Short stories are perfect for holidays, you can pick them up, put them down. Perfect snack sized reading for when reading may not be your main priority! Grab a story at the pool, read another at the beach and save one for bedtime and still feel like you got plenty of reading done during your holiday.
That’s why today we’re putting together a collection of newly released short story collections that are either newly released or available for pre-order and out over the summer, and these ten books should be plenty to see you through the summer!
Everything Inside: Stories
27th August, 2019
In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.
Let’s Tell This Story Properly
30th April, 2019
How far does one have to travel to find home elsewhere? The stories in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s collection attempt to measure that distance. Centered around the lives of Ugandans in Britain, Let’s Tell This Story Properly features characters both hyper-visible and unseen―they take on jobs at airport security, care for the elderly, and work in hospitals, while remaining excluded from white, British life. As they try to find their place, they drift from a home that feels further and further away. In an ambitious collection by the critically acclaimed author of Kintu, Let’s Tell This Story Properly explores what happens to those who leave.
Send More Tourists, The Last Ones Were Delicious
1st June, 2019
With birth, death, contemplation, and close calls, Send More Tourists… the Last Ones Were Delicious explores how we respond to the weight of social expectations. From the hidden pressures of wall paint and tarot card predictions, to the burden of phone numbers and the dismembering of saints, Waddleton takes us on a surrealist road trip through the missteps of her vivid characters with honesty and compassion. These are stories of survival. Unafraid, dreamy, and downright weird, these stories cross boundaries of geography, gender, and generation with an eye to the transient nature of human life
Meteorites
June 4th, 2019
A young man takes his father to Hawaii, even though he’s been dead for months. An organ player won’t let her newly amputated arm stand in the way of Sunday duties. A grad student decides to take the fate of a homeless man into his own hands. A couple of criminals, new to rural living, find their idyllic life in jeopardy when nature strikes back. A stepdaughter moves in, a brother goes missing, and twins fall in love with the same girl. In Meteorites, Julie Paul’s third collection of short fiction, characters are taken by surprise and must react and recover from what’s entered their lives unbidden. Ghosts, giant animals, artists, imposters—you’ll meet them here in these captivating stories of family dynamics and frailty, loss and atonement, faith and redemption.
Meet Cute
May 21st, 2019
Whether or not you believe in fate, or luck, or love at first sight, every romance has to start somewhere. Now readers can indulge in their love of meet-cute moments with a YA short story collection from some of today’s most popular YA authors. A diverse cast of characters and situations means that this collection has something for every reader looking for feel-good fun.
Thirteen Months of Sunrise
21st March, 2019
n this powerful, debut collection, Rania Mamoun expertly blends the real and imagined to create a rich, complex and moving portrait of contemporary Sudan. From painful encounters with loved ones to unexpected new friendships, Mamoun illuminates the breadth of human experience and explores, with humour and compassion, the alienation, isolation and estrangement that is urban life.
Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.
New Suns
12th March, 2019
New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color showcases emerging and seasoned writers of many races telling stories filled with shocking delights, powerful visions of the familiar made strange. Between this book’s covers burn tales of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their indefinable overlappings. These are authors aware of our many possible pasts and futures, authors freed of stereotypes and clichés, ready to dazzle you with their daring genius.
Instructions for a Funeral
5th March, 2019
Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an “established master of the form.” (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral―featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and VICE―finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man’s funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia.
Color Outside the Lines
12th November, 2019
This modern, groundbreaking YA anthology explores the complexity and beauty of interracial and LGBTQ+ relationships where differences are front and center.
When people ask me what this anthology is about, I’m often tempted to give them the complicated answer: it’s about race, and about how being different from the person you love can matter but how it can also not matter, and it’s about Chinese pirate ghosts, black girl vigilantes, colonial India, a flower festival, a garden of poisons, and so, so much else. Honestly, though? I think the answer’s much simpler than that. Color outside the Lines is a collection of stories about young, fierce, brilliantly hopeful people in love.
Look How Happy I’m Making You
19th March, 2019
The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or–having recently given birth–are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about what having a baby looks like.
One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another woman nervous about her biological clock “forgets” to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother’s Day contend with their losses and what it would mean to have a child.
Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, Look How Happy I’m Making You offers the rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women’s most intimate choices.
We hope you find some good suggestions there and we’ll be back with more recommendations lists soon. If you want to ensure you never miss any of these, subscribe now.
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