Short stories rarely attract the attention given to novels, but they remain one of contemporary fiction’s most revealing forms. Several collections appearing in 2026 — from established writers and new voices, and on topics from domestic drama to speculative history — prove just how entertaining and rewarding short fiction is.
Lauren Groff — Brawler: Stories
Lauren Groff returns to short fiction with Brawler, her first collection since Florida (2018).
Groff is best known for the novels Fates and Furies (2015) and Matrix (2021), which established her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction.
The new collection of nine stories is set across the US, ranging from mid-century America to the present. As in much of Groff’s work, the stories focus on the impact of pressure in ordinary lives. Violence and family tension recur throughout the collection, with many of her characters caught between duty and survival, responsibility and guilt.
In the extremely powerful and harrowing The Wind, a mother is fleeing an abusive husband with her children. The narrator writes, “But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging through her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with the same wind,” acknowledging how trauma affects generations.
In the title story, Brawler, a defiant teenage girl confronts the world with “fists up, knuckles split”. Groff has spoken about her own experience as a competitive swimmer when she was younger, and that background informs the story’s vivid descriptions of diving.
Outside the pool, the girl’s home life is tense and unstable. Her mother lives in a state of extreme anxiety and germophobia. Distrusting tap water, she drinks only vodka and gradually wastes away, reducing herself to the size of “a skin bag with chalk in it, far too light to be human”.
Louise Erdrich — Python’s Kiss: Stories
Louise Erdrich returns to the short story with Python’s Kiss, her latest collection following a long run of novels set largely in the northern plains of the US. Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman (2020) and has built one of the most substantial bodies of work in contemporary American fiction.
The stories in Python’s Kiss focus on ordinary lives shaped by place, memory, family ties and community interconnectedness.
Erdrich often likes to begin with a recognisable setting and then introduce something off balance. In the title story, the narrator considers an encounter that seems to carry deeper meaning: ”It was as though I was chosen — marked out by the python’s kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.”
In one, a man is confronted by a folk-singing thief whose strange behaviour unsettles him and forces him to rethink what he values. Another story imagines a woman entering a corporately owned version of the afterlife so she can confront her father, turning unfinished family conflict into something unsettling and darkly comic.
Throughout, characters deal with competing loyalties, but these conflicts rarely erupt into open drama.
Colm Tóibín — The News from Dublin
Colm Tóibín returns to the short story with The News from Dublin, his first collection since Mothers and Sons (2006). Through his exceptional novels Brooklyn (2009), The Master (2004) and The Magician (2021), Tóibín has built a reputation for clear, restrained prose and careful attention to emotional life.
This new collection is about longing for home. These are people whose lives remain tied to Dublin, whether they still live in the city or have spent years abroad.
A woman in Galway receives news that her son has been killed in World War 1. In Barcelona, an Irishman tries to disappear from his past, troubled by crimes he has committed. A man travels from Enniscorthy to Dublin to ask the minister for health for a personal favour. A young woman finds out she is pregnant during the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War. After three decades in the US, an undocumented worker is forced to leave San Francisco, and the child he has raised there. Meanwhile, three sisters who have been living in Argentina decide to return to Catalonia.
Tóibín keeps the focus on small moments rather than dramatic events. The Dublin of these stories is also a city in transition. Migration, economic change and generational differences all play a role in how characters see their past and their place in the present.
Sigrid Nunez — It Will Come Back to You: The Collected Stories
Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You is a collected volume of 13 stories written across several decades. Nunez is best known for the novel The Friend (2018), which won the National Book Award, and for a style that blends narrative with reflection on literature, art and everyday life.
Many of her characters are writers, teachers and artists thinking through questions of ambition and responsibility. Plot is rarely the point.
In The New Year’s Story, an isolated and socially estranged woman examines the small dramas of everyday life. At a party an elderly woman says to an entitled young man, “You sound as if you believe your generation would have behaved completely differently…. Which I very much doubt. Because the problem with people behaving badly — shortsightedly, irrationally, greedily — isn’t a generational problem. It’s a problem of human nature. Which is why history keeps repeating itself…. And see how many young people swung right this year, voting for the party that vowed to roll back environmental protections and ramp up production of fossil fuels, and for a president who calls climate change a hoax.”
As a collected edition, It Will Come Back to You also shows the consistency of Nunez’s voice.
Senaa Ahmad — The Age of Calamities
Among the newer voices in short fiction this year is Canadian writer Senaa Ahmad whose bonkers, genre-defying debut collection, The Age of Calamities, approaches the crises and upheavals of the past with sharp humour and unlimited experimentation.
The stories move freely across time, placing historical figures and events in bizarre situations. In one, Henry VIII repeatedly orders the execution of Anne Boleyn, only to discover that she keeps coming back to life.
In Choose Your Own Apocalypse, readers are taken back to 1945, when a technician is working on the Manhattan Project, and presented with a series of branching narratives that imagine several different versions of catastrophe. Inside the House of the Historian begins with a dinner party that turns into a murder mystery.
By taking gleeful licence with history, Ahmad draws readers to question history, the contradictions of the present and their own assumptions at the same time. Inventive and ambitious, the collection introduces her as a confident, striking new voice in contemporary fiction.
This article was first published in Business Day.
