7 Short Story Collections to Sink Your Teeth Into in 2015

Get in Trouble, by Kelly Link
Step into a bizarre world where robot dolls, mermaids, and mysterious beings inhabit a landscape that looks, disturbingly, a lot like our own. Link’s uncanny ability to meld the ordinary (theme parks, birthday parties, hotel conferences) with the surreal is what makes her nine stories deliciously eerie and darkly funny.

Lucky Alan and Other Stories, by Jonathan Lethem
This collection of nine stories showcases Lethem’s exquisite writing ability and multifaceted sense of humor. There are some work-of-art sentences in this collection that you’ll quote over and over again. Lethem’s characters, too, are unforgettable. They’re peculiar, vulnerable people mired in strange circumstances—a hapless critic of porn, a bystander who witnesses something surreal, a sentence-obsessed couple in a bookstore. Lethem’s stories all take on increasingly improbable and surreal turns, but underneath it all is a comment on the true oddities of everyday life.

There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter
There are moments in your life that can seem insignificant to the rest of world, but that change everything. This collection is about those moments. Set in Minneapolis, these ten intertwined short stories capture pivotal events in the lives of ordinary people. From drug addicts to doctors, suicidal comedians to honeymooners, Baxter’s masterful writing makes you so invested in his broken characters that you hunger to rescue them yourself.

Single, Carefree, Mellow, by Katherine Heiny
The 11 pitch-perfect stories in Single, Carefree, Mellow are about women who are anything but. Love in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and personal trainers is tough, and Heiny reveals this reality with wry, clever humor. These are tales of infidelity and intrigue, of secret crushes and secret hatreds, of self-loathing and selfishness, and of entertainingly bad behavior. They’re also stories that unapologetically reveal the inner lives of modern women and shouldn’t be missed.

One More Thing, by B.J. Novak
Yes, that B.J. Novak. The one who wrote, coproduced and costarred in TV’s The Office. In his debut collection of 64 short stories, Novak shows off his renowned dry, offbeat humor alongside a talent for storytelling and a sensitivity to matters of the human heart. There’s a dizzying range of tales here, from a hare who wants a rematch with the tortoise, to a translator updating The Great Gatsby into modern English. Every one of these inventive stories is a fast-paced glimpse into a comic’s imaginative mind.

The American Lover, by Rose Tremain
Love stories transcend time, place, and culture, which may be why Tremain’s short stories so successfully capture love in both modern and historical settings. Against the backdrop of the 60s, 19th-century Russia, or World War II, each story plumbs the depths of human emotion and digs up some shocking secrets. Our feelings for the people we love, and the people we don’t, are cruel, kind, and convoluted, but Tremain renders something beautiful out of that confusion.

Voices in the Night: Stories, by Steven Millhauser
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer comes a collection of sixteen magical new stories. Ostensibly about small-town life in upstate New York and New England, each one involves an element of the uncanny and the supernatural. Some are explicitly about fantasy and folk tales—one is a retelling of Rapunzel, another centers on Paul Bunyan, and another is about a Biblical character. The most haunting, however, are those that showcase Millhauser’s phenomenal talent for infusing the ordinary and familiar moments of life with the inexplicable and unearthly.
What’s your favorite short-story collection?