Short stories, big hearts: ten collections worth reading

Sometimes, when you’re reading, you want to dip in and out. To read a story from start to finish, savouring the words and the rhythm of the story. There’s something deeply satisfying about finishing a tale in one sitting, especially when it lingers like perfume on skin. Short stories, at their best, are emotional distillations. They open small doors to large truths, inviting empathy, surprise, and sometimes awe. Here are ten collections that do just that.

1. Raymond Carver – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Carver's pared-back prose and elliptical dialogues reveal the tensions beneath everyday life. These stories make the domestic feel seismic, turning tiny gestures and half-spoken thoughts into moments of revelation.

2. Annie Proulx – Close Range: Wyoming Stories

These stories are brutal, lyrical and expansive. Proulx captures the ferocity of rural life and the emotional repression that simmers beneath tough exteriors. Brokeback Mountain is the standout, but the whole collection pulses with sorrow and steel.

3. Jayne Anne Phillips – Fast Lanes

Phillips writes with a kind of ragged grace. Her stories centre on dislocation—of body, of heart, of home, and they hum with the vulnerability of lives slightly off-kilter, beautifully out of sync.

4. Richard Ford – Rock Springs

These are morally murky tales, tracking drifting lives in the American West. Ford's prose is deceptively calm, even when his characters are unravelling; his gift is in making the ordinary feel epic.

5. Edith Wharton – Roman Fever and Other Stories

Don't be fooled by the velvet gloves. Wharton writes with elegant precision, but her stories are full of wit, rivalry and emotional daggers. A masterclass in social subtext and quiet devastation.

6. James Baldwin – Going to Meet the Man

Baldwin's stories feel both timeless and terrifyingly current. He brings racial tension, love, and faith into direct collision, crafting scenes of intense intimacy and public reckoning with rare moral clarity.

7. Lorrie Moore – Birds of America

Moore balances absurdity and ache like no one else. Her stories, often about women trying to make sense of life’s cruelties, are funny until they’re not—and all the more affecting for it.

8. Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

Though more a poetic sequence than traditional stories, Calvino’s book dazzles with imaginative potential. Each vignette—a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan—offers a philosophical reflection on memory, desire, and the shifting nature of reality.

9. Katherine Mansfield – The Garden Party and Other Stories

Mansfield’s prose is subtle, intuitive and emotionally piercing. Her stories, often centred on fleeting moments in women's lives, evoke profound emotions through seemingly small encounters and social gestures.

10. Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women

Berlin’s stories are jagged and dazzling. She writes about addiction, working-class struggle, and motherhood with unflinching honesty and strange, poetic humour. Every story feels lived-in, worn like a coat.

Each of these collections offers a different lens on what it means to live, to feel, to fall apart, and sometimes to come back together. Keep one by your bedside or carry one in your bag; these are stories to meet in moments and remember for years.