7 Short Story Collections to Read in 2017

Signals: New and Selected Stories by Tim Gautreaux (January 17)
Tim Gautreaux is a contemporary short story virtuoso, and this collection of new and selected tales offers a great chance for readers unfamiliar with him to catch up, and for fans to reminisce. Gautreaux’s home territory is the South, especially Louisiana, and his stories draws on and refreshes classic tropes of Southern literature. From a priest with a taste for brandy who must comfort a dying man who has sinned creatively all his life (“Good for the Soul”), to a grandpa who attempts his chores while babysitting a passel of grandchildren (“Welding with Children”), to a piano turner hired to visit an instrument at the decaying mansion of an eccentric widow (“The Piano Tuner”), Gautreaux captures messy lives with humor, heart, and grace.

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (January 17)
Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel Eileen, a dark literary thriller about a woman who escapes from a New England town, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize last year, and a movie is reportedly in the works. She has followed it up with her first collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in The Paris Review and The New Yorker. Moshfegh’s stories shock and surprise as she draws you into the quirky worlds of her characters, from an unconventional teacher at a Catholic high school (“Bettering Myself”) to an old man who becomes obsessed with the young woman who buys the house next door (“An Honest Woman”).

What it Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah (April 4)
Minneapolis-based writer Lesley Nneka Arimah’s debut collection of short stories promises to surprise and entertain with her unique style of mythic realism. In “Who Will Greet You At Home,” a Nigerian woman must choose a material out of which to create her child. The title story, which won the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing, is set in a future world where mathematicians eat other people’s grief.

Fen by Daisy Johnson (May 2)
Daisy Johnson sets her stories in East Anglia, an area in the east of England that’s full of marshlands, hence the title. Johnson mixes magic and folklore in freely as her characters have uncanny encounters, often with the animal world: a dead boy has been reincarnated as a fox in “There Was a Fox in the Bedroom,” and an albatross storms into a pregnant woman’s kitchen in “The Superstition of an Albatross.”

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami (May 9)
International literary powerhouse Haruki Murakami will publish a new story collection in May. The seven tales feature men who have ended up alone, and are laced with many of the standard elements of Murakami’s fiction, including mysterious women and Beatles references.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley (May 16)
New Yorker regular Tessa Hadley is a prolific British writer whose stories capture all phases of the lives of women with rare sensitivity. In “Deeds Not Words,” the personal and political struggles of two female British schoolteachers are set against the outbreak of World War I. In the title story, Hadley enters a child’s thoughts, fears, and skin as she wakes in the middle of the night while her family sleeps on around her, and creates a mess that her mother, upon waking, thinks her husband has caused.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang (August 1)
Girls creator Lena Dunham has a new publishing imprint, and her first choice as an editor is this collection of stories by Jenny Zhang. Zhang’s stories explore the lives of Chinese American girls and young women growing up in New York City, as in “Hold On, Sour Grape,” in which the narrator reveals the degredations of living in Bushwick with little money, and her parents keep a list of “things we need to buy immediately or else we’ve just lost all human dignity whatsoever.”