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Reading List · Short StoriesThe Best Short Story Writers to Read
Some writers are known above all for the short story: a form that can be read in one sitting but asks for precision in every sentence. The writers here shaped what a story can do, from Poe’s single effect and Maupassant’s twist ending to Chekhov’s open conclusions, Munro’s decades compressed into thirty pages and Saunders’s satire. Many also wrote novels, but their reputations rest mainly on short fiction.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Edgar Allan Poe (born 1809) to Mariana Enríquez (born 1973). It mixes classic and living writers, and writers in English with those read in translation from French, Russian and Spanish. For each there is a suggested collection to start with, and often a second one.
Twelve Short Story writers, and where to start with each
Edgar Allan Poe
1809–1849 · Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Poe wrote tales of terror, guilt and obsession, often narrated by people who insist they are sane. Stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ turn on murder, burial, decay and a mind turning against itself. He also wrote poetry, including ‘The Raven’, and criticism.
His three tales featuring the Paris detective C. Auguste Dupin, beginning with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), are widely seen as the starting point of modern detective fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle asked where the detective story was ‘until Poe breathed the breath of life into it’.
Read Poe if you want the origins of the horror tale and the detective story in one writer.
Start with Tales (1845). The twelve-story collection selected by Evert Duyckinck for Wiley and Putnam, including ‘The Gold-Bug’, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and all three Dupin detective stories. Or Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839). Poe’s first story collection, published in two volumes, gathering his early tales of horror and satire.
All Edgar Allan Poe books →Guy de Maupassant
1850–1893 · Normandy, France
Maupassant wrote around 300 short stories, most of them brief, plainly told and ending on a twist or a hard truth. His subjects are Parisian clerks, Norman peasants, prostitutes, soldiers and the provincial middle class, and the money, vanity and hypocrisy that shape their lives. ‘The Necklace’ (1884) is his best-known story.
Gustave Flaubert was his mentor and guided his early writing. ‘Boule de Suif’, set during the Franco-Prussian War, appeared in 1880 in Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of Naturalist stories about that war. His economy and twist endings shaped the short story in France and well beyond it.
Read Maupassant if you like short, sharp stories with an ironic sting at the end.
Start with A Parisian Affair and Other Stories (2004). A Penguin Classics selection of thirty-three stories, including ‘Boule de Suif’ and ‘The Necklace’, translated by Siân Miles.
Anton Chekhov
1860–1904 · Taganrog, Russia
Chekhov wrote many stories about ordinary Russians: doctors, clerks, landowners, peasants, unhappy couples. He avoided big plots and neat morals, ending many stories at a moment of quiet realisation rather than resolution. ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899), about an affair begun on holiday in Yalta, is a common entry point.
He trained and worked as a physician while writing, and won the Pushkin Prize in 1888 for the collection At Dusk. Constance Garnett’s translations first won him a wide English-language readership. His open endings and attention to small details shaped much later short fiction.
Read Chekhov if you like quiet stories about ordinary lives that end on an unresolved note.
Start with Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (2000). Thirty stories translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, including ‘The Huntsman’, ‘A Boring Story’, ‘The Student’ and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.
All Anton Chekhov books →Katherine Mansfield
1888–1923 · Wellington, New Zealand
Mansfield was a New Zealand-born modernist known almost entirely for her short stories. Her work follows small moments of perception, class awkwardness and family life, often from inside a character’s head. Several of her best stories, including ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, draw on her childhood in Wellington.
She published three collections in her lifetime: In a German Pension (1911), Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). She was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917 and died in France in 1923, aged 34.
Read Mansfield if you want modernist stories built from small, closely observed moments.
Start with The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). Fifteen stories, including ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Garden Party’, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and ‘Miss Brill’. Or Bliss and Other Stories (1920). Her second collection, which includes ‘Prelude’, a long story about a family’s move to a new house in New Zealand.
All Katherine Mansfield books →Jorge Luis Borges
1899–1986 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Borges wrote short, dense fictions that read like puzzles, essays or reviews of books that do not exist. Labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, dreams, doubles and invented books by invented authors recur throughout. His reputation rests above all on two collections, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949).
He was appointed director of Argentina’s National Library in 1955, by which time he was losing his sight. He shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961, and the English anthology Labyrinths appeared in 1962. He received the Cervantes Prize for 1979.
Read Borges if you like short fiction built around ideas, paradoxes and infinite libraries.
Start with Ficciones (1944). Stories including ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, built around labyrinths, libraries and literary games; available in several English translations. Or The Aleph (1949). His second major collection, whose title story describes a point in a Buenos Aires cellar that contains every other point in the universe.
All Jorge Luis Borges books →Shirley Jackson
1916–1965 · San Francisco, California, USA
Jackson wrote about the menace beneath ordinary American life: small towns, suburban houses, families and neighbours who turn out to be cruel or strange. Her stories move between domestic comedy and dread, often without a clear supernatural element. She is also known for the novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962).
‘The Lottery’, published in The New Yorker in June 1948, drew more than 300 letters, many from angry readers. Several collections of her uncollected stories have appeared since her death, including Let Me Tell You (2015).
Read Jackson if you like quiet domestic stories that slowly turn sinister.
Start with The Lottery and Other Stories (1949). Her only story collection published in her lifetime, including ‘The Lottery’, about a village ritual held every June.
All Shirley Jackson books →Flannery O’Connor
1925–1964 · Savannah, Georgia, USA
O’Connor wrote Southern Gothic stories set in rural Georgia, full of violence, grotesque characters and dark comedy. A devout Catholic, she was preoccupied with grace, morality and pride, and her characters often meet a sudden, brutal moment of revelation. She also wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960).
She died of lupus in 1964, aged 39. A second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, followed in 1965, and The Complete Stories won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction.
Read O’Connor if you can take dark comedy, violence and questions of faith in the same story.
Start with A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Ten stories, including the title story, ‘Good Country People’ and ‘The Displaced Person’. Or Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Her second collection, published the year after her death.
All Flannery O’Connor books →Alice Munro
1931–2024 · Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Munro wrote long, layered stories that cover years or decades in a few dozen pages, moving back and forth in time. Most are set in small towns in Huron County, south-western Ontario, and follow women through marriage, affairs, ambition and memory. The Swedish Academy called her a ‘master of the contemporary short story’ when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013.
She also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. In July 2024, after her death, her daughter Andrea Skinner wrote that Munro’s second husband had sexually abused her as a child and that Munro stayed with him, which has led many readers to reassess her life and work.
Read Munro if you want stories with the scope and depth of a novel.
Start with Runaway (2004). Eight stories, including three linked stories about a woman named Juliet, which Pedro Almodóvar adapted as the film Julieta; winner of the Giller Prize. Or Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). Her first collection, which won the Governor General’s Award.
All Alice Munro books →Raymond Carver
1938–1988 · Clatskanie, Oregon, USA
Carver wrote spare stories about working-class Americans: unemployed husbands, waitresses, drinkers, couples running out of things to say. His style is often called minimalist, a label he reportedly rejected, or ‘dirty realism’. Much of the pared-down effect of his early work came from heavy cuts by his editor, Gordon Lish.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) made his name; Beginners (2009) restored those stories to his own versions. His later stories, collected in Cathedral, are fuller and more hopeful. He died of lung cancer in 1988, aged 50.
Read Carver if you want spare, plain-spoken stories about ordinary lives under strain.
Start with Cathedral (1983). Twelve stories, including the title story, about a man’s visit from a blind friend of his wife, and ‘A Small, Good Thing’; a finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). His breakthrough collection, in the heavily edited form that defined his early reputation.
George Saunders
Born 1958 · Amarillo, Texas, USA
Saunders writes satirical, often futuristic stories about people trapped in theme parks, corporate jobs, drug trials and debt. The worlds are absurd, but the stories turn on small acts of kindness or cruelty, and the comedy is often sad. His collections run from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Liberation Day (2022).
He has taught in the creative writing programme at Syracuse University since 1997 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize in 2017, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain collects his lessons on Russian short stories.
Read Saunders if you like satire that is funny, strange and kind at the same time.
Start with Tenth of December (2013). Ten stories, including ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ and ‘Escape from Spiderhead’; winner of the Story Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize. Or Liberation Day (2022). His most recent story collection.
All George Saunders books →Claire Keegan
Born 1968 · Ireland
Keegan writes short, carefully pared stories and novellas, mostly set in rural Ireland. Her subjects are families, farms, silence, cruelty and unexpected kindness, often seen through a child or someone on the edge of a community. She grew up on a farm in County Wicklow, and her first collection, Antarctica (1999), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Small Things Like These (2021), about a coal merchant in 1985 who discovers what is happening at a convent’s laundry, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. So Late in the Day (2023) is a collection subtitled Stories of Women and Men.
Read Keegan if you want short books that can be read in an evening but stay with you.
Start with Foster (2010). A long story, first published in The New Yorker, about a girl from rural Ireland sent to spend a summer with relatives she has never met; it won the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award and was filmed as The Quiet Girl. Or Small Things Like These (2021). A novella set in New Ross in December 1985, in which coal merchant Bill Furlong confronts what is happening at a local convent.
All Claire Keegan books →Mariana Enríquez
Born 1973 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Enríquez writes horror and gothic fiction set in contemporary Argentina, mostly Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Ghosts, curses and missing people sit alongside poverty, illness, addiction and the darker parts of Argentine history. All her books in English are translated by Megan McDowell.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Her novel Our Share of Night won the Premio Herralde in 2019, and A Sunny Place for Shady People won the 2025 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
Read Enríquez if you want literary horror rooted in real social history.
Start with Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). Horror stories set in and around Buenos Aires, mixing the supernatural with social violence; published in English in 2017. Or The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2009). An earlier collection, published in English in 2021, of stories mixing ghost stories and pulp horror with illness and the female body.
Which Short Story writer should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first taste of the form — Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (2000)
- For gothic horror — Edgar Allan Poe, Tales (1845)
- For dread in everyday life — Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories (1949)
- For stories that read like novels — Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)
- For something you can finish in an evening — Claire Keegan, Foster (2010)
- For contemporary horror in translation — Mariana Enríquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is considered the greatest short story writer?
Anton Chekhov is the name most often given, and his open-ended stories influenced many writers who followed. Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013, was called a ‘master of the contemporary short story’ by the Swedish Academy.
Where should I start with short stories?
Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’, Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ and Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’ are common starting points. Claire Keegan’s Foster is a single long story that can be read in an evening.
Which short story writers have won the Nobel Prize?
On this list, only Alice Munro (2013). Borges was never awarded it, though he shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961.
Who are the best living short story writers?
On this list, George Saunders, Claire Keegan and Mariana Enríquez. Saunders’s Tenth of December won the inaugural Folio Prize, and Enríquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.
Which writers on this list are read in translation?
Guy de Maupassant (French), Anton Chekhov (Russian), and Jorge Luis Borges and Mariana Enríquez (Spanish). All are widely available in English, including Chekhov in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation and Enríquez in Megan McDowell’s.
Who invented the detective story?
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), featuring C. Auguste Dupin, is often described as the first modern detective story.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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