Short story month: Three short story collections to celebrate
May is a busy month! The US celebrates many things besides mother’s day. All month long, May is used to celebrate important events like South Asian Heritage Month and Celiac Awareness Month, and among these celebrations, May ends up also being the National Short Story Month.
Short stories are one of the literary forms I enjoy the most. I didn’t use to think much of them, but then I learned that Edgar Allan Poe believed in the power of bite-sized fiction. He claimed a good short story should be read in one sitting and that got me thinking: it’s probably harder to write a short story than a novel. Sure, a novel takes a long time to write. There’s the crafting of an entire universe and characters to think about, but in the end, a novel has more space to deliver a message. A short story has limited space and time to make readers stick around and care about the characters.
So why celebrate short stories? Because short stories are their own little world and are just as important as any other form of writing. Short stories can be just as impactful as any novella or novel. They can help an unsure reader dip their toes in a new genre or help a tired bookworm reset and snap out of reader’s block. Short stories offer us a shortcut to beautiful and cathartic prose, so they deserve to be celebrated!
Here are three short story collections to help you celebrate.
1. Remapping Wonderland
What if classical fairytales were told by people of color? Remapping Wonderland answers this question as a true testament to the literary movement #OwnVoices. This adult fiction collection will take you through fairy tale retellings written by BIPOC authors that feature BIPOC and LGBTQ+ characters. From Cinderella to Rapunzel to Little Red Riding Hood, a diverse cast of 27 authors retold the classic stories we loved in concepts that range from wildly absurd to painfully realistic to bizarrely humorous to arousingly sexual. This anthology is a journey through a fantastical land of make-believe that vividly reflects the human spirit and the colorful world in which we live. A percentage of the proceeds from the book go to Room to Read, a leading nonprofit for children's literacy and girls' education across Asia and Africa.
2. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Remember when I said short stories can introduce you to new authors? Well, Lesley Nneka Arimah is, without a doubt, one of the most talented writers I’ve ever read. She is a genius in her own right and I got to know her thanks to her short story What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.
Behind this short story, there’s a dazzling collection that explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. The prose and themes are evocative, playful, subversive, and touch on an adventurous exploration of humanity.
3. Cosmicomics
Cuban-Italian Italo Calvino gifted us many marvelous stories before his departure in 1985, but the one that influenced me the most was his collection of short stories titled Cosmicomics.
This imaginative short story collection was my introduction to the Science Fiction genre. Calvino made his characters out of mathematical formulas and simple cellular structures. He takes us through their journeys among galaxies as they experience the solidification of planets move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and even have a love life. Calvino explored the concepts of continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. His work is a fun and complex relation between science and the human condition.
Short stories can serve as the presentation card between author and reader or a quick route to get you out of a reading slump. I hope you enjoy these short stories as much as I did. What other short story collections could we read to celebrate National Short Story Month?