The debut story collection where the modern American short story was invented — trout streams, war flashes, and Nick Adams.
Short stories
The form the era perfected: whole lives in ten pages, wars in a paragraph.
The modern short story — the one that ends without resolving, that leaves its meaning below the waterline — was substantially invented in 1920s Paris, in the space between Chekhov's example and Hemingway's ambition. The little magazines needed short work; the aesthetic demanded compression; and the result was a form where omission became the chief special effect.
In Our Time remains the demonstration case: stories in which a man fishes, or a couple argues about nothing, while enormous unstated facts — a war, a pregnancy, a marriage failing — displace their weight through the surface. The interchapters between stories, single paragraphs of distilled violence, pushed the compression further than fiction had ever taken it.
Stories are also the honest low-commitment door into the whole era: three pages tell you whether the style is for you, and the collected volumes reward reading in any order, in any mood, at any speed.
Authors to Explore
The short stories we recommend
Four darker literary fairy tales about sacrifice, beauty, art, poverty, and the harm done when one life is valued above another.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's third story collection, published ten months after The Great Gatsby — nine stories about money and class, including “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy.”
Colette's cat and dog talk over the household — the early book she counted as her first step free of the Claudine machine.
The trunk's last surprise: collector-era erotica thought lost for seventy years, recovered and published in 2016.
Four late stories that keep hard subjects under a calm surface — and a title tale built on a revelation that changes everything you have read.
Written at a dollar a page for an anonymous collector in the forties — published the year she died, and instantly her bestseller.
Fifteen short stories about ordinary people in Dublin — the first book by James Joyce, and a nine-year fight to get it printed.
Six stories about people reaching toward belonging and finding that the distance remains.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's first book of short stories, published in September 1920 — eight magazine pieces written for money, one of which became the most famous American story about a haircut.
The only book of stories he wrote, containing "Sonny's Blues" and, at the end, a title story told from inside a white deputy's head.
Before Paris, before the war, before everything: the school newspaper and literary magazine work of Hemingway, sixteen years old.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered short story, published in La Nouvelle Revue française in 2023 — a humiliated elderly woman in Pontabon carries her private mythology of a dead captain to his grave and walks away.
The second book from the dollar-a-page trunk: thirteen more stories written for the collector, published two years after Delta of Venus.
Comic and supernatural stories about murder as duty, a ghost who cannot frighten Americans, a secretless socialite, and a disputed Shakespeare portrait.
The Villa Seurat portfolio — portraits, surrealist manifestos, and the essay on Brassaï, gathered by Obelisk in 1938 and never quite reprinted whole.
The second story collection — 'The Killers,' 'Hills Like White Elephants' — the iceberg method at its coldest and most perfect.
The music hall seen from behind — the tired, precarious, intimate world of performers, by a writer who had lived it.
A 1955 mass-market paperback of Henry Miller's legal writing, sold for twenty-five cents while his major books were still banned in America.
A wartime book of animals — an imagined refuge 'where there is no war,' and one of Colette's decisive works about the otherness of beasts.
Six very short parables that use biblical language to unsettle simple lessons about miracles, suffering, knowledge, and desire.
Three long stories about clever people who cannot see the thing standing in front of them. The title is a joke, and this was her last collection.
A rare 1913 animal book — printed in just 300 copies, never reissued, and soon absorbed whole into Peace Among the Beasts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's second story collection, published in 1922 — eleven very uneven pieces, two of them among the best things he ever wrote, and a table of contents in which he grades them himself.
The compilation that put African storytelling on Paris shelves in 1921 — creation myths, trickster tales, and the source of a Ballets Suédois landmark.
Everything after the forty-nine: the 1987 omnibus adds the later stories and the vault's fiction — the whole short-form career, one spine.
The first Miller book America was allowed to read: stories and essays smuggled home from the Paris years, Tropics not included.
One volume, whole arsenal: every story through 1938 — 'Snows,' 'Macomber' — plus the Madrid play written under actual shellfire.
Five literary fairy tales about generosity, vanity, friendship, poverty, and the cost of seeing other people's suffering.
Her first collection: nine stories written months after Spain and the Winter War, published by Scribner's in 1941 and never reprinted.
Henry Miller's best pages from thirty years of writing, selected by his friend Lawrence Durrell.
Twenty-two short, dark tales of love's hidden side — betrayal, solitude, and illusion, told in the manner of a modern Maupassant.
Stories from the peace that followed the war, written by someone unconvinced by it.
Four wartime stories of frustrated love, shadowed by backward glances at the Paris circles of Colette's youth.
The shadow autobiography assembled: every Nick Adams story in the order of Nick's life, with eight unpublished pieces joining the canon.
Fourteen novellas written between 1936 and 1978, gathered in one volume. For most of Gellhorn's fiction it is the only edition still in circulation.
The early collection in which Colette's short prose became unmistakably her own — lyric reveries, animal pieces, and music-hall sketches side by side.
Four novellas about Americans out of work, written by a twenty-seven-year-old who had spent a year being paid to go and look.
Three novellas about Europeans who stayed in East Africa: two sisters at a hotel on Kilimanjaro, a man building a farm in Kenya, a woman out of options.
Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.
Gertrude Stein's first book — three long stories about three working women, written in the flat repeating sentences that Ernest Hemingway and a generation of American writers learned from.
The first book: three hundred copies from a little Paris press, 1923 — everything Hemingway had that the stolen suitcase spared.
Four long stories about marriage, each one titled from a promise made at the altar.
The stories that broke the silence — hand-set on her own press in 1944, and reviewed into legitimacy by Edmund Wilson.
The apprentice Nin, published at last: stories written around 1930, before the diary's fame, before even House of Incest.
Beauvoir's earliest book — five linked stories about young Catholic bourgeois Paris women written in 1935–37, rejected by Gallimard and Grasset, and published only forty-two years later as a document of the author before she had learned to write.
Small-town Ohio after dark — the linked stories that taught American fiction to speak plainly, from the writer who sent Hemingway to Paris.
The darkest of the story collections: insomnia, nada, and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' — the code with the lights going out.
The stories that made France love him first — half of the notorious 1972 collection, under the title the world kept.
A collection of Crowley’s sinister, decadent, occult, and darkly comic short fiction.
War and grief carried in ordinary objects and unsaid feelings.
The first big Bukowski story collection — published by Ferlinghetti's City Lights, dedicated to Linda King, and later split into two famous volumes.
The late story collection: drinking, women, gambling and writing, compressed to the bone — the book that named a punk band.
The first Black Sparrow story collection: twenty-seven stories of the buried life, folding in the two rare 1960s prose pamphlets.
The second prose pamphlet: an autobiographical account of a hemorrhoid operation, published a year after the first.
Bukowski's first book of prose — a stapled 500-copy pamphlet that sold for a dollar and introduced Henry Chinaski.
Thirty-eight stories, and the half of the 1972 City Lights omnibus that kept the wildest material.
Thirty-nine recovered pieces, including Bukowski reviewing his own first book and assessing Ginsberg, Creeley and Zukofsky.
The first posthumous book, published two years after his death — poems and stories mixed the way Septuagenarian Stew had mixed them.
The first story Bukowski published and the last one he wrote, in the same book — forty-six years of work recovered from magazines nobody kept.
Eighty poems and twenty stories shuffled together, published the year Bukowski turned seventy and named for it.
497 pages arranged by the period of life each piece describes, not by publication date — a life told through its own writing.
One story, illustrated by Robert Crumb — 376 copies signed by both men, and the start of a collaboration that outlasted Bukowski.
The second Crumb collaboration: one story about an aging comedian who has lost whatever he had.
A selection of Bukowski chosen by another editor to introduce him to strangers: eighty stapled pages, four hundred copies, printed in Madison, Wisconsin.
An illustrated story Bukowski wrote in 1947 and never published, followed by the newspaper column and the work he sold to men's magazines in the 1980s.
One short story published on its own as a book, illustrated throughout by Bukowski, with eleven copies carrying an original drawing done by hand.
Seventeen stories in which travelers, families, missionaries, and outsiders discover how quickly the world can stop behaving as they expected.
Six commissioned erotic pieces, published after Miller’s death under two titles — and shadowed by a serious authorship dispute.
Seven short works—essay, letter, memory, fiction, and meditation—issued as the eleventh number of Irving Stettner’s Stroker.
A pocket-sized self-portrait assembled from stories, essays, autobiographical sketches, and photographs for readers meeting Miller beyond the scandal.
Poe's first collected tales place Gothic terror beside comic exaggeration, literary parody, and speculative adventure.
Hughes's first Simple collection turns Harlem conversations into arguments about work, love, race, and everyday dignity.
Four Moroccan stories in which kif, not alcohol, is the way out of the ordinary world.
Thirteen late stories about houses, money and the people who end up owning both. Bowles was seventy when Black Sparrow published it.
Eleven short passages of Moroccan history, from a Carthaginian sailing past the coast around 500 BC to the day before yesterday.
Bowles's first collection in seventeen years, and a title Time magazine called ironic, masking profound misanthropy.
Nine late stories written when Bowles had stopped travelling, including the one where a boy trades bodies with a cobra.
A young woman living on charm and other people's money in wartime Manhattan, remembered by the neighbour she left behind.
Fourteen short pieces and a murder story, published in 1980 by a writer who had not finished a book in fifteen years.
Twelve bedtime stories about how the camel got his hump and the elephant his trunk, told to "O my Best Beloved" and drawn by Kipling himself.
Puck brings back the dead of English history to talk to two children in Sussex, and between two of their stories sits "If—".
Seven stories and their songs: a boy raised by wolves, a mongoose against two cobras, a white seal, and a night when the elephants dance.
Two drifters sign a contract to become kings of Kafiristan, and one of them comes back two years later with the other's head in a bag.
Toni Morrison's only published short story: two girls meet in a children's shelter, one Black and one white, and Morrison never tells you which is which.
Four tales in a 61-page booklet: a soldier with a magic tinderbox, a pea under twenty mattresses, and a reviewer who hoped Andersen would stop.
A girl no bigger than a thumb, carried off by a toad, a beetle and a mole's marriage plans, and saved by a swallow she once nursed.
Two tales in one thin booklet: a mermaid who trades her voice for legs, and an emperor who walks through town in clothes that are not there.
The collection that made Andersen famous: an ugly duckling, a nightingale in China, and a girl who walks to Lapland to bring her friend home from the Snow Queen.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 collection of magazine stories, including "Harrison Bergeron", the tale of a future America that makes everyone equal by force.
Twelve stories chosen by Poe's publisher, with all three Paris cases of C. Auguste Dupin beside The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat and the House of Usher.
Two women are killed in a locked room on a Paris street that does not exist, and a poor young reader named C. Auguste Dupin works out how.
A lonely young man meets a crying girl on a St Petersburg canal bank, falls in love with her over four summer nights, and helps her wait for someone else.
An officer shows a visiting traveler the machine that executes prisoners by writing the broken rule into their skin, and asks him to help save it.
Ray Bradbury's 1953 collection of twenty-two stories, including "A Sound of Thunder", the time-travel hunt that ends with a crushed butterfly.
Ray Bradbury's 1951 collection of eighteen stories, told as the moving tattoos on one stranger's body, including "The Veldt" and "The Rocket Man".
Ray Bradbury's 1950 book of linked stories about the people from Earth who go to Mars, and the Martians who are there when they arrive.
Twenty-one magazine stories that neither Fitzgerald had collected, eleven by him, nine by her and one by both, gathered in 1973.
Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, play, eleven stories, twelve magazine pieces and a selection of her letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one volume.
William Faulkner's most famous short story: a proud old woman dies in her decaying house, and the town finally breaks open the room upstairs.
A Wall Street lawyer hires a quiet copyist, who one day answers an ordinary request with "I would prefer not to" and never stops.
The collection that holds "Young Goodman Brown", a young Puritan's night in the forest among his neighbours at a witches' meeting.
Hawthorne's first book of stories, from a minister who hides his face behind a black veil to four old friends who drink from the Fountain of Youth.
Other styles on the shelf
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