Short Fiction & Anthologies

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Ficciones

By Jorge Luis Borges , Anthony Kerrigan , John Sturrock

Ficciones is Jorge Luis Borges's best-known book, a compact set of tales that turned philosophical puzzles into fiction. A secret encyclopedia leaks an invented planet into the real world. A minor author sets out to rewrite a famous novel word for word. A universe is imagined as an endless library, and a detective chases a killer through a geometry of clues. Borges often writes as a scholar, critic or witness rather than a conventional storyteller, and that choice shapes the whole book. Among short story collections, few have had so much influence on later writers worldwide. This Everyman's Library hardcover adds an introduction by John Sturrock and presents the stories in English.

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The Pelican Child

By Joy Williams

The Pelican Child is Joy Williams's seventh collection of short fiction, published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2025. The twelve stories, most previously published in literary journals, gather Williams's signature fusion of the mundane and the mythic: talking dogs at a writers' retreat, a Slavic folkloric figure meeting John James Audubon, twin sisters plotting ecological retribution in Wyoming, and a man's mother receiving his terminal diagnosis with a koan. The collection is unified by its preoccupation with mortality, the slow unraveling of the natural world, and the uncanny quality that hides inside ordinary American life. Characters drift through a diminished landscape where care homes replace family photos with stock images, where lakes are drying, and where the boundary between the living and the dead remains stubbornly porous. The book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and received broadly favorable critical attention.

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Ghostroots

Stories

By ’Pemi Aguda

Ghostroots is ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection: twelve stories set in a Lagos where the supernatural presses against ordinary domestic and working life. Among recent short story collections, it stands out for treating haunting as inheritance. A woman may see a dead relative’s cruelty surface in her daughter, a new mother’s body may seem to answer to old family wounds, a whole street may lose its youngest sons, and an architect may meet a house with a will of its own. Aguda moves between outright horror and quieter realism with an uncanny edge, changing voice and form from story to story. The book was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and it keeps asking how far a person can separate herself from the family, tradition and history that made her.

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Call and Response: Stories of the Fantastic

Stories of the Fantastic

By Christopher Caldwell

Call and Response is Christopher Caldwell's debut collection of fantasy and speculative short fiction, published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2025. The ten stories are arranged in two halves. “Call” introduces characters whose ordinary lives are disrupted by magic or the supernatural. “Response” returns to some of them and shows what their earlier choices set in motion. The settings range from the American West to the sea to a simulated utopia. Across them, the book keeps returning to Black and queer lives, to the weight of history, and to the question of who controls the story of the past. Most of the stories first appeared in magazines such as FIYAH, Strange Horizons and Uncanny, and one, “The Lonesome Sea,” is new. The collection won the Crawford Award, which makes it one of the more notable recent short story collections in fantasy.

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Sad Grownups

By Amy Stuber

Sad Grownups is Amy Stuber's debut collection of seventeen short stories about adults who feel out of step with the lives they were expected to build. The settings range from a California desert suburb to a Missouri state park, a boys' summer camp and a prep-school fundraiser, and each carries a faint sense of ecological and economic strain. Stuber's characters are parents, teenagers, couples and the grieving, and the book treats their sadness as a reasonable response to circumstances rather than a flaw to be fixed. Humor and metafictional play keep the tone from turning bleak. Published by Stillhouse Press in 2024, it won the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, which makes it a strong pick among short story collections and award-winning books of contemporary American fiction.

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Heart Lamp

Selected Stories

By Banu Mushtaq , Deepa Bhasthi

Heart Lamp is a selection of twelve stories by the Kannada-language writer Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. The stories were first published between 1990 and 2023. They follow Muslim women, girls and their families in Karnataka, southern India, as they deal with marriage, property, money, motherhood, religious authority and neighbourhood gossip. Mushtaq is also a lawyer and activist. She handles these pressures with anger, irony and tenderness rather than lecturing. In 2025 the book became the first short story collection, and the first work translated from Kannada, to win the International Booker Prize. Readers looking for translated fiction or short story collections will find a close, dryly funny account of domestic power struggles. It also shows the solidarity that sometimes pushes back against them.

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The Canterbury Tales

By Geoffrey Chaucer , Jill Mann

Geoffrey Chaucer's unfinished late-medieval masterpiece is a storytelling contest set on a pilgrimage from Southwark to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Around thirty travellers from very different walks of life, among them a knight, a miller, a prioress, a pardoner and the Wife of Bath, entertain one another with tales. The tales include courtly romance, bawdy comedy, saints' legends, beast fable and sermon. Each speaker is shaped by a vivid portrait and by the quarrels that break out between stories. The result is both a survey of medieval literary forms and a lively picture of English society in the 1380s and 1390s. It is one of the classic books of English literature. This Penguin Classics edition presents the Middle English text with reader aids and notes by Jill Mann.

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

By Arthur Conan Doyle , Iain Pears , Ed Glinert

This Penguin Classics volume pairs the first two Sherlock Holmes story collections: the twelve cases of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and the Memoirs that follow, which include "Silver Blaze" and "The Final Problem." Dr. John Watson narrates. He takes readers from the rooms at Baker Street to country houses, City offices and London's seedier corners, where Holmes turns small observations into solutions. Each story stands alone, which is part of why these are among the most influential short story collections in crime writing. They are also some of the most approachable classic books for newcomers to Victorian fiction. For anyone exploring detective books, they show how the genre's habits of clue, deduction and reveal were set. Iain Pears's introduction and Ed Glinert's notes add useful context.