New & Novel: Short Stories

A short story writer today is almost like a mythical unicorn, an anomaly, an artist writing for the love of a fledgling form of writing. Short stories that are consumed today by large masses usually only appear in The New Yorker, one of the only major outlets that still publishes short stories for fairly substantial amounts of money. Getting a short story published in the most lauded magazine in America is much harder than getting a novel published.

Short stories bring more pressure, because like poets, each paragraph, sentence, and word is more important than they would be inside a large novel. Short stories are precise with their delivery, they must capture the attention of the reader extraordinarily quickly, and tell a full tale from beginning to end in roughly a half hour of reading. Short stories will likely never be as widely read as novels, but they do matter to those who are paying attention. 
~Steven Petite, "Why Short Stories Matter Now More Than Ever"

We are great fans of short stories here at the blog, and happy to bring you a list of some new and novel collections. What we've cherry-picked from the library catalog includes: new stories by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Helen Oyeyemi (Mr. Fox), Luis Alberto Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter) and Joyce Carol Oates; stories by Stefan Zweig, whose memoir inspired Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel; Ayelet Tsabari, whose stories have been called "[r]eminiscent of the early work of Jhumpa Lahiri"; Regina Ullman, whose stories have never before appeared in English but whose work was admired by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Rainer Maria Rilke; stories by Helen Ellis that are part of the "resurgence of the housewife novel"; and more!

Why not take a short story collection out for a spin? Unlike a novel, where you have to decide how many pages to read before you decide whether or not you like it enough to keep reading it, you only have to give a couple of stories a whirl, and you will not have to wait to find out if the ending is disappointing.

Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War edited by Heather Webb

In the Land of Armadillos: Stories by Helen Maryles Shankman

The Doll-master and Other Tales of Terror by Joyce Carol Oates

The Best Place on Earth: stories by Ayelet Tsabari 

What Is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

City Beasts Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife by Mark Kurlansky [eBook]

Refund: Stories by Karen E. Bender 

Fantastic Night Tales of Longing and Liberation by Stefan Zweig [eBook] 

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories by Ann Pancake 

The Country Road: Stories by Regina Ullmann; translated from the German by Kurt Beals 

The Queen's Caprice: Stories by Jean Echenoz; translated by Linda Coverdale 

Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread by Chuck Palahniuk [also eBook, eAudio, book on CD]

The American Lover by Rose Tremain 

American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis 

Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick

The Water Museum : Stories by Luis Alberto Urrea  

Oye What I'm Gonna Tell You: Stories by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés 

England: And Other Stories by Graham Swift [also eBook] 

Gutshot: Stories by Amelia Gray [also eBook]

Also, if nothing here grabs you, try checking out our Poetry & Short Story Reference Center eResource! It's free with your library card, providing a historically rich collection of hundreds of thousands of classic and contemporary poems, as well as short stories, biographies, and authoritative essays on such topics as poetic forms, movements, and techniques—including contemporary content from the finest publishers.

New and Novel: The Short Form - Essays and Stories

Short stories may have grown out of the fables of Aesop in the 6th century BCE, or out of the oral storytelling tradition. Up until the 18th century in Europe, a popular short story form was the anecdote ["a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point", Wikipedia]. However, the first proper collections of short stories were thought to have appeared in the early 1800s. In the early 1900s, short stories were flourishing due to publication in periodicals such as The Strand, the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and others. Since 1945, short story collections continue to be published, but their popular readership has declined. Alice Munro brought the form back into the spotlight with to her 2013 Nobel Prize win. In an interview, Munro said:

Interviewer Adam Smith: And the award will bring a great new readership to your work ...
Alice Munro: Well I would hope so, and I hope this would happen not just for me but for the short story in general. Because it's often sort of brushed off, you know, as something that people do before they write their first novel. And I would like it to come to the fore, without any strings attached, so that there doesn't have to be a novel.

Essays, on the other hand, can be directly traced back to their French origin - Michel de Montaigne was the first to popularize this term in the 1500s, from the French "essayer" [to try or to attempt]. Since this term came into fashion, in the 18th and 19th centuries, many essays were written for public consumption, and may have contributed to the rise of magazine publication. Essays have been used a forum for politics, literary criticism, and more, and have found a place in education, with students being assigned essays to improve their writing skills.

At abcreads we have a romantic vision of both these forms - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner publishing their short stories during the Jazz Age; Southern story writers such as Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor at work in the 1950s, Porter writing amidst her travels and O'Connor, debilitated by lupus, writing from her family farm in Georgia; Thoreau and Emerson's Transcendentalist essays celebrating nature; philosophers such as Voltaire, Francis Bacon, and Samuel Johnson scribbling their essays by candlelight during the Age of Enlightenment.

All that said, we hope you'll find something to enjoy from this list of some of the new and novel offerings of the short form, essays and stories, from the library catalog.

Essays and Miscellany

Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London by Mohsin Hamid

The Expo Files: Articles By the Crusading Journalist Stieg Larsson by Stieg Larsson

Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms edited with an introduction by Alan Ziegler

Ham - Slices of a Life: Essays & Stories by Sam Harris

What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch

Study in Perfect: Essays by Sarah Gorham

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags by Daphne Merkin

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit

Spent: Exposing Our Complicated Relationship with Shopping edited by Kerry Cohen

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair edited by Graydon Carter

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East by Nathan Deuel

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

Short Stories

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction by Terry Pratchett

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman

High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread by Joyce Carol Oates

Karate Chop: Stories by Dorthe Nors

The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner

Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet

Wallflowers: Stories by Eliza Robertson

The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons by Heather A. Slomski

Now We Will Be Happy by Amina Gautier

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

The Wilds by Julia Elliott 

Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane

Links

A Short History of the Short Story [Prospect]

A Brief History of the Short Story in America [Critical Mass]

In Praise of the American Short Story [New York Times]

A brief survey of the short story [Guardian series]

17 Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life [Buzzfeed]

150 Great Articles and Essays [The Electric Typewriter]

eNovellas & eStory Collections: Short Fiction When You're on the Go!

Maybe you just want something quick to read, while you're waiting at the doctor's office, or waiting at the airport for your flight.  Maybe you don't have a lot of time.  Maybe you want to borrow a Kindle from the library, but you are not sure you're going to like eReading, and don't want to commit to a whole book that you might not have the time or inclination to finish.  Whatever your reasons for avoiding reading an eBook, we would like to suggest the burgeoning field of eNovellas, and, our personal favorite, short story collections in eBook format.

The novella as a form has fallen out of favor, but is enjoying a resurgence right now.  They have been around in European literature since the Renaissance, and feature generally "fewer conflicts than a novel, yet more complicated ones than a short story...[they] are often intended to be read at a single sitting" [Wikipedia].  Famous novellas include: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor; Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's; and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. We think you may even love the form already without knowing it!

Here at abcreads, we often feel that short stories as a genre have gotten short shrift lately as well, despite their rich and magnificent tradition, which date back to oral storytelling and fables. Early examples include The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron, both of which feature short stories in the "frame" of a larger story. Early short story masters include Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Guy de Maupassant, and Anton Chekhov. In the early 1900s, when magazine publishing was flourishing, so did the short story, with magazines like The Strand, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Evening Post regularly featuring stories. At this time short story writing was lucrative and authors often quickly penned a story for some cash in hand. Some authors published in this era are: F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (the father of the Japanese short story); Dorothy Parker; and Franz Kafka. The genre continued to be very popular through the '50s and '60s, with its popularity falling off alongside the rise of film and the shrinking of the commercial market for them.

So, check out an eNovella or an eStory collection today!  Maybe you just want to kill some time...but you will be breathing life into a literary tradition, and becoming a link in the chain of literary history, all while still being on the cutting edge of technology!


Novellas

Shipwreck by Maureen Jennings

The Hangman by Louise Penny

Patricide by Joyce Carol Oates

A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows by Diana Gabaldon

Darkness Under the Sun by Dean Koontz

Hollyleaf's Story by Erin Hunter

Chaotic by Kelley Armstrong

High Heat by Lee Child

Snatched by Karin Slaughter

Museum of Final Journeys by Anita Desai

The Variable Man by Philip K. Dick

Stupid Perfect World by Scott Westerfeld



Short Stories

Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women

Mad For It: Short Stories on Football's Greatest Rivalries - Part 1, Manchester Utd. v. Liverpool: Seeing Red by Andy Mitten

There is No Long Distance Now: Very Short Stories by Naomi Shihab Nye

One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories edited by Chris Brazier

Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories by Agnes Owens

Island Boyz: Short Stories by Graham Salisbury

Midnight Pleasures: Four Short Stories of Otherworldly Passion by Amanda Ashley ... [et al.].

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack: 47 Tales of the Thinking Machine and Others

Dreamsongs, Vol. 1 by George R. R. Martin

Bite by Laurell K. Hamilton ... [et al.].



Links

A list of popular eNovellas from Goodreads

A Brief History of the Short Story in America

In Praise of Short

New Short Fiction

Love short stories? Still waiting for your copy of Tenth of December or The Fun Parts or Dear Life or Vampires in the Lemon Grove?  Never fear, the ABC Library catalog has many short story collections for you to sample in the interim. Here are some of the latest:

Damage Control: Stories by Amber Dermont

I Want to Show You More: Stories by Jamie Quatro

We Live In Water by Jess Walter [eBook only in our catalog]

The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich

I Am an Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran

Signs and Wonders: Stories by Alix Ohlin [eBook only in our catalog]

The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, Brenna Yovanoff (YA)

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1 edited by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 2 edited by Joseph Gordon-Levitt [eBook only in our catalog]

Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women by Jo Glanville [eBook only in our catalog]

This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You: Stories by Jon McGregor [eBook only in our catalog]