Susan Kaye Quinn 125 pages Self-published (2024)
Read this if you like: Solarpunk/climate fiction, Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson
tl;dr summary: Six stories set in near futures where we haven’t fixed shit yet, but we’re getting there.
Multiple authors (anthology) 129 pages air & nothingness press (2024)
Read this if you like: formal experimentation, flash fiction
tl;dr summary: Collection of 18 flash stories across genres that make use of footnotes and other marginalia to tell narratives in a new way.
See the book on the air and nothingness press website
Both of the collections I've put together so far have been linked, which made deciding what stories to include a bit easier. In fact, almost all the pieces in Cryptid Bits were written specifically for the chapbook, and the same was true for about half of the stories in Luck and Other Disasters. There was still some curation work that needed to happen—in both cases I wrote some stories that didn't end up in the final version, and it took a bit of fiddling to get the pieces I did include into the right order. But since each of those books occupies a self-contained world, with shared characters and settings, deciding which things fit into each book was pretty straightforward.
That's not the case for every short story collection. I knew that in an abstract, of course, and now I’m getting a first-hand lesson. A few months ago, I realized I have enough speculative short stories to put together a collection—way more than enough, actually, which is mostly a good problem to have. I have options and can mix-and-match things to find the exact right set of stories. But that’s also caused a bit of a delay in getting the manuscript assembled while I figure out how to even choose which ones belong together.
Jacob M. Appel 181 pages Black Lawrence Press (2016)
Read this if you like: Robert Olen Butler, Matthew Cheney, Juan Villoro
tl;dr summary: A study in the craft of writing short stories, with 10 stories that each have a different lesson to teach.
Dorene O’Brien 156 pages Baobab Press (2019)
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).
Anthony Veasna So 260 pages Ecco (2021)
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Jennifer Egan, Alan Heathcock
Tl;dr summary: Various views of the day-to-day lives of Cambodian refugees in California.
Joanna Acevedo 196 pages Flexible Press (2021)
Read this if you like: Jennifer Wortman, Susan Minot, Alice Munroe
tl;dr summary: Glimpses in the lives of thirteen people who are all very bad at love each in their own unique way.
Matthew Cheney 270 pages Third Man Books (2023)
tl;dr summary: Genre-spanning and blurring collection that is a study in crafting voice and balancing realism against absurdity.
Read this if you like: Juan Villoro, David Foster Wallace, literary horror
Elwin Cotman 89 pages Nomadic Press (2023)
Read this if you like: mythic fantasy, punk poetry, Haruki Murakami tl;dr summary: Combination poetry collection and story about a galaxy-traveling wizard
Multiple authors (anthology) 302 pages Air and Nothingness Press (2022)
Read this if you like: Dr. Who, non-humanoid aliens, speculative short fiction
tl;dr summary: Interdimensional librarian has adventures, loans books, preserves knowledge across the multiverse.
See the book on the Air and Nothingness Press website
