6 Short Story Collections to Look Forward to in 2019

Mouthful of Birds, by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (January 8)
Buenos Aires–raised, Berlin-based Samanta Schweblin caught the attention of international lit fans when her novel Fever Dream made the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. She’s back with a collection of otherworldly short stories, newly translated into English, that should appeal to readers who loved the feminist, horror-tinged fairy tales in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. Mouthful of Birds opens with a bride abandoned at a highway gas station by her new husband—along with dozens of other jilted women—in “Headlights.” In “Butterflies,” girls transform into the title creatures, but some fathers don’t have the sense to respect their fragile wings. In the title story, a teenage girl’s transformation into a young woman who needs to eat live birds to thrive horrifies her parents, who cannot stomach what their daughter is becoming.

You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories, by Kristen Roupenian (January 15)
Kristen Roupenian is the author of an exceedingly rare phenomenon: a viral short story. In December 2017, the New Yorker published her story “Cat Person,” and it immediately became the magazine’s most-read story of the year, while igniting fierce social media debate about its merits and meaning. “Cat Person” plunges the reader inside the experience of Margot, a white, middle-class college student trying to puzzle out Robert, an older man she begins dating. Her only clues are the limited information she can glean from his texts and their strained communication. Roupenian’s debut collection proves her knack for shocking, unsettling, and riveting readers was not a one-story deal, with stories including “Bad Boy,” about a couple who make a sex game out of controlling their recently dumped friend, their actions spiraling into violence, and “Look at Your Game, Girl,” a haunting suspense tale about a girl who meets a creepy older man at a skatepark.

This Is Not a Love Song, by Brendan Mathews (February 5)
This story collection, which follows Matthews’ debut 2017 novel The World of Tomorrow, showcases Matthews’ knack for getting to the heart of a story through unusual structures and perspectives. In the funny, quirky “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer,” the narrator, an “old clown” at a circus, addresses the “new girl on the flying trapeze” who stole his heart, giving his version of the events that led to a preening lion tamer’s untimely demise. The title story begins, “She was Kitty to her parents, Katherine to the nuns in high school, Kate when she was in college. But to anyone who knew her then—Chicago in the first years of the nineties, her hands tearing at her guitar like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present—she had already become Kat.” The narrator, a photographer, chronicles Kat’s rise to fame in gritty Chicago indie clubs when it was going to be “the next Seattle.”

Aerialists, by Mark Mayer (February 19)
In Mark Mayer’s debut collection, he displays dark humor in stories such as “The Clown,” in which a clown is intent on murdering a couple in their 30s who wear Apple watches and want to buy a new house with “granite counters, sectional couches, [and] a pop-up soccer goal.” Mayer, who studied writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has garnered praise from Marilynne Robinson, who wrote, “His stories are singular, as detached and intimate as dreaming.”

Lot, by Bryan Washington (March 19)
Washington’s debut book depicts the city of Houston in all its sprawling, low-rent glory. Washington focuses on a recurring cast of characters—a young man who narrates many stories has a black mother, a philandering Latino father, and an older brother and sister. They work in their family restaurant, the narrator picking up the slack whenever his dad disappears, while trying to figure out his place in his family and the world. Washington captures the vivid atmosphere of Houston—”East End in the evening is a bottle of noise, with the strays scaling the fences and the viejos garbling on porches”—but leaves space amid the realism for touches of whimsy, such as in “Bayou,” when two down-on-their-luck friends manage to capture a very worn-out Chupacabra and hope it will change their fortunes.

Sabrina & Corina, by Kali Farjado-Anstine (April 2)
Kali Farjado-Anstine’s debut story collection arrives with lavish praise from beloved writers including Sandra Cisneros (“Here are stories that blaze like wildfires”) and Julia Alvarez (“masterful storytelling”). Farjado-Anstine’s characters are Latina women with deep roots in Colorado who are contending with the difficulties of modern life, from a former graffiti writer who can’t quite give up the thrill of spray paint to a stripper who moves her daughter to California to try to reinvent herself, but finds that wherever she goes, there she is.