Electric Literature is one of the only—if not the only—publications that puts together a best of the year list dedicated to short story collections, the commercial underdogs of the publishing industry and perhaps my most favorite literary form.
I love short stories for their efficiency and precision, for the way they contain an entire world in a mere few pages. Sometimes they are funny, enlightening, strange, or surprising. Often they are devastating. This year, it’s especially fitting that the EL staff and regular contributors selected Marie-Helene Bertino’s collection Exit Zero as our favorite collection of the year. We first published Bertino in Issue No. 3 of our weekly fiction series Recommended Reading, fourteen years ago. Recommended Reading recently published its 700th issue, adding to a completely free archive composed mostly of short stories. Bertino’s most recent novel Beautyland was voted EL’s best novel of 2024.
Bertino is an example of the many writers whom Electric Literature has invested in long term: Lydia Millet first appeared in our pages in 2014, Samanta Schweblin in 2012. The list below is wide-ranging, and includes relative newcomers, as well as masters of the genre, like Richard Bausch, Paul Theroux, Lynne Tillman, and Jonathan Lethem. The enormously influential Osamu Dazai, who lived from 1909 to 1948 is featured, as is the contemporary Tamil author Jeyamohan, translated into English for the first time. Wherever you dip in, a world awaits.
— Halimah Marcus, Executive Director, Electric Lit and Editor, Recommended Reading
Top 5 Short Story Collections of the Year
Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino
Many great writers are recognizable, even without a byline, at the line level—in the cadence of their sentences, the structure of their plots, the voice of their characters. Marie-Helene Bertino’s work is unmistakable for its intelligent charm and startling originality. A unicorn appears in a backyard in New Jersey. An escaped tiger visits a department store. A vampire navigates eternal middle age. In one particularly endearing story published in Recommended Reading, a 70-year-old woman spends her first day post divorce with a stolen painting of Cher. In Exit Zero, Electric Literature’s favorite collection of the year, Bertino asks her readers to suspend their disbelief and step into a brighter, if sideways, world. We suggest you do.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Readers of Torrey Peters know her for her distinct voice, and for writing that excavates the depths of trans identity and longing. In her newest book, Stag Dance—comprised of three short stories and a novella—Peters’s voice careens towards both intimacy and cruelty: “Infect Your Friends and Love Ones” tracks a virus released by a group of trans women; in “Stag Dance,” a lumberjack dismantles and then reconstructs his gender through the duration of an isolated winter in the wilderness. Equal parts vulnerable and remarkably weird, Peters transcends the binaries of language to focus on the underlying feelings that inform identity, shame, and connection—themes she discusses in her interview with EL.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund
In her introduction for “The Gap Year,” a story from Are You Happy? published in Recommended Reading, Kristen Arnett discusses a phenomenon she credits with attracting readers to Lori Ostlund’s work. In book reviews, critics unintentionally circle the same phenomenon, describing Ostlund’s stories as worlds “not comfortable to inhabit,” “where devastation stands at attention” and “happiness is elusive.” In “The Gap Year,” a couple navigates the death of a child. It’s a story about grief—it is, absolutely, yes, devastating, not quite comfortable, suffused with sadness. And yet, the reader can’t—does not want—to turn away. This is, of course, the Ostlund effect, and not only can it be found in every story of the collection, it’s also on display in EL’s interview with the author.
Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin
Samanta Schweblin’s work can be accurately described as equal parts uncanny and hyperreal. In Good and Evil and Other Stories, Schweblin’s characters grapple with the very real terror of occupying a human—and therefore inherently destructible—body. In one story, a child swallows a battery and the tracheotomy that follows punctures the connection between father and son. A woman drowns herself only to discover that suicide is not an escape from life. A writer flees her husband’s illness but finds herself stymied by writer’s block in a world without him. All of Schweblin’s stories, like all of her fiction, irradiate our deepest, slipperiest fears without once losing purchase in the “real world.”
An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park
In his recent 23 Questions Interview with Electric Literature, Ed Park shared his penchant for surrealism and unlikely sources of narrative energy. His newest short story collection reflects these preferences: In the title story, one man’s isolation compounds an apocalyptic, pandemic-struck New York City; another imagines a university course on aphorism as an allegory for fragmented connections. Park approaches the mundanity of contemporary life with humor, absurdity, speculation, and nods to his genre influences.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Short Story Collections
Atavists by Lydia Millet
If there’s one thing that characterizes Lydia Millet’s work, it’s her unwillingness to look away, to return to business-as-usual in a continually disturbed (and disturbing) world. In “Therapist,” published earlier this year in Recommended Reading, the titular character is plagued by the neuroses, climate concerns, and maladaptive coping mechanisms of her patients, unable to shrug off a mounting sense of disquiet. Millet’s attention to contradiction, denial, and palliative responses makes Atavists a deeply human exploration of our most base impulses, and the role they play in shaping our surroundings.
Sex of the Midwest by Robyn Ryle
Robyn Ryle is a self-described “lover of small towns,” but even if you didn’t know this about her, you would feel it in her prose. All of the stories in Sex of the Midwest orbit a mysterious survey—“Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town”—sent to the inhabitants of Lanier, Indiana. The characters’ reactions to said survey, though varied, consistently push against any assumptions you might have about small towns. In one bracingly funny story published in Recommended Reading, small town denizen Loretta steadfastly ignores “the stupid sex survey” and confronts instead the encroachment of the outside world into her hometown, beginning with the wiener vendor. She isn’t interested in the survey, isn’t interested in change, isn’t interested in the hot dog guy’s mystery meat. “There were no hot dog carts when she was growing up and there would be none now.”
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou
In Where Are You Really From, Elaine Hsieh Chou takes a familiar, reductive phrase and turns it on its head, returning the question to the reader with a philosophical bent. Chou’s characters encounter doppelgangers, covet (and plot to cook) their neighbors, and transact with the currency of identity. She is interested in the conflict and jealousy that arises in dyadic relationships, infusing her stories with honesty, aspiration, and what it really means to grow up and assume responsibility for one’s place in the world.
Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore
These eleven stories consider the reality of living, connecting, and searching for home as a Black American in the Southern United States. In conversation with Rickey Fayne, author Carrie R. Moore spoke of her struggle to convey multiple ways of being, and her approach to imbuing each character with a particular emotion. The result is a series of fully-populated stories: a sensory landscape that captures the conflicted intimacies of place, and attends to both the historical ley lines and resilience that accompany being Black in the South.
Extinction Capital of the World by Mariah Rigg
Mariah Rigg’s debut collection is an ode to the legacy and impact of place. Born and raised in Hawai’i, Rigg brings her own personal and ecological knowledge to these stories, deconstructing the all-too familiar history of destructive tourism, displacement, and imperialism. These stories treat Hawai’i as a living entity of its own, with care and intense feeling for the many species and communities under threat, and recognition for the challenges that come with adapting and forging a path into the future.
No Ones Knows by Osamu Dazai
Osamu Dazai’s work is bleak—there’s just no other word for it. His protagonists are embedded in worlds characterized by despair and alienation, possessed of perspectives that might generously be called pessimistic. The narrators in No One Knows are self-pitying and self-absorbed. “Chiyojo,” featured in Recommended Reading, begins with a declaration embedded in a monologue: “I’m a stupid person. Genuinely stupid.” And yet, like Dazai’s prose itself, his characters are also decidedly compelling, even charming.
Stories of the True by Jeyamohan
Translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar 35 years after it was written, Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True feels as poignant and prescient as ever; these twelve stories excavate the class, caste, religious, and gender issues that characterize Indian life, with a resounding, hopeful voice. “The Meal Tally,” featured in Recommended Reading, follows a young man who finds literal and spiritual nourishment with a man named Kethel Sahib, whom the boy calls a djinn—a resourceful spirit—for his unbidden kindness. This encounter, amongst many others in the book, reveals an undercurrent of idealism set against the fraught context of Indian society, and speaks to the transfigurational power of care and connection.
God-Disease by an chang joon
Selected as the winner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction by Manuel Muńoz, an chang joon’s God-Disease is a haunting collection that turns darkness into an irresistible indulgence. Through five stories set in an otherworldly Korea, joon’s debut contemplates identity, mortality, and denial with a deftness both rare and shocking. Best described as “Southern Korean Gothic,” God-Disease unnerves, rattles, and curses characters and readers alike. Challenging and unsentimental, joon’s stories enlighten us by probing the sharpest horrors of being alive.
Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Body horror is all the rage in 2025, but rarely is it juxtaposed so elegantly with humor, surrealism, and the buoyant force of faith. Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s characters are on the hunt for meaning amidst uncanny forces: One character grows a tail with a mind of its own; another reckons with a recent cancellation at a haunted punk show. These stories remind us that the body is a stage for our most gruesome psychic conflicts, and the systems of belief we develop to surmount them.
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş
Ayşegül Savaş is a master of displaying the intricacies and follies of human connection. Like her 2024 novel, The Anthropologists, which followed a couple building a new home together in a country far from their families, Long Distance reckons with the effects of chosen separation. Across a series of relationships fractured by space, characters must consolidate a complex network of loss alongside the igniting pursuit of new life.
A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem
The newest collection from literary giant Jonathan Lethem offers seven newly published pieces, and several more short fiction triumphs from the past three decades of his career. Lethem consistently subverts genre, distorts the real, and elevates the everyday. His unique style and speculative play on themes of mortality, relationships, and technology makes this one of the most surprising collections of the year.
Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee
Demree McGhee’s debut, Sympathy for Wild Girls, reconsiders the meaning of girlhood for Black and queer women and girls. These fifteen stories explore intimacy, belonging, and ferality as a response to internal and societal subjugation. For the women in McGhee’s stories, wildness is a tool to reshape a world that has fought to flatten them. With a strong, poetic voice—attuned to the potential for magic in a world ruled by realism—Sympathy for Wild Girls contends with yearning, asymmetrical opportunity, and a premonition-turned-actual apocalypse.
The Vanishing Point: Stories by Paul Theroux
In his introduction to Paul Theroux’s “First Love,” published in Recommended Reading, Ryan Murdock describes Theroux’s archetypal character as “usually male, often a writer—trying to solve a problem.” One could go further to say that in The Vanishing Point, Theroux is less concerned with the solution than with the circumstances that bring a character up against a problem in the first place. “First Love,” explores the relationship between an estranged grandfather and his eleven-year-old grandson, Ben, upon whom he projects his own experiences, “reminded of the habitual evasions of my younger self.” We come to understand the distance from his son and daughter-in-law through omission, through what the narrator does not seem to realize about himself. This is Theroux’s written gift: The careful placement of empathy, the ability to lift the blinders of ego, and the careful detailing of how life emerges in response to love.
The Fate of Others by Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch is concerned with the most cruel and remarkable moments that define us. Recently featured in Recommended Reading, Bausch’s short story “Blue” follows a painter who witnesses a horrific car accident and lives with a mosaic, image-driven recollection of the event: A web of burst capillaries are described as “one night-dark shade of blue, the skin itself a purplish midnight blue.” The narrator resumes his day with an overwhelming sense of displacement; “It’s a warm, sunny morning on Earth,” but the peace of his former reality is irrevocably fragmented. Bausch’s ability to marry the truth of unprecedented loss with mundanity is what makes him one of the greatest contemporary fiction writers, and what makes The Fate of Others one of the most notable collections of 2025.
Thrilled to Death by Lynne Tillman
A collection of selected stories from eminent novelist and essayist Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death captures Tillman’s serrated edge and eye for mundane discomfort. The tonal and formal variation in Thrilled to Death is astonishing: Tillman revives and inhabits old Hollywood stars (Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Sal Mineo); unwinds the self into menu courses; deconstructs her identity as merely a pen name. With Postmodern inventiveness, Tillman’s collection teems with wit, prescient social critique, and a voice that abstracts itself.
Whites by Mark Doten
Whites offers both an ethnography and evisceration of white hegemony: from white supremacist school shooters and Q-anon conspirators, to white liberals in denial about the violence they perpetuate. In the title story, a seemingly beneficent nonprofit manager is publicly skewered when a video surfaces of her accusing a Black teenager of stealing her iPad; in another, a chronically online white supremacist teen plots a school shooting, only to die by his own hand (by literally slipping on a banana peel). Doten’s searing critique is sharpened by humor, internet fluency, and self-awareness, which he discusses in a recent interview with EL. He positions whiteness as a condition of obliterative self-pity, one that cannot be expunged through efforts to be labeled as “one of the good ones.”
My Prisoner and Other Stories by Tyler McAndrew
My Prisoner and Other Stories takes a personal interest in the inhabitants of late stage capitalism and the systems in place to perpetuate it. In one story, a girl sees a prisoner’s arm waving from a cell, and attempts to piece together his life; in another, a man writes letters to his cousin, who is incarcerated for murdering several of their family members. The Rust Belt, where many of the stories are set, is the perfect setting to unravel the isolation, carceral superstructures, and systems of violence in our country. With empathy, tenderness, and specificity, McAndrews not only excavates a framework of systemic adversity, but the complicated individuals who inhabit it.
Hurricane Envy by Sara Jaffe
Sara Jaffe’s sophomore work hints at some of the writer’s perennial preoccupations—if one looks closely, for example, music and musicians permeate more than one story. The narrator of “My Sleep,” published in Recommended Reading, is a guitarist struggling to stay awake long enough to make it through band practice, and through the minutiae of her life. Ada, the main character of “Ether” is haunted by a song she has only heard once; the titular Arthur of “Arthur Why” is a musician obsessed with gamelan; Helen from “Earth to You” is transfixed by a musician she can hear but not see. Sara Jaffe has said she wanted to write a collection that focused less on theme and more on a cohesive aesthetic. She succeeded; Hurricane Envy reads like a post-punk mixtape.
Crawl by Max Delsohn
In this debut collection from Max Delsohn, a series of young trans characters traverse the superficially liberal, discreetly hostile landscape of 2010s Seattle. Delsohn’s characters come of age for the first (or second) time and navigate newfound desires and responsibilities, all while interfacing with a complex system of structural and interpersonal aspersions. A young trans man is asked an invasive question by a work superior; a comedian—drawn from Delsohn’s own comedy ventures—parses the unexpected effects of starting T. Unabashedly funny, honest, and nuanced, Crawl depicts a multitude of trans experiences with startling authenticity.
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus
Guatemalan Rhapsody considers the duality of a place marked by both beauty and suffering. Jared Lemus writes to capture the complicated reality of his ancestral home, consolidating the warmth and community of his childhood visits to the villages of his parents, with the violence and systemic oppression found in the cities. Lemus’s characters are diverse, coming from different social sects, education backgrounds, and belief systems. It is through these closely-inhabited perspectives that we come to see the intense beauty—and deep scars of imperial subjugation and Indigenous deracination—that characterize Lemus’s Guatemala.
The post Electric Lit’s Best Short Story Collections of 2025 appeared first on Electric Literature.
