and loss. In "The Mark of Cain," a woman pretends not to know that her abusive husband and his gentler identical twin have switched places; women participate in fight clubs in another story, while a priest refuses to feel bad about an affair in a third. With complex characters and straightforward writing, this collection stands out.

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writing Book Cover
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Presents fiction and non-fiction selections from the twentieth-century American feminist and sociologist, displaying keen analysis of economic and women's issues.

Florida Book Cover
Groff, Lauren

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive.

20th Century Ghosts Book Cover
Hill, Joe

A compilation of short fiction includes the tales of Imogene, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud theater, and Francis, an unhappy, hopeless human turned giant locust seeking revenge on his Nevada hometown.

The Lottery: And Other Stories Book Cover
Jackson, Shirley

The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

Fortune Smiles: Stories Book Cover
Johnson, Adam

In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. "Nirvana," portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous" a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.

Redeployment Book Cover
Klay, Phil

A collection of short stories by a former Marine captain and Iraq veteran focuses on the complexities of life for soldiers on the front lines and after, exploring themes ranging from brutality and faith to guilt and survival.

Interpreter of Maladies: Stories Book Cover
Lahiri, Jhumpa

Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, they also speak with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story - Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and the baffling New World.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories Book Cover
Li, Yiyun

In this collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, [this collection] reveals worlds both foreign and familiar.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Book Cover
Liu, Ken

An award-winning science fiction and fantasy author hand-picks his best short-stories, as well as a brand-new piece, in a collection that includes “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” “Mono No Aware” and “The Waves

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories Book Cover
Machado, Carmen Maria

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Book Cover
Moore, Lorrie and Heidi Pitlor (editors)

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time.

Dear Life: Stories Book Cover
Munro, Alice

This collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate that turn a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron, these stories about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-Four Stories Book Cover
Murakami, Haruki

From the surreal to the mundane, an anthology of short fiction captures a full range of human experience, emotion, and relationship in works that chronicle a chance reunion in Italy, a holiday in Hawaii, and a romantic exile in Greece.

The Refugees Book Cover
Nguyen, Viet Thanh

From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.

Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Book Cover
Oates, Joyce Carol

Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.

The Things They Carried Book Cover
O'Brien, Tim

A collection of award-winning and utterly moving stories about the madness of the Vietnam war.

The Complete Stories Book Cover
O'Connor, Flannery

Thirty-one tales depicting the humorous, if near tragic conditions of life in the Deep South during the fifties.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales Book Cover
Ogawa, Yōko

Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape. Macabre, fiendishly clever, and with a touch of the supernatural, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge creates a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: Stories Book Cover
Oyeyemi, Helen

The stories collected here are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi's ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi's Day. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Book Cover
Poe, Edgar Allan

A complete collection of the writings of Poe, including his mysteries, fantasies, satires, and poems.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories Book Cover
Proulx, Annie

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves : stories Book Cover
Russell, Karen

In these ten stories, Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here wolflike girls are reformed by nuns, a family makes their living wrestling alligators in a theme park, and little girls sail away on crab shells.

Olive Kitteridge Book Cover
Strout, Elizabeth

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.

The Best American Short Stories of the Century Book Cover
Updike, John (editor)

Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. 

The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection Book Cover
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors)

What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the pope were a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. 

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Book Cover
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (editors)

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Welcome to the Monkey House Book Cover
Vonnegut, Kurt

Tender stories of love, incisive essays on human greed and misery, and imaginative tales of futuristic happenings reveal Vonnegut's versatility and vision.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Book Cover
Wallace, David Foster

The series of stories from which the book takes its title is a tour de force sequence of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. These portraits of men at their most self-justifying, loquacious, and benighted explore poignantly and hilariously the agonies of sexual connection.

99 Stories of God Book Cover
Williams, Joy

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It's the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass--a ... collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves.

Zane's Sex Chronicles Book Cover
Zane

New York Times bestselling author Zane presents a tantalizing short story collection, Zane's Sex Chronicles. Pleasurable from beginning to end, this anthology brings together fifteen hunger-inducing stories from the original bestselling editions of The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth and Gettin' Buck Wild: Sex Chronicles II. Zane's Sex Chronicles weaves together a compilation of bold characters and provocative stories of passion and intoxicating eroticism to seduce both men and women.

Summaries provided by DPL's catalog unless otherwise noted. Click on each title to view more information.