Short Story Recommendations

I like short stories, and I like making lists of things. Lately I've started keeping this (non-comprehensive) list of short stories that I have enjoyed. The majority are sci-fi, since that's what I read most of. Latest additions go at the top of the list. You can also subscribe to this list via an RSS feed.

  • The Feminist by Tony Tulathimutte. Tulathimutte has an incredible talent for creating characters who are horrible in ways that stem from deeply realistic insecurities. If you enjoy this story, or more generally if you enjoy stories that make you wince at the choices the characters are making, I would highly recommend reading "Rejection," a book of interconnected short stories including this one. 7431 words.
  • Tomorrow's Beautiful Dream by Ju Chu. A grim dystopia of wage labor set in a system designed to squeeze every last drop of profit from its workers. 6150 words.
  • All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt by Marissa Lingen. A tightly written story in which a space station gift shop manager will not be putting up with any of your nonsense. 2067 words.
  • Multi-Spatial Apartment Complex Malfunction Results in Body Horror by Reyes Ramirez. In which we learn that landlords cannot be trusted with spacetime-bending technology. 1487 words.
  • The Twenty-One Second God by Peter Watts. An imagining of the evolution of consciousness. 7870 words.
  • Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Actually this is a recommendation not just for the story "Exhalation" but for the entire collection of short stories by the same name. It's a really thought-provoking and cohesive collection that approaches our concepts of time and consciousness and choice from a variety of angles. But "Exhalation" the story is also available to read online if you are in the mood for an unusual sort of apocalypse. 6552 words.
  • The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It's a classic for a reason. Also it has sentences like "It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!" which is a big mood even though the context is... well, creepy. 6078 words.
  • Schrödinger’s Catastrophe by Gene Doucette. A funny and surreal story of a spatial anomaly. Contains quite a few scientific and literary references/in-jokes for the perceptive reader. 12846 words.
  • The Hole in the Garden by Gene Doucette. A bedtime story about a black hole that develops in a man's flower garden. 4353 words.
  • Sunrise, Sunrise, Sunrise by Lauren Ring. A bittersweet time loop story. 4394 words.
  • Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labour by Vajra Chandrasekera. Colonial extractivism applied to demon summoning. 1481 words.
  • The Greatest Home Run in Baseball History by P H Lee. Asking the important questions, like, what if people used time travel to cheat at baseball? 2269 words.
  • Four Steps to Hunt a God by Athar Fikry. What happens when you heist a god? 1281 words.
  • LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson. A techno-horror story about tourism. 2680 words.
  • The Fall by Jordan Chase-Young. A ghost story set on the moon. 2200 words.
  • Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer. Maybe the real algorithm... was the friends we made along the way. 5610 words.
  • Construction Sacrifice by Bogi Takács. "There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city." 7344 words.
  • The Father Provincial of Mare Imbrium by E. Lily Yu. Jesuits on the moon! 3755 words.
  • Concerning Your Recent Submission to Beyond the Edge of Reason by Alexandra Erin. A horror story in the form of a SFF magazine rejection letter. 4146 words.
  • Sharp Undoing by Natasha King. A post-apocalyptic story that does some really neat things with perspective and inner dialogue. 3780 words.
  • In The Stacks (Maisie's Tune) by Robin Sloan. A story about death, music, and libraries... and, it's interactive! With sound! 3453 words.
  • The Transfiguration of the Gardener Irene by the Dead Planet Hipea by Ann LeBlanc. Body horror, a struggle for survival, and a sentient planet-fungus. 7420 words.
  • An Extant Form of Life by André Geleynse. Post-apocalyptic flash fiction about fungi and robots. 981 words.
  • The Portal Keeper by Lavie Tidhar. A cozy story about living in a kind of liminal space next to a portal to other worlds. 5064 words.
  • Shining Bursa and the Listening Post by Sarah Pauling. This story works well on two very different scales; it's in one sense a space epic that spans centuries, yet it also zooms in on one particular relationship that threads throughout the larger-scale story. 5270 words.
  • Migratory Patterns of the Modern American Skyscraper by Derrick Boden. If you're intrigued by the title, chances are you'll enjoy the story! 1450 words.
  • We're Always Looking Forward To Seeing You by Alexandra Erin. A very creepy horror story of the AI-gone-wrong variety told entirely in hotel reviews. 5524 words.
  • The Scene of the Crime by Leonard Richardson. Grad students unionizing due to... temporally hazardous conditions. 3470 words.
  • Spirochete by Anneke Schwob. Excellent story about a haunted ankle. 4115 words.