Do you find short stories super intimidating?
If so don't worry, you're not alone. A lot of people do.
So here on Book Break we are here to help you out. Whether you've never read a
short story before, or you've tried some, found them hard to
read and never yet found one that you've fallen in love with,
I have got nine brilliant short story recommendations that should capture your
imagination. So let's start with Story of Your Life
from the collection Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
So this is the story that the movie Arrival is based on,
so if you've already seen the movie - brilliant, you've got a great framework
for understanding this story. And if you haven't seen it yet - also
great! This is an exciting new story for you to dive into. So in
Story of Your Life, aliens have just arrived on Earth but
nobody knows why. And our main character is a language
expert who's called upon to help learn to communicate with these aliens
and find out what they want from us. But it turns out that their way of speaking
is linked to a totally new different way that these aliens have of perceiving the
world, which our characters can learn a lot
from. So it's this very cool, speculative sci-fi story, it's told in a
slightly unusual way that makes more more sense as the story goes on,
and this is a story that will really leave you thinking about it.
So luckily there is a movie for you to go and watch straight afterwards!
Next I'm going to recommend Shirley from a Small Place, from the collection How to
Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs, so this is a story about a pop star,
that the author based on Rihanna. So it's about this really
famous pop star who goes back to her mother's island home to
rediscover her roots. And Alexia Arthurs did a lot of research
into Rihanna's life to write the story, including watching that interview that
she did once with Oprah where she took her on a tour
of her own island home, which is actually on Barbados.
And I absolutely loved this quote from the author about writing the story.
She said "I wanted to write a story about a girl who had been everywhere and seen
everything worth seeing, and yet the small place she came from
could hold the healing power of home." And then for something totally different
all over again, the story Keith Prime from the collection You Will Never Be
Forgotten by Mary South. So this has a really
bizarre opening story about a woman who works in
a human organ farm where they grow these host
bodies called Keiths, who are constantly kept sedated and
unconscious, and are grown for the purpose of donating organs. And
our main character is this really sad lonely figure who ends up fostering
one of the Keiths after he accidentally wakes up which he wasn't supposed to.
And she sort of wants him as a substitute for company after her husband
died. So it's a bit like that episode of Black
Mirror where the woman gets that AI version of her husband, it's
a bit like the book Never Let Me Go, but it's also very much
a unique, melancholy story of its own. And then in
another very weird, uncanny short story collection, this time
almost horror, we have Salt Slow by Julia Armfield. So all of
the stories in here are about women's bodies
but portrayed in these almost monstrous ways, and a really good example, the story
I'm particularly going to recommend to you, is the first story
Mantis, which is about a teenage girl whose body is changing,
but in more than just the usual ways. And you can kind of take a guess
from the title what that might mean for an unsuspecting teenage boy who shows an
interest in her. OK the next story is called Only Those
Who Struggle Succeed from the collection Alligator and Other
Stories by Dima Alzayat. This one is set in Hollywood and it's
about a young woman called Lina trying to work her way up in a film
production company, starting as an intern, and finding at every step the
ways in which her gender, her race, her class make her
vulnerable. So this is a really sad, interesting
story for anyone who has been following the Me Too movement over the last few
years, and can't stop thinking about how many
more women there must be who have been scared to speak up about their own
experiences of sexual harassment within the industry,
and how there are still so many powerful men at the top who pull
all the strings. And then for something a bit mystical we
have the story On the Cause of Winds and Waves from the collection
Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason.
And this is a historical fiction story about a french balloonist
who discovers on one of her voyages the end of the sky.
And it's all written as a letter that she wrote to a friend describing her
two journeys in her hot hair balloon, in which she went higher than anyone had
ever been before, and discovered this tear in the
sky. And it's a bit reminiscent of the movie
Stranger than Fiction so if you like that, you will love this short story.
This collection, Blue in Chicago, is a collection of very heavily
autobiographical stories. So the one in particular i'm
going to recommend is Public Facilities which draws on Howland's own time as a
librarian and is about the Chicago public library
as a meeting point for people with nowhere else to go.
And it's very funny. Bette Howland writes quite teasingly about the
other oddball librarians and all the eccentric regulars. One of the other
librarians actually wrote a pretty scathing response to this,
claiming it was all exaggerated and fictitious. And Bette Howland only
wrote a handful of stories before pretty much vanishing into
obscurity, so she is very much worth rediscovering. One
of my favourite weird and wonderful authors, Helen Oyeyemi,
wrote a short story collection all about different
keys and locks. And there are loads of brilliant stories in there,
but if you're a short story beginner i'm going to guess you don't like stories
with ambiguous endings, and so i'm going to recommend
you one that wraps up nice and neatly, and that is
Books and Roses. So in this one we meet a baby who was abandoned in a monastery
with a key around her neck, and a note telling her to 'wait for me'.
And we follow her as she grows up and meets another woman
who also has a mysterious key and instruction to wait for someone,
and we learn how their stories intertwine. And finally I had to include
a story from the collection Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman,
because this was actually the first ever short story collection that I fell in
love with, so it's definitely a good place to start.
Three of the stories in here follow the same character, so it gives you that
sense of returning to a narrative, but the one standout story I'm going to
recommend, just because of the shock factor in it, is called Warm Ups. So
this is about a Russian teenage girl who was given the
opportunity to travel to America with three of the other girls from her
gymnastics team, but the story has a very disturbing twist.
So I would love to know what you guys think of short stories, and if you're
someone who does love them, what were the stories that first
captured your imagination? And I'm going to link here to a guest
video we have from Mercedes from mercysbookishmusings
with all of her tips for how to get into reading short stories. See you next time!