Every time I get a recommendation request where one of the five recent reads contains a collection of short stories, I get extra excited because it means I may be able to recommend a book of short ...

When the Exxon Valdez dumped more than 10 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound, “Yellowfish” author John Keeble received a call from his then-Harper & Row editor Ted Solotaroff asking ...

Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...

Before Covid-19, there was no formula for social distancing, merely a concept of personal space in public places and safety guidelines like standing behind a painted line while waiting for a subway.

As Ross McMeekin tells it, short stories are a kind of literary firecracker. “There’s an intensity and a compression to the form,” he says. “It’s almost a puzzle element with short stories, in that ...

NPR's Scott Detrow talks with author Aaliyah Bilal about her new book Temple Folk, which tells the stories of dozens of Black Muslims over the course of several decades. In her debut short story ...

James’ third novel and brilliant anticolonial critique (also a National Book Award longlist nominee) deploys a large cast of British and Indian characters. But its protagonist is a machine: an ...

A central Iowa English professor’s debut collection of short stories is being released today and it’s an atypical collection since it reads more like a novel. Marc Dickinson, who teaches creative ...

Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen's University Belfast in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between was published in April 2026.