Book review – short stories

A strong whiff of goodbyes: The Pole and Other Stories, by J.M. Coetzee, reviewed

9 December 2023 9:00 am

‘The cogs are seizing up, the lights are going out.’ As Elizabeth Costello clears her desk in this collection of stories, we feel that Coetzee may be doing the same

Love and loneliness prevail in the latest short stories

31 March 2018 9:00 am

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction,…

The more outrageous sf fantasies give way to soft dystopias

17 February 2018 9:00 am

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…

Elegiac and exuberant: short stories from Philip Hensher and Helen Oyeyemi

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a…

The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal

12 March 2016 9:00 am

‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…

The best short story collections — from childish gabbling to jaded nihilism

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter…

Clockwise from top left: Rudyard Kipling, Hannah More, M.R. James, Elizabeth Bowen, Arthur Conan Doyle and Candia McWilliam

The best British short stories — from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith

7 November 2015 9:00 am

In this handsome two-volume anthology, Philip Hensher convincingly establishes himself as a world authority on the short story, says Ian Sansom

Matilda Bathurst chooses the best recent short story collections

22 August 2015 9:00 am

‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection…

Margaret Atwood settles her accounts with this new short story collection

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has…

You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

12 July 2014 9:00 am

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions,…