10 Fantastic Short Story Collections for Your Book Club

​Highway Thirteen, by Fiona McFarlane (2024)

​Crime fiction (or true crime) book clubs will want to dive into this collection set in Australia and named a best book of the year by Kirkus and The New Yorker. The 12 fictional stories are centered on, or related to, serial killer Joe Biga — a character based on the real-life Australian murderer Ivan Milat. In “Hostel,” a story about telling stories, a woman retells a tale that her old friends had recycled for years about how they befriended one of Biga’s future victims outside a Sydney hostel one night. Or at least they think they did. In “Tourists,” a dense forest that was one of Biga’s crime scenes hosts an odd encounter between two coworkers: Lena, a blousy, middle-aged, self-declared “empath,” and Joe, a younger man from payroll with intrusive thoughts.​

​100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor (2015)​

Pitlor, along with short story maestro Lorrie Moore, also edited in this weighty anthology of 40 tales that’s perfect for groups that want to hit iconic authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Among these stars (and more contemporary authors like George Saunders), Pitler recommends checking out the lesser-known Nancy Hale. “She’s completely forgotten by time, and she’s totally brilliant,” Pitlor says. In Hale’s story, “Those Are as Brothers,” originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1941, an abused wife finds solidarity with a German Jewish refugee. If funny-sad stories are your thing, try Donald Barthelme’s 1974 whirlwind, “The School.” In a brisk four pages, Barthelme chronicles cycles of death and questions of love in a public school classroom.​

​The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, by Louise Kennedy (2023)​

Kennedy is among the latest wave of hot Irish writers, including Claire Keegan, Paul Murray and Paul Lynch. Her 2022 love story set against the Troubles, Trespasses, is set to become a TV show starring Gillian Anderson, but in this absorbing collection, she takes readers to modern, post-Troubles, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Your group might try the story “Powder,” where a young Dubliner named Eithne begrudgingly escorts her dead boyfriend’s American mother on a cringey ashes-scattering trip through Ireland’s tourist hot spots. In the heartbreaking “Brittle Things,” a crab fisherman and his wife keep up appearances while they wait for their young son to say his first word.​

The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Amor Towles and Jenny Minton Quigley

​This year’s guest editor, best-selling author Amor Towles (The Gentleman from Moscow), has arranged the 20 stories — which, like the previous collection, were culled from works published in magazines — in a kind of chronological order: The first are set in childhood and the rest revolve around increasingly older characters. He suggests “The Honor of Your Presence,” by the prolific Dave Eggers, which is a long, wonderfully weird story about an odd 62-year-old uncle who eggs his lonely 31-year-old niece into crashing an aquarium’s fundraiser. Family relations are frostier in Caroline Kim’s “The Hiding Spot.” When a recently retired dry cleaner, Mrs. Lee, cannot precisely remember where she stashed her good jewelry, the search reveals long-simmering bad feelings toward her grown son and husband.​

A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, edited by Deborah Treisman (2025)

​Treisman curated this collection of 78 stories for the magazine’s 100th birthday. “I could not read everything,” she says. “We’ve published more than 13,000 stories.” But she read a lot, including everything from classics like J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian, about a texting romance gone wrong (a viral sensation when published in 2017). Treisman could not name a favorite (she loves them all). Still, she says not to expect a bookful of famous mid-century male writers writing about “middle-class marital discomfort and boredom … and stories that end with an epiphany” when thinking about New Yorker short stories, which are more varied than that. “If you read through the archives, you find very few.”​ ​

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and Cathedral (1983), by Raymond Carver

​Carver, who died in 1988, was a writer’s writer who pushed modern short stories in a realistic direction. “Cathedral,” the title story, about a couple and their blind dinner guest, is considered his masterpiece. Irish writer Anne Enright has said that “Fat,” from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, about a waitress and an out-of-town customer, is her favorite by Carver. In the thought-provoking tale, the nameless waitress-narrator begins to differentiate herself from the boorishness of her coworkers. The year after his death, Carver was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his collection Where I’m Calling From, with the prize committee calling his “mastery of the form” a contributor to “the revival of the short story in recent years.”  ​ ​

Witness, by Jamel Brinkley (2023)​

Groff recommends this collection of 10 tight stories set in New York City that won the Maya Angelou Book Award and was one of The New York Times’ best books of the year. Brinkley’s story “A Family,” published in The Best American Short Stories 2018, is particularly good, with portraits of children and teens feeling their way through the adult world. A little girl in “The Happiest House on Union Street” ricochets up and down the stairs of her Crown Heights townhouse between apartments occupied by her grumpy father and free-spirited uncle. A splintering teenage friend group temporarily coheres when they encounter a neighborhood fixture, an unhoused man known only as Deadass, working at a rabbit rescue. It seems to be a particularly strange sign of the gentrification that has cropped up in their Bed-Stuy neighborhood. “I love Jamel’s voice,” Groff says. “I think he is delightful.”​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​