short stories Archives

Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024

For the tenth year in a row, we’re kicking off the reading year with a set of short stories hand-picked by longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj.

“We abandon stories. They don’t end.”

Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.

Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok.”

Pravesh Bhardwaj read and and shared 304 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2020. Here are his favorites.

Stories by Edwidge Danticat, Etgar Keret, Valeria Luiselli, and more.

“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”

Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Min Jin Lee, and Saul Bellow.

A trip to a Swedish stone-age burial site gives an archaeologist too close a look at death.

Roxane Gay writes about the necessary and inevitable influence of politics on literature at this fraught time in history.