By Muhammed Hashim 
I haven’t been reading as many short stories as I would’ve liked since the pandemic hit. But I hit gold with some amazing short story collections this year. These stories tease us with the slightly strange things, and provoke us with their depiction of the human condition. Here are some excellent short story collections to read in 2024. From Japan to India, from the fantastical to the life of working class—you might just have to read them all.
1. Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo
Seeking Fortune Elsewhere is one of my favourite books of 2024. I picked this up to read a story or two for a short break, but ended up reading them all, unable to peel myself away from this short story collection. Bhanoo’s characters are Tamil men and women, some of whom live in India and some who have come to America to make their lives. In Malliga Homes, the narrator, who like many others at the retirement home “has lost sons and daughters to Foreign” thinks about her life and future while in No. 16 Model House Road, a wife seizes her place of respect and decision making, thanks to owning a house that is eyed by building developers. I am at a loss because I want to mention every story and person in the collection (so good!)—the divorced woman whose daughter invites her father’s girlfriend but not her to a trip with friends and family (Buddymoon), women who gossip about their schoolmate who worked as a Tamil actress and then a politician (Amma, PS: beautifully narrated by a collective plural voice), an Indian professor is under scrutiny over a complaint that he misused them for household chores but he had welcomed fellow Indians to his home as a family (A Life in America), cousins and estranged families (Three trips). These people fall into and out of love, arranged marriages, isolated communities, jealousy. They are subjected to inter-generational misunderstanding (A Life in America), loneliness, sadness; their lives tinged with nostalgia and dreams, both realized and broken. Bhanoo’s eye for characters and their psychology needs a standing ovation.
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Also read : 15 awesome books to add to your 2024 summer reading list
2. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Sayaka Murata’s novels are a pleasure to read. So I was excited to dive into her first short story collection translated into English from the Japanese. Life Ceremony is a great mix of the bizzare and the strange with a splash of horror and the uncanny told through 12 stories. A newly married couple fight over their clothing preferences in a world where human remains and organs are repurposed into clothes, décor and furniture (A First-Rate Material), a woman experiments with food to remember her experience of eating fresh vegetables (Eating the city), a jealous curtain falls in love with the boy whom its owner dates and tries to come in between their relationship (Lovers on the Breeze), an unconventional family where two single women live with their kids, breaks societal normalcy (Two’s family). These stories are about individuality, personal choices, relationship with food, and tolerance. I wasn’t very keen on the occasional cannibalism, but I greatly enjoyed the short stories and Murata’s subversive storytelling.
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Life ceremony by Sayaka Murata
Also Read : Joy of routine, a love story and a dystopia in Japan
3. The Wait by Damodar Mauzo, translated by Xavier Cota
The Wait by Damodar Mauzo, translated by Xavier Cota is a brilliant short story collection, and a relevant book to read in these times when religious extremism and intolerance has taken hold of India. This is not the Goa of touristy beaches, glitzy bars and Instagram photo ops. Mauzo’s Goa, characters, and their stories reminded me of Jayant Kaikeni’s Mumbai in No Presents Please (translated by Tejaswini Niranjana), which confirms that the lived experience is essentially the same everywhere. In these 14 stories you will find an unlikely relationship between a thief and a writer (The Gentleman Thief), a Catholic school girl plagued by the guilt of accidentally sharing her beef burger with a Hindu friend (Burger), the impact of real estate price spikes and couples being forced to display affection publicly because they cannot afford privacy (The Wait), casteism and prejudice (The Coward), a man who does not voice his opinions in local disputes or bigger matters (It’s not my business). One of my favourite stories is Yasin, Yatin, and Austin about a cab driver who changes his religious identity according to his passenger and stains his small talk with religious ideologies for extra tips.
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4. Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker
In an unromanticized version, away from the glamour of Hollywood, in the dry Central Valley in California, Chelsea Bieker’s characters exist and do things that hurt one another. A main theme that connects the stories in Heartbroke are parents and children wounding one another, leaving scars, springing up in bad memories. These stories are full of tenderness, in spite of their quiet violence. There are raisin farmers, phone sex workers, missing women, cowboys, filmmakers. A friend goes missing in Say where she is, but it is also a story about catfishing and internet culture. A 19-year-old girl lives with an abusive partner in Mama’s, Don’t let your Boys Grow up to be Miners. A woman steals a baby in Women and Children First. Birker’s characters are thirsty for love, validation, money and a life free of worries, but chained by their traumas. Heartbroke is a testament to the working class in small town rural America.
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5. Adam by S. Hareesh, translated by Jayasree Kalathil
The phenomenal Moustache by S. Hareesh, translated by Jayasree Kalathil, won the JCB prize for literature, South Asia’s richest literary prize in 2020. The author-translator duo’s latest is a short story collection of 9 stories translated from Malayalam. In Moustache, the human world and the flora and fauna were intermingled to tell a bigger story. In Adam, stories of humans and animals sit comfortably alongside one another, though the stories in themselves might not be as comfortable. They are dark, raw, often tipping into a cruel, visceral space of loneliness, hunting, conditioned patriarchy, and death. Men are villainous, misogynists, brutal, and the stories are explored through a masculine lens. In the titular story Adam, we follow a dog and its litter, all of whom grow up with human-like qualities (dominance, love, rebellion). Maoist, which was adapted as screenplay for the acclaimed movie Jallikattu, follows chaos in a village because of two escaped buffaloes. The stories in this collection are violent, with ample subtext, and explore the chasms in gender, and caste-based inequalities.
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6. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
The 12 stories in Kim Fu’s collection beg to not be stuffed into a single box or genre—they are realistic, futuristic, surreal, dystopian. Here we encounter couples that try to kill one another (Twenty Hours), alternate lives (In this Fantasy), bug infested homes (June Bugs), a phone call between a user and a simulator to recreate a day (Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867), children finding a haunted doll (The Doll), and a vendor selling cubes where you can rewind or fast forward the life cycle of an organism (Time Cubes) . The stories, often dark with abrupt endings, explore themes of grief, loneliness, coming of age (an adolescent girl sprouts wings in Liddy, First to Fly), and memories. The monsters that plague Kim Fu’s characters are often not physically terrifying, but abstract as the darkness that has holed its way into our souls. Fans of Samantha Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez, Karen Russell will enjoy this collection.
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Also Read : Read this book by Helen Philips when you are in the mood for bizarre stories
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