We've had a bounty of exciting new short story collections in 2026, with releases from the internationally beloved Colm Tóibín, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Louise Erdrich and Australian literary stars including poet and novelist Omar Musa, and acclaimed writer Inga Simpson. To make sure you don't miss any of these unique, compelling collections, we've rounded up some highlights from the year so far, to bring you the very best new short story collections available.
Discover a debut who will become your new favourite writer, or return to a writer you've read and loved before with these ten recommendations!
The Vape Lord of Queanbeyan
Omar Musa
The Vape Lord of Queanbeyan is an explosive collection of award-winning, surreal short stories. Characters across the globe confront the most human of struggles – grief, doubt, addiction, lost love and friendships that shape or betray them.
From Bosnia to Borneo, the United States to Australia to Mars, these are stories where lizards talk, cars fly and humans become birds, Sufi mysticism and AI technology collide. A world where nothing is ever what it appears to be.
I Made This Just for You
Chris Ames
The characters in I Made This Just for You are perfect avatars of modern life. They work in tech, take designer drugs, assemble IKEA furniture, pursue beauty matching, and rehabilitate their reputations – all while grappling with a perilous sense of unease, held hostage by economic forces beyond their control.
I Made This Just for You lives in weird and flirts with normal. The stories explore the tension between authenticity and performance, as characters navigate the anxieties of modern parenthood, the disorienting nature of loss and memory, and the absurd, often dystopian, intersection of the digital and the real.
🎧 Hear Chris Ames in conversation on The Readings Podcast
Read our review.
It Will Come Back to You
Sigrid Nunez
It Will Come Back to You takes in thirteen stories – never before collected together – from a career spanning three decades, which has seen Nunez become one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive voices.
Moving from an inappropriate teenage crush to a therapist's second chance at love, in this collection Nunez maintains her irrepressible humour, bite, and insight, while exploring the philosophical questions we have come to expect from her writing.
The Typing Lady
Ruth Ozeki
A spellbinding story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can't quite forget, and the stories that shape us.
A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life – and sets in motion a deception she can't control.
Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is an electrifying meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we become.
Once We Were Wildlife
Inga Simpson
In this compulsive compilation of eleven stories and one poem – set against scorched landscapes, wild oceans, and rocky terrain – Simpson follows people on the edge of desire, heartbreak and change.
From the aching intensity of romantic love to the quiet devastations of motherhood and ageing, Simpson's literary prowess keeps us riveted by the power of nature to shape human relationships and worlds. Melancholic and joyful, masterful and inspiring, this is contemporary fiction at its finest by Australia's foremost writer of the natural world, Inga Simpson.
Python's Kiss
Louise Erdrich
From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a captivating collection of short stories.
Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich's magnificent story collection features a range of characters: a newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass; immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged; and ordinary people – bird lovers, artists, school teachers, and romantics.
Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe – an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter – these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.
The News from Dublin
Colm Tóibín
A woman in Galway hears of the death of her son in the First World War. An Irishman seeks anonymity in Barcelona, haunted by crimes he has committed. A man goes to Dublin from Enniscorthy to implore the Minister for Health for a special favour. A young woman is pregnant during the Spanish Civil War. An undocumented worker finds himself living an illegal life and must leave San Francisco, and his child, after thirty years in America.
In The News from Dublin, a beautiful collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island, Colm Tóibín delves into the days and nights of those living far from home.
Brawler
Lauren Groff
Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.
Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.
Mother Salad
Helena Pantsis
In 21 stories of the strange and the uncanny, Mother Salad unravels the image of the woman in shambles, identity fractured and exploring a world which has long abandoned the creature it so carefully constructed, betrayed by the very people she has been taught to trust.
Helena Pantsis' surreal short story collection explores the plights of womanhood through the lens of mothers and the children of mothers.
My Dear You
Rachel Khong
Throughout My Dear You, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is a lost cause and gives each person 24 hours to decide in which animal form they will spend the rest of their days.
Playful and tender, dark and witty, each of these stories is infused with a profound sense of compassion. They express a powerful curiosity about the human experience, and the inescapable choices that meet us all – to have or not have children; to pursue connections with others in spite of life's impermanence; how to live – and live well.
