The Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collections of 2024
In a year packed with noteworthy debut novels, it can be easy to overlook a more eclectic type of debut: the short story collection. In these diverse, electrifying debut collections, you’ll encounter haunting allegorical ghosts, embattled ferocious women, gritty, bottom-feeding youths, and more unforgettable characters. These fresh voices of fiction offer new worlds—whether fantastical, absurd, or realistic—that are a treat to inhabit.—Skylar Miklus
Editor’s note: The book descriptions below were written by Skylar Miklus, Vivienne Germain, Marina Leigh, Willem Marx, Courtney DuChene, and Jalen Giovanni Jones.
Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall
Award-winning playwright Marshall offers feminist commentary, optimism, and humor in a collection of sharp, quirky, poignant short stories. Women! In! Peril! follows delightfully eclectic characters—including a failed ballerina, a sex bot, a lesbian with a mysteriously pregnant wife, and the last woman on Earth—as they grapple with womanhood and reclaim their power. From divorce to racial identity to coming-of-age narrative, Marshall’s collection embarks on twelve unique journeys, each one surprising and stunning.
Half-Lives by Lynn Schmeidler
Inventive, playful, and evocative, Half-Lives investigates women’s bodies and psyches in worlds that play by bizarre rules—or lack thereof. Schmeidler’s debut collection, which won the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, explores women’s autonomy, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, aging, and mental and physical health in unfamiliar circumstances with all-too-familiar resonance. The sixteen imaginative stories are witty, wise, and wonderfully brilliant.
The Goodbye Process by Mary Jones
Jones’ debut short story collection introduces a new, captivating voice to investigate the pains, wonders, and complexities of the ways we say goodbye. From funny to tragic, from haunting to heartwarming, Jones’ dynamic stories navigate ends of many kinds: relationships, innocence, past versions of ourselves. The Goodbye Process is not only about loss and grief, but also love and healing. It’s deeply human—and a remarkable read.
My First Book by Honor Levy
Levy’s creative, riveting debut illustrates the chaotic world of Generation Z, embracing its strange, web-sourced, digitally powered mayhem. My First Book reflects reality, sometimes in surreal ways. With experimental form and style, ambitious imagination, and brutal honesty, the short stories follow earnest, anxious young people whose formative years take place in a frenzied environment. Levy’s collection promises a fresh and fantastic read.
Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda
In a mesmerizing debut collection of speculative short fiction, Aguda offers twelve dark, strange, and playful stories set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria. Against a haunting and imaginative emotional and physical landscape, characters confront tradition, modernity, family, gender, myth, and magic. The stories brilliantly weave supernatural chills with everyday living. Unsettling and breathtaking, Ghostroots introduces Aguda as a talented new force in the literary world.
Sad Grownups by Amy Stuber
In smart, insightful short stories, average Americans search for connection, freedom, and joy in today’s dispiriting society. Stuber’s masterfully-crafted characters—from a college professor dying from cancer to a pair of high school graduates planning a robbery—find their way through adult life, seeking liberation from consumerism, the climate crisis, and gender roles. Beautifully melancholic and full of warmth and hope, Sad Grownups is a must-read collection.
Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad by Damilare Kuku
In this anti-romcom, Damilare Kuku writes twelve short stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, that detail various women, their relationships, and their experiences with men. Described as a “dynamic sociological satire,” by Bolu Babalola, this short story collection is a witty and humorous exploration of the exhaustive dating scene and attempts to find lasting love in the face of serial cheaters, mommy’s boys, abuse, and sexual naivety. Kuku doesn’t shy away from sex or promiscuity in this collection, but each story is layered and unique in its characterization and voice. This brilliant debut will have you laughing, crying, and blushing to the very last page.
Mouth by Puloma Ghosh
In this surreal debut collection of short stories, Puloma Ghosh conjures haunting tales of otherworldly creatures and spaces to explore themes of grief, loneliness, sex, and bodily autonomy. Mouth is a collection hungry with desire. Ghosh’s stories are urgent and her characters insatiable. Between the necrophiliac fantasies, the ghosts, and the all-consuming infatuations, these stories are written to unsettle; to crawl underneath your skin. Throughout this collection, you’ll continue to wonder how far Ghosh is willing to go.
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia
Loved and lauded, the stories in Lena Valencia’s debut collection take on contemporary and timeless subjects relating to womanhood–the #MeToo movement, the surge in female representation in cinema, the “hysterical” woman–and relentlessly turns them on their head. There’s an ineffable darkness when Holly’s younger sister goes missing and she feels relief at being “sisterless.” On the guided Glow Time Retreat, Pat finds self-actualization, not through yoga and meditation, but through a descent into the bowels of jealousy, competition, and the need for control. These are stories of revenge, violence, and horror that place women, not men, in powerful, destructive roles. Yet, for all the blood that’s spilled, all the psychological darkness that’s explored, there’s pathos, recognizable though unspoken, in the brutal, emotional honesty of these characters. Mystery Lights bends genres, inverts tropes, and ultimately reshapes what feminist literature looks like.
Electrodomésticos by Moira McCavana
Electrodomésticos…household appliances, those integral parts of domestic life. That is the world this collection conjures by subtly weaving memory, history, and the rippleless moments of everyday life into a portrait of the Spanish Basque Country in the decades after World War II. Drawing on family history (McCavana’s traces her lineage to Bilbao) and deeply sensory awareness of place, this collection captures the specific tension that inhabits the quiet after the storm. The installation of a television becomes a fraught affair; music triggers memories of war; and language itself becomes a political statement (to speak Basque or Spanish? That is the question). Small vignettes spill over into larger stories and slowly, Electrodomésticos gives form to the smoothed over scars of history.
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr.
Ruben Reyes Jr. blurs the past, present, and futures in this debut collection, where he plays with the question of what we might do if we wake up one day as someone (or something) we don’t recognize. For the Central American characters in this book, they are often forced to make choices in the face of injustice, and to find voice in the shadows of what aims to silence them. There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven explores themes of sexuality, violence, masculinity, the consequences of unchecked capitalism and technological advances. The stories of this sci fi collection will stay with you long after the last page.
Horse Show by J. Bowers
In thirteen short stories, J. Bowers details the ways horses have been used and abused throughout American history. Bowers’ writing is ridiculously smart and meticulous, but also lyrical and driven by the story itself. Horse Show forces a reader to examine the history of abuse and spectacle of horses, but it also shows how horses have come to be companions. Bowers shows us the best and the worst of the historical relationship between man and equine, and you don’t need to be a horse lover to thoroughly enjoy and become engrossed in this short collection.
A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo
Set in Nigeria, the stories in A Kind of Madness explore madness as an illness, but they also delve into the ways other feelings—desire, hunger, grief, shame, longing—too can bring about a type of madness. Okonkwo is interested in the relationships we hold closest to us, and why these relationships, or the spaces they exist in, are what drive us the maddest. These stories are about developing your own sense of identity in the face of cultural expectations, relationships, insecurities, and mental illness. The stories are deceptively short, demanding instead that you linger with them; that they be remembered.
The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq
The World With Its Mouth Open follows the lives of eleven people in Kashmir in the aftermath of war. Zahid Rafiq forces our eyes open and to bear witness to the real consequences of violence in communities where there is so much life. Rafiq refuses the facelessness that so often comes with news coverage and war, showing us the humanity behind the cameras. Through the haunting themes of violence, loss, displacement, and longing, Zahid Rafiq is also able to capture the profoundness of ordinary life, and this collection urges us toward beauty, laughter, and refuge in the face of darkness.
The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer
Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Man in the Banana Trees is a collection in the old, nineteenth century sense of the term. Here you’ll find the odd and the beautiful, the fantastic and the provocative, a true assemblage of curiosities bound together with sharp sentences and ferocious intelligence. Perhaps only the banal everydayness of the world is missing. There are ghost stories (an artist who just can’t give up on her dreams of grandeur), science fiction imaginings (ice cream obsessions run amok in the year 2036), and countless other experiments in genre and ideas. What holds these stories together is a core human striving to survive, to understand, and to be happy, even in the strangest of times.
Flowers from the Void by Gianni Washington
The creep factor is off the charts in this collection of thirteen strange, gothic, and otherworldly stories. But that hardly does justice to the depth of humanity buried in each tale–harbingers of death hang around to see what happens to their victims (will they escape the burning houses?), a young girl is bullied at school for not having a shadow until she befriends one that might love her a little too much, and a creature gets a little too infatuated with the humans living nearby. That’s a theme of this book, in which kernels of love and compassion repeatedly curdle into horrific realities that, nonetheless, bare the hallmarks of human affection. Flowers from the Void doesn’t revel in jump scares–no, it raises the horror genre up to a whole new level of unease by exploring genuine feeling.
Softie by Megan Howell
Megan Howell’s twisty, speculative, bold short stories arrive with a flourish and make their presence known. In one story, a young woman’s babysitting side-hustle goes sideways when the child reveals shape-shifting abilities; in another, an Afro-French girl obsesses over her lover’s earlobes. The titular short story, in which two teenage girls detangle the fear and shame of their unusual living situation, stands out for its grit and poignancy. Howell’s stories carry an absurdity reminiscent of Yoko Ogawa and an urgent voice entirely her own. Her odd, brash, “softie” female protagonists will stay with you long after the final story.
Island Rule by Katie M. Flynn
Katie M. Flynn probes into everyday idiosyncrasies, supernatural happenings, and near-future dystopias in this collection of interconnected short fiction. In one standout, “The King of South Phoenix,” reality TV contestants beg their audience for urban funding, a scenario that feels almost too close to real life for comfort. In others, Flynn shows off her talent for world-building, conjuring peculiar universes that still ring emotionally true. The stories are united by their strong roots in terroir and by Flynn’s daring to swing for the fences.
Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle
Bad Seed marks the long-awaited first translation into English for emerging Puerto Rican fiction writer Gabriel Carle. Their prose is red-hot, erotic, and immediate as they investigate an eclectic cast of young queer Puerto Ricans. Preoccupations with gender identity, economic inequality, and the threat of HIV/AIDS tie together these breathtakingly sensual, audaciously spunky, and tenderly crafted stories.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Following her stunning poetry collection Mother/land, Ananda Lima makes her fiction debut with this interconnected set of short stories centered around a Brazilian writer who sleeps with the devil at a party. After their encounter, Lima’s writer composes these chilling stories for the devil; along the way, the writer discloses her own biographical details and experiences with migration. Lima’s tales frequently turn surreal, as in the excellent “Antropófaga,” in which a hospital cleaner becomes addicted to eating Americans out of a vending machine. The layered narrative structure creates an atmospheric, eclectic, and gripping reading experience.
A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve
In A Small Apocalypse, queer characters weave in and out of haunting, surreal stories. A group of friends manage relationship drama and tell ghost stories on a trip outside of Jacksonville. A grandmother shows her granddaughter how to pickle—and forget—painful memories. A woman slowly transforms into a reptile, forcing her to leave her boyfriend and her West Philly home for the warmth of Florida. Characters appear in multiple stories, making some scenes feel truly haunted when someone returns from the dead.
The Only Sound Is the Wind by Pascha Sotolongo
Pascha Sotolongo’s debut collection The Only Sound Is the Wind is broken into two parts: “Sustain” and “Release.” The characters in the “Sustain” section wind up in situations where they feel balanced within their bizarre circumstance though—like an acrobat on a tight rope—that equilibrium can be tenuous. One character uses invisibility to spy on her enchanting neighbor. In another story, humans birth animals. While the characters in “Sustain” come to accept their situations, those in “Release” transform their lives in ways large and small. The result is a striking collection that relishes in the intersection between reality and imagination.
Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver
Neighbors and Other Stories is the almost lost and long-awaited debut from Diane Oliver. Oliver, who died at age 22 in 1966 from a motorcycle accident, writes presciently and intimately about the daily lives and anxieties of Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. The titular story exemplifies this as it follows a family the night before their young son desegregates a local school. Oliver’s stories are unyielding and carry a clear-eyed realism about the realities of race in America.
Perfect Little Angels by Vincent Anioke
In Perfect Little Angels, Vincent Anioke writes a beautifully tender collection that seamlessly flows into a larger narrative exploring masculinity, religion, and queerness. Largely set in Nigeria, confessions rewrite the truth when a son returns from abroad, while romance is turned dangerous when lovers develop a secret relationship. Through his recurring characters’ journeys, Anioke asks what happens when we can’t meet our own deeply held expectations.
How to Get Along Without Me by Kate Axelrod
Kate Axelrod’s writing throughout How to Get Along Without Me is unabashed and vicious in its humor. Exploring the dating lives of twentysomethings with wry, yet contemplative prose, Axelrod reveals a world that leaves us desperate for, but incapable of, intimate connections. These interwoven stories are modern, yet timeless, poignant, yet ruthless.
How to Capture Carbon by Cameron Walker
Award-winning author Cameron Walker writes a dreamy, enchanting debut collection that is at once spell-binding and somber. These stories confront the climate crisis in elegant prose that take understated leaps toward the magical. As readers are brought closer to the water’s edge, Walker dares us to look toward the depths of loss and love.
Vague Predictions and Prophecies By Daisuke Shen
Following their novella “Funeral,” co-authored by Vi Khi Nao, Daisuke Shen’s debut collection writes through the uncanny to explore humanity’s most secret desires. In one story, a long-distance couple employs clones of their partners, before starting to lose their memories. In the titular story, angels transform into humans and gain the capacity to know emotions. Through concise prose and dazzling, surrealist worlds, these stories question the very nature of human connection.
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper
In her debut collection, Maggie Cooper writes us an escape route. In The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, nine whip-smart stories contemplate worlds built by and for women. Through unsettling, haunting satire, Cooper dissects queerness, gender, and the patriarchy as she contemplates the bounds of womanhood.
Kindling by Kathleen Jennings
From the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway comes a debut collection of twelve fantastical fables. These stories contain many elements of traditional myths, like treacherous quests and magical transformations, but Jennings offers a welcome twist with the ease and nonchalance of her narration. Her characters – especially the kind but absentminded cryptozoologist in “Undine Love” – are vivid, off-the-wall, and sure to stick in your brain.
Diversity Quota by Ranjan Adiga
Adiga’s tales of migration, from Nepal to the United States and back, trouble the borders of the typical American immigrant narrative and question the structure of the short story itself. Adiga refuses simplistic explanations for human behavior at every turn, instead showcasing his characters in all their messy, self-contradictory glory. The standout story “The Diversity Committee” takes this unflinching lens to another level as a meeting between a Nepali professor and the dean of his university turns brutally uncomfortable. Ranjan Adiga’s singular voice, tightly wound prose stylings, and clarity of narrative focus all assert him as a rising author to watch.
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