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In talking about my debut story collection, House Gone Quiet, with friends and family, I’ve often found myself pitching the merits of the short story form itself. Due to habit or book marketing or a lack of exposure, it’s simply the case that most fiction readers who enter a bookstore are typically on the lookout for a novel (You can trust me on this one, as a former bookseller myself). And don’t get me wrong—I love novels! But there are times when only a story collection can scratch the particular reading itch I’m experiencing.
I love short fiction for its tight prose and its economy of detail. There are also risks—be it with voice or form, premise or genre—that seem more digestible to encounter in short fiction than they might be stretched out over the course of a 400-page novel. But it’s also the case that I didn’t read many short stories until the college courses when I began to study and write them. So, in pitching not only my collection, but also the idea of why one might choose a story collection in general over the more familiar novel form, I’ve turned to another common form of media to make the argument—that is, television shows versus movies.
You know how you’re not always in the mood for a film’s long, drawn-out story? Or, you’re short on time, or attention span? Or how, before you fall asleep, you’re looking for the sense of closure that comes from a 30-minute episode of your current show? These are also the perfect reasons to pick up a short story collection, especially for those new to the genre of short fiction.
To get you started, or to help you find your next favorite collection, here are 7 story collections—both backlist picks and new releases—to pick up if you’re a fan of a TV show with a similar theme or premise.
If you like Black Mirror, try…
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Beloved by readers, writers, and booksellers alike, Machado’s collection helped to pave the way for genre-bending fiction. And while Black Mirror has proved to be the most apt metaphorical comparison for my own collection—which includes stories linked by theme rather than by location or character—it’s also a fitting one for Machado’s. From a fairytale-esque story of a bride whose only request of her husband is that he not remove the green ribbon tied around her neck to another featuring a protagonist navigating new love amidst an epidemic of women turning incorporeal and ghostly, the stories in Her Body and Other Parties are linked by want and hunger, violence and darkness.
If you like Reservation Dogs, try…
Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamelei Kakimoto
Is this show-collection pairing set in the same place? No. Is it about the same group of people? Also no. But what FX’s Reservation Dogs and Kakimoto’s debut story collection do have in common is a vivid sense of culture and heritage, which often influence the day-to-day lives of those living within them. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare follows Native Hawaiian and Japanese women as they not only learn and navigate within their cultural parameters, but also grapple with outsiders’ interpretations of them. The opening story charts a list of rules and superstitions, including “Don’t whistle at night! You know what happens if the Night Marchers hear you?”. Another story follows a Hawaiian writer who pens the ancestral manuscript she feels she’s expected to, and meets the consequences that unravel from this choice.
If you like Fleabag, try…
Emergency by Kathleen Alcott
Alcott’s debut story collection features tight yet expansive writing, as well as themes that echo Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series—chiefly women behaving badly as they navigate sexual desire, relationships, and their own happiness. In one story, a collective voice recounts a woman’s summer spent alone at a remote house and the transgressions she commits there. Another finds a woman standing before a museum’s portrait of her late mother in a compromising sexual scenario. Like Fleabag, a favorite of mine, Emergency will be a work I circle back to in order to rediscover the kernels I might’ve missed the first time through.
If you like Lovecraft Country, try…
Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams
Jordan Peele has recently curated an anthology of Black horror that’s sure to delight fans of his other spooky but troublingly plausible media ventures. This collection includes stellar writers with devoted followings like N.K. Jemisin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Nnedi Okorafor.
If you like Made for Love, try…
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
Tenth of December by George Saunders
It’s not such a stretch to say that if you enjoy the series written by Alissa Nutting, you might enjoy the story collection that predicated it as well as the novel the show is based on. The show version of Made for Love explores the conflict between modern advances and human connection, which you’ll also find in George Saunders’s Tenth of December. The story “Escape from Spiderhead” follows a protagonist whose emotions are experimented upon and controlled by a ruthless pharmaceutical company. The collection also features such sci-fi conceits as immigrant-women-turned-decor by a brain-altering surgery and, in another story, a drug that increases chivalry to disastrous results, all deployed with Saunders’ characteristic generosity towards human resilience and compassion.
If you like Atlanta, try…
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
If you love the surrealism of FX’s Atlanta, especially as it relates to stories snatched from real-life headlines or Black history, you’ll find a similar adeptness in Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black. The opening story follows a code-switching protagonist reeling from the news of a white man acquitted of wrongdoing after murdering five black youths with a chainsaw. My favorite story in the collection, “Zimmer Land” is set in a theme park where visitors are allowed to exercise their racial prejudices in preconstructed scenarios. The stories are smart and stylistically adept, all while interrogating what it means to be Black in America.