Electric Lit’s Best Short Story Collections of 2024
It may come as no surprise that we absolutely love a good short story. When you sit down with an all-consuming piece of writing, whirl through it from beginning to end in one sitting, and come out the other side transformed in only a few pages—that experience is something like magic.
Another experience that’s something like magic? Discovering a new writer you can’t wait to follow throughout their career. Combine both of those feelings, and you get this year’s best short story collections: every—yes, every—short story collection on our top five list this year was a debut, as were several of our honorable mentions. How lucky for all of us, because it means talented, exciting writers are entering the scene, and we can look forward to following them throughout the years. These books are master classes in the art of the short story, full of unputdownable writing that you won’t easily forget. We hope you love them as much as we did.
The books included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 short story collections of 2024, followed by the best short story collections of the year.
The Top 5 Short Story Collections of the Year:
Green Frog by Gina Chung
This masterfully inventive collection weaves literary fiction, Korean folklore, and science fiction elements into deeply revelatory narratives that reframe how readers contemplate the human condition. Through explorations of Korean American womanhood, transformation, fate, and legacy, Gina Chung proves in this debut her mastery over thoughtful precision. Equal parts entertaining and emotionally riveting, these stories will stay with you long after you’ve read them. Find “Presence,” one of the brilliant stories from the collection, published in Recommended Reading.
Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda
In the first story of Ghostroots, a woman wonders if she’s destined to perpetuate the same evils as her deceased grandmother, with whom she shares an uncanny resemblance. Setting the rest of the collection in motion, Aguda’s stories ask: are we fated to the violence passed down from our ancestors? Or is freedom from our generational ties possible? Through elegant prose that threads together the strange, the supernatural, and the ordinary, each story finds new ways to haunt you long after you’ve read them.
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia
Through explorations of the supernatural and the mundane, Lena Valencia’s debut collection wrestles with the unsettling horrors of womanhood. As haunting as they are enlightening, these stories interrogate deception, self-deception, and existential dread against the backdrop of the Southwestern desert. Valencia’s tales exhibit subversion at its finest. Find our interview with the One Story managing editor about her collection here, as well as a story from the collection published in Recommended Reading.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
This electrifying collection of interconnected stories opens on a young Brazilian writer who meets and sleeps with the Devil at a Halloween party. After their encounter, the writer keeps in touch with the Devil and writes him a series of haunted stories—the very same stories that make up the remaining pages of Craft. When unfolded, the layers of this frame narrative form an innovative, eclectic patchwork. Lima’s prose is at once claustrophobic and yet startlingly intimate, marking her impressive fiction debut.
Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall
Traversing through stories both speculative and realistic, Marshall’s debut collection interrogates queerness, Asian and Asian American identity, and womanhood through the lives of twelve women. Packed with wry humor and sharp social commentary, Marshall’s stories prove ferocious. Check out our interview with the author, where she discusses defying societal norms through Women! In! Peril!
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Short Story Collections
Beautiful Days: Stories by Zach Williams
This daring debut book ventures to lift the folds of reality and probe the depths of the surreal, the menacing, and the absurd. The understated precision of Zach Williams’ prose allows these stories to exist in a captivating liminal realm, hovering between a dream and a nightmare.
Bugsy & Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin
This collection of six longer stories examines themes of taboo, neurodiversity, and sexuality with a vibrant pen. Frumkin’s ability to stare directly at the strange and the subversive creates a whirlwind, mesmerizing reading journey into these surreal new worlds.
Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian
This genre-defying kaleidoscope of a book follows best friends Val and Tal—and the women that orbit around them—-following a rattling incident at a Halloween party. Haroutunian’s witty, pulsating prose draws the reader into this beautifully rendered world.
Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams
Joy Williams probes the depths of the surreal and the fleeting in this collection of ninety-nine bite-sized stories. Her fiction moves in associative, ungovernable leaps between topics as disparate as religion, psychoanalysis, art, and literature. Williams draws from her background as the daughter of a minister to craft the overarching narrative that corrals these fragments: the tale of Azrael, an angel who is ambivalent about his job collecting souls. Her prose is sparse, clear-eyed, and sharply observant, inviting the reader to immerse themselves in her fantastical micro-worlds.
Diversity Quota by Ranjan Adiga
Ranjan Adiga constructs unique narratives centered around the Nepali diaspora and characters who struggle toward upward mobility. Adiga blurs the line of the traditional immigrant narrative, questioning assumptions around race, class, and gender. His tightly focused style and expert plotting make each short story a treat to receive, even when immersed in uncomfortable themes.
I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López
The stories in Annell López’s debut collection offer a rare sensitivity. While confronting the hard truths of Dominican immigrant life in Ironbound, Newark, López’s prose is simultaneously delicate and methodical. Through seventeen stories, López’s honesty inspires resilience in an unforgiving world.
A Kind of Madness by Uché Okonkwo
Okonkwo’s debut book showcases some of the best qualities of short fiction: immersive world-building, taut suspense, and endings that leave you questioning. Her stories pay close attention to the concerns of relationships of women and girls in modern-day Nigeria. The sparse but unflinching prose bears witness to Okonkwo’s masterful blending of African and western literary sensibilities. Her stories are tense from beginning to end, full of turmoil, and always deeply human.
Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State edited by Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gündoğdu
Republished in 2024 by Deep Vellum, Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State imagines a freer future for Kurds, one that sees independence as a possibility by 2046 — a century after Kurds last had independence through the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. Exploring subjects such as eco-activism, drone warfare, and retroactive social justice, this anthology of stories writes against the boundaries of what’s possible.
Mouth by Puloma Ghosh
In her debut collection, Puloma Ghosh blurs the line between the real and the absurd to explore our most fanged and aching desires. Through contemplations on sexuality, the body, isolation, and longing, Ghosh’s stories blend genre and literary fiction in eleven eerie, yet elegant stories.
Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver
Diane Oliver, the author of Neighbors and Other Stories, died in 1966 at the age of 22. With the posthumous release of her collection, these stories explore race and racism in the mid twentieth century. Intimate, precise, and chilling, her stories prove timeless.
Ninetails: Nine Tales by Sally Wen Mao
Sally Wen Mao’s fierce collection reimagines the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore. With vibrant, lyrical prose, Ninetails inspires hope as its characters search for truth and belonging in a world so determined to be difficult.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Todd Portnowitz
Since Lahiri’s 2015 commitment to only writing in Italian, her short fiction has taken on a fresh, clear-eyed mode when translated into English. This collection is no different, circling its lens around Italian characters—often interlopers or migrants—who observe the world from a cool distance. These vignettes drip with delicacy and tension, an impressive display of Lahiri’s signature style.
Sad Grownups by Amy Stuber
In her debut collection, Amy Stuber writes toward hope in a world intent on taking it away. Confronting American consumerism, narrow versions of acceptability, and the worsening climate crisis, Stuber’s writing exhibits sensitivity, urgency, and care. With stories full of clarity and hilarity, the stories in Sad Grownups showcase the true strength of the short story form.
Sluts: Anthology edited by Michelle Tea
Edited by Michelle Tea, Sluts: Anthology is a multi-authored collection celebrating queer pleasure and connection. The anthology explores what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, with cathartic entries from writers Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Brontez Purnell, and many more.
Softie by Megan Howell
These striking, spunky, unforgettable short stories center around women and girls on the cusp of change, often just an arm’s reach away from some kind of freedom. Megan Howell has an unrelenting voice and constructs taut narratives that wind both reader and characters into a spiral of worry. Her debut collection is sure to both dazzle and haunt.
Some Soul to Keep: A Short Story Collection by J. California Cooper
The reissue of this little-known classic by J. California Cooper has been eagerly anticipated by her devotees since her passing in 2014. Cooper’s prose stylings are most often compared to other authors from the Black literary folk tradition like Zora Neale Hurston, but the tender closeness of her narration is uniquely Cooper. These five “long-short stories,” as Cooper calls them, pay intimate attention to the concerns of Black women in rural areas, especially their familial, romantic, and community ties.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
The queen of short horror returns with her third story collection to be translated into English, giving us a return to her usual ghostly themes but with plenty of new tricks up her sleeve. Here, Enríquez shows off her knack for rendering body horror, her affinity for neo-noir aesthetics, and her empathy for the tragedies of the mundane.
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories by Ruben Reyes Jr.
This slick, stylish debut traces a thread from El Salvador to the United States, interrogating the familial and migratory challenges of Salvadoran diaspora members. Reyes’s observant eye is piercing and unrelenting as he unfolds these poignant, sobering stories.
There Will Never Be Another Night Like This by John Salter
The protagonists of these stories are frequently spiraling out of control or breaking their own hearts, and always rendered in vibrant technicolor. John Salter has mastered the art of giving the reader just enough information and then upending his own carefully constructed world with a devastating revelation. The resulting collection has a fitful, roiling momentum that does not let up until the final page. Salter has a knack for realistic dialogue and a sharp eye for the tragedies of the everyday.
Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
These fascinating, technology-soaked stories take readers to outer space, unrecognizable futures, and brand-new realms. Chung excavates the loneliness and grief at the heart of each imagined utopia with her singular narrative voice and astounding imagination.
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