Ten Short Story Collections You Should Know About

Let me whet your appetite for short fiction in 2009. Below is a list of ten upcoming short story collections, most of them coming out in the first six months of the year. Some heavy hitters, some favorites, some in translation, some from bigger publishers and some from smaller publishers. In a word, Variety.

1. Chimamanda Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

Fresh off receiving a Genius Grant, Adichie focuses on Nigerian/American relationships and connections in this forthcoming collection. (June)

2. Irving Welsh, Reheated Cabbage

I couldn’t think of a less appetizing title. But obviously that’s the point. (August)

3. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes

Described as “five stories of music and nightfall.” I suppose that works as a unifying theme, if you force it. And I’m detecting a tendency for high profile authors to package only four or five stories together into a book, while the norm is about ten to a dozen. Trend? (May)

4. Raymond Carver, Beginners

So I opposed the printing of this book. I should divulge that now. But it is rather unprecedented to have a pre-edited book of short stories come out, so my curiousity is piqued. What will we learn about Carver and what will we learn about the editing process of Gordon Lish? If nothing else, it will stoke up controversy again, so watch out.

5. J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand

I was introduced to Lennon by Harper’s serialization of his abridged novel. Which was wonderful. So I’ve been a regular reader of his blog Ward Six since then and look forward to these flash stories, over a hundred of them, none of them longer than a page. Yes, it came out four years ago in the U.K., but this is the first time it’s widely available in the U.S. (April)

6. Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames

High Concept short story collection, with each one of the forty vignettes chronicling a fictional moment at the last forty times that the Thames river froze. Intriguing, no? (March)

7. Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry

If she’s going for irony in the title, she’s got it, because her stories do make me cry. This is her third short story collection, but the last installment came in 1997. Although being busy with Veronica is a perfectly valid excuse for the last decade. (March)

8. Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The supernova debut of 2009. The buzz will be deafening. Reserve front row seats at your local bookstore now. Publications in New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope. Pakistani stories about class. Watch for it. (February)

9. Ali Smith, First Person

Just came out. Very playful, metafictional. Here’s the LA Times review. (January)

10. Carol Windley, Home Schooling

Located in and around Vancouver, these seven stories explore domestic situations through the eyes of women and children. (February)

UPDATE: The Story Prize Blog added a few more collections to this list:

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible (January) (Selected and new)
Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (March)
Joyce Carol Oates, Dear Husband (April)
Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (May)
James Lasdun, It’s Begining to Hurt (August).

Yes, I didn’t include Joyce Carol Oates in the ten, but really, she publishes about three books a year, so who can keep up?

Two more I could add would be The Withdrawal Method, by Pasha Malla, coming out in March from Soft Skull Press (I’m already half through it) as well as Future Missionaries of America, by MacAdam/Cage, coming out in February.