Joyce Carol Oates’s Book Bag: 5 Short Story Collections

A novel is an entire world, a short story is a glimpse into a world. But in the very best short stories a glimpse can be a totally memorable experience—in fact, magical.

The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks

While Banks's ambitious novels are critiques of class in America, his short stories often take for their subject American masculinity, about which the writer is both enormously entertaining and relentless.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Seemingly "Minimalist"—some are as short as three pages—these stories suggest the delicacy and beauty of Monarch butterflies. But one should remember—Monarch butterflies are long-distance travelers, possessed of extraordinary strength and resilience.

Stories From Another World
By Sheila Kohler

Literally, some of these stories from a South African–born writer are from "another world"—South Africa, Italy, France. Less literally, they are set in the labyrinthine world within.

The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories
By Richard Burgin

What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly "normal" we may mistake them for ourselves.

The Age of Grief
By Jane Smiley

Smiley is excruciating in her examination of a disintegrating marriage in which a husband and a wife so fear intimate knowledge of each other, they find that it might be easier to break up than to risk vulnerability.