In the process of writing about my favourite short story collections I run the risk of writing an endless list, or forgetting crucial ones that have shaped my mind and writing, but here is a non-comprehensive list of the short story collections I’ve found something vital in.  

10th of December by George Saunders was introduced to me, like many, in my undergraduate degree. It was a really important book to get so early on in the process of becoming a writer: here was something weird and new that said writing did not have to be self-serious, or even beholden to realism. Another book that felt like drinking water straight from a spring: Zadie Smith's Grand Union. Each story is different, but this is what makes it such an amazing piece of work, each story an experiment in how a short story can be written. It’s a book I return to often for guidance and humility.

I adore good themed collections, and my favourites are ones which are greater than the sum of their parts: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado and Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke are both incredible, but Lauren Groff’s Florida is immaculate – no one can write quite like her. Each one of these books feels like they’re deepening one shade or mood rather than trying to give you an entire palate. 

Hemmingway and Carver don’t move me so much, at least not consistently, but I do love a lot of American collections: Self Help by Lorrie Moore, and Sixty Stories by Donald Barthleme or Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories will do the trick. Otessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World is like opening something fleshy with a box cutter and The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg is excellent. When people talk about Denis Johnson they tend to talk out his debut Jesus’ Son, and, while fantastic, I’m more partial to his matured sensibilities and writing in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. I like Ben Marcus’s weird, dissecting stories in Notes from the Fog – in the same breath I’ll mention Prodigals by Greg Jackson, which is one of my absolute favourite books about precocious, lost, brilliant characters trapped by their own precocious brilliance. Speaking of: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is one I read young and was very influenced by.

Closer to home: Fiona McFarlane’s The High Places (incredible), Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August (luminous), and Peter Carey’s Exotic Pleasures – really his collected stories, should be mandatory reading for all Australian short story writing wannabees. Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire is brilliant and (in my opinion) the most underrated book of 2021. 

Speaking of underrated: While the Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marías, Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing, Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories, The House Guest: And Other Stories by Amparo Dávila, or any short story by Beverly Farmer is worth your while.

I love a well-done interconnected collection, my favourites are Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, and Lot by Bryan Washington. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, while obviously well-known, is a masterpiece, and so bears mentioning. 

Some other fantastic collections I have yet to list: Cosmogony by Lucy Ives, The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O’Neill, An Account of the Decline of The Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jesse Greengrass. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, The Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen, Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and The Boat by Nam Le. Somehow all of these are debuts. 

Any collection by Gogol or Kafka or Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.

And to finish, collections I’ve read and loved this year: Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić, Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Paul Dalla Rosa’s An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life – which is brilliant.