Every day is short story month. For me, at least. I’ve been following Ray Bradbury’s assignment of reading one short story, one poem, and one essay every night for years.
I love short stories. Good ones, like Neil Gaiman says in his MasterClass module on writing short fiction, are like close-up magic tricks. Short story writers are skilled conjurers. You think the story’s going to go one way, then it zags another. You inhabit the skin of another person from another world, like a tribesman wearing the garb of a feared animal’s skin. A good story gets you right to the heart of the human condition.
So how do we celebrate Short Story Month?
By reading a ton of short stories!
Try to read at least one short story a day this month.
Treat yourself to a few volumes of short stories from your favourite writers and get lost in hidden worlds.
Luckily, I’ve read so many short stories over the years that I can easily recommend thirty-one great short stories to you right now.
Here’s a short story recommendation for every day of the month of May.
Some of these short stories will take only five minutes to read, whilst others need a relaxed half-hour put aside. All will marinade in the back of your mind over the course of the month. Some are freely available to read online, and I’ve linked to them in such instances. In other instances, I’ve linked to the best anthology or collection of which the short story is a part of – some of these short stories are in the same volume, so purchasing that book will pay off dividends for your foray into the world of the short story.
As a bonus, if you’ve read any of the short stories I recommend below, I will swap them for more recommendations.
For example, you comment and let me know that you’ve already read and loved Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, Murakami’s ‘Kino’, and Hemingway’s ‘Hills For White Elephants’, then I’ll reply with three alternative short stories. I call that a huge win. But I’ll only do that if you offer up at least one short story you recommend. Fair trade, right?
Recommended Short Stories for Short Story Month:
- Denis Johnson’s ‘Emergency’ (link)
- D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ (link)
- Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ (link)
- Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ (link)
- Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’ (link)
- Ken Liu’s ‘The Paper Menagerie’ (link)
- Ted Chiang’s ‘Understand’ (link)
- Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (link)
- Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (link)
- Stefan Zweig’s ‘Chess’ (link)
- James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (link)
- Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ (link)
- Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (link)
- Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’ (link)
- Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt’ (link)
- Haruki Murakami’s ‘Kino’ (link)
- Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ (link)
- Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over The Mountain’ (link)
- Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’ (link)
- John Updike’s ‘A & P’ (link)
- James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’ (link)
- Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ (link)
- John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ (link)
- Roald Dahl’s ‘Skin’ (link)
- J.D. Salinger’s ‘For Esme – with Love and Squalor’ (link)
- Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ (link)
- Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Heat’ (link)
- Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Horla’ (link)
- William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (link)
- W.W. Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (link)
- Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ (link)
I could keep going. I could list another thirty-one stories off the top of my head easily. But I’ll rein in that impulse (unless you really want more recommendations, in which case indulge me). Instead, I’ll recommend some of my favourite short story collections.
My favourite Short Stories Collections to read during Short Story Month:
It’s great reading anthologies of short stories. And I love this one anthology of a hundred short stories, which includes many of the great writers listed above and more, called That Glimpse of Truth (link). But sometimes it’s really nice to grab a volume of short stories by one author and read all the way through.
I like doing this with poetry. I like doing this with albums too. There’s a cohesive whole to a fine short story collection in the same way there’s a sense of unity running through a great album.
My personal favourite short story collections are Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (link), J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (link), Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie (link), Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women (link), and Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (link).
Enjoy Short Story Month, and let me know if you want more short story recommendations.
Another bonus: Follow me on Twitter because, every day going forward during Short Story Month, I’ll be posting videos of writers reading their short story works. Reading short stories is great, but actually having the writer who penned the short story read it to you is a real treat.