We love short stories and their unique ability to immerse you in a new place or feeling at a moment’s notice. This month we’re recommending a number of short story collections to explore.

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tender-hearted, balancing acerbic humour with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship and family. With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humour and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.

Pure Gold by John Patrick McHugh

In this stunning debut short story collection exploring betrayal and longing on an imagined island off the west coast of Ireland, John Patrick McHugh takes us deep into a community of individuals who are lost, yearning, and self-deceiving. We see two boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, follow a couple driving out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, watch a widow seek a stranger’s help to bury her grief, see a horse crash a house party. Whether falling in love or turning on one another the residents here are united by a quest for connection in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom. Bitterly funny, profoundly moving and crackling with wild energy.

Permafrost by SJ Norman

This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted.

Though it ranges across themes and locations - from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England - Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger. Read our review here.

Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle

In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother’s funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret.

Told with Doyle’s signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives.

New Australian Fiction 2021 edited by Rebecca Starford

A son becomes enthralled in his father’s quest for treasure. A young woman is blamed for an unfathomable act. Teenagers break into an airfield. Strangers meet in the night. The world is thrown into chaos when people spontaneously combust. New Australian Fiction features brilliant writers with distinct experiences, voices and styles from all corners of Australia.

Together they showcase the strength and diversity of Australian short fiction at its best.

Eat the Mouth that Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza

In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories. In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza’s imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them.

Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women’s wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Metamorphosis by Penelope Lively

Wry, compassionate, and glittering with wit, Penelope Lively’s stories get beneath the everyday to the beating heart of human experience. In intimate stories of growing up and growing old, chance encounters and life-long relationships, Lively explores with keen insight the ways that individuals can become tangled in history, and small acts ripple through the generations.

From new and never-before-published stories to forgotten treasures, Metamorphosis showcases the very best from a literary master.