We love short stories and their unique ability to distill so much insight and entertainment with artful brevity and fervour. This month we’re highlighting six collections that have recently hit our shelves.

Send Nudes by Saba Sams

A motherless teenage girl, daughter of the town butcher, falls into a relationship with a much older boy, but realises she’d rather have the love of his dog. A directionless university student is taken up by beautiful, chaotic party girl Lara, who moves right into her bed and slowly destroys her life…

Strange and arresting, dirty but shining, the girls of Saba Sams’s extraordinary debut collection traverse girlhood and womanhood in all its glorious complications. Negotiating absent mothers, intense friendships, wanting and fearing being desired, Sam’s characters are brought to life with striking wit, originality and tenderness.

Anonymous Sex edited by Hillary Jordan & Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

A married woman has a BDSM-tinged encounter at a work conference. Two young boys on a sleepover feel the first stirrings of desire. In an artificially generated afterlife, anything can be sexual if you want it to be. A bisexual woman cheats on her wife with a baker. Anyone can hire a holographic gigolo in 2098 - but one client gets a lot closer than she’d intended.

Twenty-seven well-known writers, their imaginations unleashed by anonymity…

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If You’re Happy by Fiona Robertson

A divorced woman discovers a growing sinkhole in her yard, a second wife in a fundamentalist community questions her religion, a young Australian veteran of the Afghanistan conflict is haunted by a memory from his last mission.

Fiona Robertson’s stories traverse the globe to reveal people at moments of change or crisis, as they struggle to repair fractures in their lives and search for something close to happiness. The stories in this impressive, thoughtful collection explore the human heart and its desire and capacity for joy.

The Teeth of a Slow Machine by Andrew Roff

A corporate satire follows a pair of dark operatives working for a chicken franchise as they take careful revenge on counterfeiters. A coder calculates the odds of her husband’s cold developing complications and killing him, in a story told in code … And an archeologist working for mining companies against the interests of Indigenous communities develops a mysterious psychological condition that causes her to black out and commit extreme acts of generosity.

This collection dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Told in the captivating voice of a young woman who sees with clarity, courage and extraordinary dignity, My Monticello interrogates the systemic violence of America past and present, while also offering a powerful vision of collectivism, resistance and hope.

Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon

Simbiyu wins a scholarship to study in Australia, but cannot leave behind a world of walking barefoot, orange sun and his longing for a ‘once pillow-soft mother’. Sweet taarab music, full of want, seeps into a mother’s life on the streets of Melbourne as she evokes the powers of her ancestors to seek vengeance on her cursed ex. A village woman, gives her all for her family in Old Kampala.

Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author’s own hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.