This is a great season for short story fans, with collections appearing from beloved writers such as Lauren Groff and Louise Erdrich as well as from less familiar names you’ll be glad to discover. Here are a few recent and upcoming books for your to-be-read list:
Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich (Harper/HarperCollins, March 24): This is Erdrich’s second book of short fiction, following the bumper crop in The Red Convertible, which included stories from 1978 to 2008. I’m glad she didn’t wait 30 years this time. The 11 stories here, which our starred review calls “wise and uncanny,” are accompanied by drawings by Erdrich’s daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.
Brawler by Lauren Groff (Riverhead, Feb. 24): The stories in Groff’s last collection, Florida, live in my head more clearly than almost any novels I’ve read in the past decade; she’s a wizard of compressed emotion. Our starred review of her new book says, “It’s no surprise that a book called Brawler should provoke, ambush, and, yes, gut-punch its readers.” A mother and children try to escape domestic violence, their situation made harder by the fact that the father is a cop. Not all the mothers in the book are good ones, but they aren’t villains. What they are, according to our review, is “vivid.”
Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (Biblioasis, Feb. 24): Canadian author Jarman’s stories are just the thing for readers seeking a sharp, voicey narrative. Our starred review says he’s “one of those writers, like Padgett Powell or Joy Williams or Barry Hannah, whose style is the work’s substance, its DNA.” There’s a story about a group of people who meet one night in a bar; another about a tourist in Venice who pursues a pickpocket. The book is “quirky, stylish, daring,” according to our reviewer.
My Dear You by Rachel Khong (Knopf, April 7): Khong’s two previous books, Goodbye, Vitamin (2017) and Real Americans (2024), are both engrossing realistic novels about families. She lets her imagination run wild in these short stories, says our starred review, “exploring premises surreal, prophetic, playful, and provocative.” She considers serious issues through absurd setups, as when, to combat a spike in racial violence, the U.S. government gives citizens an injection that makes people see everyone else as a member of their own race, or when a group of Asian women take revenge on a white man who’s dated all of them—and taken them all on the same date.
The Final Score by Don Winslow (Morrow/HarperCollins, Jan. 27): Known for his prizewinning crime novels, Winslow announced he planned to retire from writing to focus on political activism after finishing the trilogy that began with City on Fire. But now he’s back with a collection of six longish stories about what our starred review calls “crimes both planned and accidental, the collision of dreams and reality, and the things people do for love.” There’s a man facing a lifetime in prison who wants to pull off one last impossible score to set up his wife, and a story that takes place entirely through dialogue in a diner booth. Our review says these are “gritty little gems.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
