50 Short Stories That are Like Mini-Novels

A&P, by John Updike
Updike was the master of the small detail and the interior monologue, both of which are on full display in this early story. A checkout clerk at a grocery store ogles some young women who shop in their bathing suits, and then offers a typically teenage act of defiance in their honor, all for nothing. In-between is a novel’s worth of brilliant observation, while the edges of the story teem with fascinating details that hint at the world beyond the page.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
It would be possible to fill this entire list with Saunders stories—all of his work bursts with details both explicit and implied. This sci-fi story of a future amusement park under attack by vandals could be made into a feature-length film without much effort, and when you’re done reading it you realize it’s precisely as long as it needs to be.

Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang
The source material for the film Arrival manages to cram in an entire life story on the edges of your vision as you focus on the sci-fi puzzle at the center of the page. The twisty ending forces you to go back and read it a second time in order to catch that story and see just how deeply Chiang sketches out someone’s life while distracting you with the big shiny spaceship.

There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury
Rule number one is to never read this story when you’re feeling fragile or depressed. Rule two is to never read this story directly after watching the evening news. The quiet, somber tone and unadorned language hide the fact that Bradbury implies a novel’s worth of plot while focusing on one brief—but devastating—moment in a future that still might come to pass.

All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heinlein
Perhaps the most plot-heavy short story ever written, Heinlein’s twisty, twisted tale of time travel and paradoxical family relationships is one of those stories you keep going back to because you can’t quite believe he pulled it off. Even when you know how every character in the story is related to each other—and the answer is simple and impossible simultaneously—the story continues to surprise.

Young Goodman Brown, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Modern readers might be tempted to dismiss Hawthorne’s 1835 story as simplistic, but if you look under the surface, the technical mastery is breathtaking. What this carefully-structured story has to say about faith and the human condition could easily fill several hundred pages if subtext was made text.

The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs
If all you remember about this story is the three wishes that don’t turn out as expected, you need to read it again. While the explicit story is so perfectly constructed it continues to be stolen by writers and producers to this day, there’s a novel’s worth of class, social, and family issues buried in the prose that subtly enhance the impact of each twisty result.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
Another short story so influential it’s possible to know the basic premise without being aware of the original story, Bierce’s classic fakeout tale of a too-good-to-be true escape is so awash in minute detail it could easily have formed the basis of an unnecessarily longer story. In fact, there are plenty of unnecessarily longer homages to this story out there, all of them merely proving that the original includes more story than meets the eye.

The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant
The more things change, the more The Necklace perfectly comments on society and modern life. Famous for one of the most effective and perfectly constructed twists of all time, the story is so rich in pathos everyone who reads it constructs a symbolic novel in their heads that fill in the blanks of the story, giving it a breadth and impact beyond its length.

To Build a Fire, by Jack London
London is in dire need of a resurgence in modern times, and you might as well start with one of the most perfect short stories ever written. A man makes a series of poor decisions and finds himself in serious trouble in the bitter cold of the Yukon, his dog (much smarter than him in some ways) the only witness to his demise. Along the way, London conveys so much about the wilderness, the nature of death, and man’s pride you could ramble on for several hundred pages more if you wanted.

Survivor Type, by Stephen King
Leave it to King to pack so much contemporary detail into this story that it transcends its basic premise—shady drug-smuggling doctor is marooned on an abandoned island without any source of food—and becomes a nightmare of finely observed detail. There’s an entire novel packed into these few thousand words, even if the absolutely chilling ending (and final wham line) distract you from it.

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This absolute classic remains a must-read for everyone. People are still arguing about when the narrator’s madness begins—whether it pre-exists the story, rendering everything suspect, or creeps in as the story progresses—but no one argues that as with many of the stories on this list there’s enough backstory implied to fill a full-on novel, which is one reason the narrator’s fate is so disturbing.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison
Ellison’s Hugo Award-winning 1967 story is dense; a lesser writer might have stretched it out to novel length by inserting a lot of dithering and pointless description or exposition. Ellison knew better, boiling this story of an all-powerful artificial intelligence keeping a handful of humans alive after the apocalypse so it can endlessly punish them down to a laser point that cuts, and cuts deeply.

‛Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman, by Harlan Ellison
Ellison gets a second entry here because this 1966 story is a complete dystopian tale in miniature, sketching out a future society in which being late and wasting time is a crime ultimately punishable by death, lorded over by the precise and unforgiving Ticktockman. The Harlequin is a citizen in disguise who mocks and engages in civil disobedience. The story’s jam-packed with great detail, and remains a fantastic example of how a master can ignore the “rules” of good writing.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish, by J.D. Salinger
Salinger’s short stories were precision instruments, and you could choose just about any of them for a novel-like experience. Bananafish takes place over a short period of time in a single location as members of the Glass family struggle to enjoy themselves despite themselves, and ends on a tragic note that’s still shocking today. In-bewteen is an ocean of secrets you can spend a lifetime digging out of the words.

The Dead, by James Joyce
You could choose any of the stories in Joyce’s thematically linked collection, but the final story, the longest and the most profound, is also crammed full of a lifetime’s worth of existential detail and confusion. At the end of this story you feel like you know Gabriel Conroy better than you know most of the real people in your life.

A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
Easily one of the most depressing stories ever written, it’s literally like the car accident at its center: you can’t look away, no matter how horrible it is. On the doomed family trip O’Connor spools out a family drama, a social commentary, and a crime story with a horrific ending as if it’s no big deal to somehow convey three novels’ worth of story in a few dozen pages.

A Small, Good Thing, by Raymond Carver
We’ve all read the apocryphal tale about Hemingway and the six-word story “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.” Well, Carver’s magnificent tale of a young boy hit by a car and a forgotten birthday cake is a grown-up version of that parlor trick, a haunting story marked by a baker repeatedly demanding to know if parents have “forgotten Scotty” as the boy lies in a coma, and then passes away. The revelation that is the ending of this story ties together the wealth of emotional detail Carver packs into it into something amazing.

Bullet in the Brain, by Tobias Wolff
A man waits in line at the bank, and becomes irritated by the women standing in front of him, is shot in the head, and dies. Somehow Wolff crams in the man’s entire life into these brief pages, an awesome exercise of creative power you won’t see repeated too often. By the end you know Anders the sour literary critic better than most characters who get hundreds of pages dedicated to their creation.

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, by Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s very short story is written in such an effortlessly casual way you’d be tempted to think it was simply dashed-off. Repeated readings make it sing in ways you wouldn’t expect, until you ultimately realize Murakami offers you fifteen years of story, in a way, in less than 1,500 words.

The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov
This short story contains the entire history of the universe and beyond, a Möbius strip of a plot centered on generations of humans asking an increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence how the heat death of the universe might be avoided. The ending remains as surprising today as it did in 1956.

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A story that crosses cultural and socioeconomic boundaries with efficient ease, telling the story of spoiled tourists in India and their good-natured tour guide who moonlights as an interpreter in a doctor’s office. Marriages and relationships are examined, judgments are passed, and a child is almost eaten by monkeys—most novels don’t have half this much going on.

The Garden of Forking Paths, by Jorge Luis Borges
A spy thriller, a literary puzzle, a philosophical exploration of choice, all tied up with a killer twist ending. There’s so much to think about after reading this story you should probably not try to read anything else until you’ve had a bit of time to contemplate what Borges just did to you.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemingway
The fact that this short story is often mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway’s novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms as among his greatest works is all you need to know. The story of a man dying of gangrene, stranded with his wife in Africa, is slow and solemn and totally absorbing as you wade through his melancholy memories, regrets, and subtle hallucinations, realizing that death stalks us all.

The Rocking Horse Winner, by D.H. Lawrence
Anyone whose ever worried over money, wished for more, or wished they were “lucky”—that is, all of us—finds this classic a dark mirror of their own lives. Throw in themes of sexual awakening under the surface, materialism versus love, and how children pay the price for their parents’ unhappiness, and you’re just scratching the surface of this incredibly deep tale of a young boy who can “get there” and predict horse races if he rides his rocking horse hard enough and long enough.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
O’Brien’s harrowing story about soldiers in the Vietnam War is part of a larger tapestry of short fiction in the collection of the same name. The simple device he uses of describing what each soldier carries with him into combat offers up novel-levels of implied detail, leaving the reader with the unshakable feeling they have just caught a nightmarish glimpse of what war is really like.

Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin
Baldwin’s 1957 short story encapsulates a lifetime between two brothers in Harlem struggling to understand each other is so richly detailed and sprawling in its emotional ambition it’s difficult to remember it’s not a novel-length story. The quiet, intimate ending isn’t flashy, but has a staying power that “twists” often lack.

Everyday Use, by Alice Walker
This story of a young black woman visiting her mother and sister and the clash of traditional American black culture in the south and her pretentious Africa-centric stylings is so packed with cultural, emotional, and historical notes it could be stretched out to several volumes. What Walker achieves in just a few thousand words is simply incredible.

The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol’s famous story is several things at once. It’s a study of middling ambition and poverty, a look at how materialism can destroy you, a ghost story, and a revenge tale all at once. The currencies and inflation rates may change, but the fundamentals of striving remain the same, and Gogol mines this for an impressive amount of story in a short space.

You’re Ugly, Too, by Lorrie Moore
Very little happens in this story—and yet everything happens. A bitter, dissatisfied academic hates her life in the Midwest teaching ignorant and uninterested students. She goes home to New York to visit her sister and hates life there as well. Along the way she spins anecdotes, spits facts, and makes darkly hilarious observations about everything. The final effect is simply knowing a fictional character better than you might know some real, actual people.

Where Are You Going, Where have You Been?, by Joyce Carol Oates
A vain teenager rebels against her mother and “steady” sister by going out to pick up boys at a local restaurant, reveling in the power of her looks. She meets a smooth man driving a cool convertible with a cryptic code painted on the side, and slowly finds herself sliding into a situation she can’t handle. There’s a fascinating story on the surface, and there’s the endless debate about what that story might mean that rivals any book-length tale.

Emergency, by Denis Johnson
The recent passing of Denis Johnson is a blow to readers, because there will be no more stories as dense and darkly hilarious as Emergency, the story of drug-abusing employees of an Emergency Room and their woozy adventures. High and unreliable, the narrator’s story of a shift in the ER and the events that follow depict the insulated misery of addiction and modern America in ways that provoke discussion—and introspection.

William Wilson, by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s short stories are all well worth reading, but his stories are usually much more concentrated and focused on singular moments. William Wilson offers a story of a life, of a man who is haunted from boyhood by a double who shares his name and who foils all of his planned “capers,” including theft, seduction, and other immoral acts. The psychological implications in this story by themselves offer a novel’s worth of discussion.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss
The story that inspired the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence is set in a future where families must receive government permission to have children. A young woman struggles to connect with young David, who writes letter exploring his feelings of love for his mother—except she isn’t really his mother. Aldiss manages to evoke an entire dystopian future while dragging your heart through the mud in just a few pages.

Message in a Bottle, by Nalo Hopkinson
On the one hand, you could summarize Hopkinson’s sci-fi story in a sentence—a creepy, fascinating sentence that outlines a time travel concept that is unique and brilliant, but still. On the other hand, Hopkinson gilds that brilliant concept with so much interesting character work concerning an artist, his strange child that exacerbates his ambivalence and distrust of children, and future art curators seeking to preserve his work, this could have been a much, much longer story.

Bartleby, The Scrivener, by Herman Melville
One of the most famous and most-analyzed stories ever written, this tale of a clerk who steadily refuses to do just about anything, replying “I would prefer not to,” until his refusal to even eat leads to his death, is darkly comic and still has more to say about the modern condition where we must sell our time to survive than most longer works.

The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s study of a man’s slow, inevitable death gets different reactions from people depending on their own relationship to their mortality. By the final sentences of this masterful work we have come to know Ivan Ilych and recognize in him our own frailties and our own arrogances, which can either be frightening or freeing. Few novels have the impact of this brief tour of sickness, denial, and death.

The Man Who Would be King, by Rudyard Kipling
Two sketchy adventurers seek out a primitive tribe in order to set themselves up as kings—and, remarkably, succeed. Kipling effortlessly sets down an exciting, twisting adventure story that ends poorly for just about all involved. A lesser writer would have turned this into a pretty good book, instead of a brilliant short story.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Just about any of Doyle’s Holmes’ stories would qualify for this list, of course, although many were more tightly focused. The story of a violent, impoverished aristocrat coveting the inheritance and estate of his stepdaughter is remembered for its clever locked-room mystery, but there’s a wealth of back story and detail evoking a much longer—and equally fascinating—narrative.

The Open Window, by Saki
The layers of this story are easy to miss. On the surface it’s a humorous story of a nervous young man who is more or less cruelly pranked by a young woman who spins a story designed to spook him. Dig in deeper, and there’s a meta quality to both the frame story and the story-within-the-story that is like a room full of mirrors, reflecting details into the infinite distance.

In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka
Kafka’s nightmarish story of a combined torture and execution device that carves the crime committed by condemned prisoners is ripe with terrible, horrible implications. The bleak history of the penal colony, the former commandant regarded with messianic fervor, and the fate of the current commandant when he submits himself to his own machine could each be their own novel.

The Swimmer, by John Cheever
The story of a young man who decides, on a cheerful whim, to go home one summer afternoon by swimming through all the pools in his suburban neighborhood, slowly transforms into a nightmare and ends on a tragic and bleak note. Along the way, Cheever somehow conveys an omniscience about modern society as it was in 1964, and the fact that he originally conceived this as a novel becomes very, very clear.

Brokeback Mountain, by Annie Proulx
Proulx’s study of closeted gay ranch hands who spend an idyllic summer working and living together and then the next two decades in intermittent contact is lush and complex, packing more into its few pages than many novels as she delves into the internal and external forces that coerce her characters into decisions that are ostensibly the “right” ones even if they don’t bring happiness or satisfaction.

The Bet, by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov’s name usually makes people think of his plays, but this short story is a sort of proto-Twilight Zone narrative in which a banker and a lawyer make a bet about which punishment is more humane: execution or life imprisonment. They bet two million rubles that the lawyer cannot spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. You can’t predict the ending, but you can spend the next fifteen years discussing it.

Signs and Symbols, by Vladimir Nabokov
A story about an elderly couple visiting their son in an insane asylum; the son’s condition is described as a belief that inanimate objects are conspiring against him. Laden with details, hints, and odd occurrences, Nabokov intended us to look for the “main story” beneath the superficial one—but whether this was sincere or an invitation to experience something akin to the son’s condition by fruitlessly searching for, yes, signs and symbols, is up to you.

The Man Who Was Almost a Man, by Richard Wright
A seemingly simple story of a young black man in the rural south who purchases a gun in order to feel like an adult, Wright layers symbolism in every moment of the story, painting a complex portrait of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s, adulthood, gun culture, and many other themes. Once you start looking for meaning in this story your head starts to spin.

Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler
The novel of the same title is based on this story and a few others, but the end result—while a good novel—feels padded compared to the sharp, biting hardboiled detective story of Philip Marlowe hunting for a missing woman, which includes most of the plot points and all of the best bits.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer
This story is simply perfection. Dina is a smart and defensive young woman headed to Yale for her first year of college, where she meets Heidi and falls in love. Packer observes the world around her with a fierce eye for culture, for prejudice, for hype, and each sentence does a lot of heavy lifting to define the character and her surroundings.

Blow Up, by Julio Cortázar
The story that inspired the delirious film of the same name is deceptively simple: a photographer snaps a photo of a woman and a boy at the park, and imagines a narrative for them. As he studies the photo he notices details that take on increasingly sinister implications, and he slowly becomes obsessed with the photo and the reality he’s spinning around it. Deciphering what’s actually happening and considering some of the unusual narrative choices Cortázar employs and why is a bigger job than you might initially imagine.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Part Catcher in the Rye, part adventure novel, part romance, and part fable, Fitzgerald’s usual obsessions are on display here as he tells a story of a family that discovers a mountain-sized diamond and descends into violent madness through generations in order to protect their wealth. In the hands of a postmodernist this story would take 1,200 pages to tell.