Browse our collection of expert-reviewed short stories books, rated and recommended by the Editors Reads team.
5 expert-reviewed books
by Paul Bowles
Bowles's first and most celebrated short story collection — tales of North Africa, Central America, and the American South that share a preoccupation with violence, dissolution, and the encounter between Western consciousness and alien cultures.
by Haruki Murakami
Seventeen short stories ranging from the title piece — in which a municipal elephant and its elderly keeper vanish without trace — to encounters with sleeping women, disintegrating marriages, and the surreal textures of ordinary Japanese life. The best single collection for encountering Murakami in concentrated form: all the themes, all the tonal shifts, all the American music, in pieces that can be read in a sitting.
by Haruki Murakami
Six stories set in the weeks following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, all featuring characters who are not in Kobe but are affected by the disaster at a psychological distance. The earthquake becomes a figure for the ruptures in ordinary life that expose what is missing underneath. Murakami's most politically engaged fiction — a meditation on collective trauma and individual isolation in Japan in the 1990s.
by Haruki Murakami
Twenty-four short stories spanning twenty-five years of Murakami's career, many translated into English for the first time in this collection. A frog saves Tokyo, a man's dead wife appears as a crab, a couple separates over a mysterious birthday present. The full range of his imagination in a single volume.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Haruki Murakami
Seven stories united by a single condition: men who have lost women — through departure, death, separation, or the gradual erosion of connection. A doctor whose wife has had an affair; a man who receives a phone call from the husband of a woman he loved twenty years ago. Murakami's most emotionally concentrated story collection.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.