When I emerge from a masterfully linked short story collection, it feels as if I’m beholding a complex origami figure after having ambled around, Alice-like, in its chambers and passageways: each turn, each fold intentional, yet delightfully surprising in how it informs the world of the collection, the final creation at once weightless and alive. Short stories operate on economy, with silences and gestures as meaningful as dialogue and action. I relish how in a linked collection, each story offers itself up to me as a single facet, a vibrant plane in a whole that depends for its dimensionality on memory and a sense of accumulation. That brief frisson as unanticipated connections cohere keeps me coming back for second and third readings in the hope of a deeper understanding, like unfolding and refolding an intricately transformed square of paper.
The nine books below are each unique not only in the stories they tell, but the terrain that takes shape by the last page. Some collections are lightly linked, more interested in their worlds rather than the lifetimes of characters. Others build toward a novelistic arc, even as each story speaks on its own terms. Each one comes from a singular sensibility.
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa
This astonishing web of quiet stories set in contemporary Japan is often linked by characters, sometimes events and at other times intimate locations. Shifting narrators take us by surprise, suddenly opening a prismatic view into a space we thought we had already grasped. Here a person who carries a dead lover’s heart; there a custom bag maker who crafts a leather pouch for a heart; here a grieving mother in a cake shop bejeweled with pastries; there a narrator discovering a dead child. With a gothic sensibility, grief and longing thread their way vividly through modest apartments and quiet streets and hospital hallways. As we are drawn deeper into the web, we glean that there is something awry in the story-world. Time becomes irrelevant, and by the last story, the collection arrives at a meta-fictional state in which the implied narrator of the collection implicates both the author and the reader, weaving them into the fabric of its surreal world.
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García
A mesmeric novel in stories, the tales in this collection are a multigenerational narrative of a Cuban family torn between Havana and the United States. A family album of a fierce matriarch still loyal to the old order, a rebellious exile in New York and mystic women who linger in the old world or are drawn to it in ways they can’t explain—we hear from them all. Vast historical events like tidal waves and massacres are made personal in these stories that grapple with history not with resentment about but with awe. Distinct, intimate voices return across stories, and the linearity of time is eschewed to allow instead for memory play and the accrual of emotion to build an arc of understanding. Time in this collection works the way a visual filter might in film, the older stories dreamier, the current-day ones resonant with a distinctly contemporary voice.
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Stepping beyond the cultural conflicts of the immigrant story, these tales contend with what remains unresolved after putting down roots, what to do with what has been inherited. Several of the stories are not linked via characters but echo each other thematically and emotionally. The evolution of aging first-generation immigrants is especially poignant as they acknowledge new possibilities, having had to reluctantly let go of what they knew as they make peace with the ways of the second generation on new soil. A linked trilogy of stories, spins off one of the aging characters, enticing the reader with the possibility of love and comfort in familiarity, but refusing romanticism for a lucid look at emotional reality.
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
In a brilliant opening gambit, the Chinese American family members we meet in the first story in this collection form the hub of the book. The remaining stories are like spokes emanating from this hub, always connecting back to this family. Stories set in the US and China are juxtaposed so that a violent history from China repeats in the US in the next generation in their schools. An urgent voice, at home with the profane, the cruel, even the scatological, carries us from story to story, exposing the inadequacy of wisdom inherited in a discordant context, laying open to scrutiny the lie of assimilation. Packed with contrasts, relentlessness and a claustrophobic desperation, these stories are voiced with the fury of young women punching back.
The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken
Half-finished lives and enduring love, the uncanniness of parenting and the regrets that come with it, the destruction wrought at the hands of caretakers and lovers on the edge: these are stories that cumulatively examine how love survives time, what people gamble, and when they allow themselves the grace of vulnerability. Stitched together loosely around a frame of five linked stories about a couple choosing love despite turbulence, these stories are unafraid to go to the places that our suppressed impulses would have us consider. They leave us asking what gestures really matter, and what kind of act is truly big in the ripples it causes.
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai
Experimental in form, surreal, vivid and intimate, these stories of Afghans and Afghan Americans run with you through the aftermath of war, through the uprooting of generations and the fracture of families. No explanations are given, the reader as adrift in the circumstances as the characters. Told in second-person, as a resume, as a list, with unremarked surrealism or with surprising intimacy, these stories feature narrators who might themselves be complicit in the systems being interrogated. Recurring characters serve not to string together a plot-like arc but as reference points, prevalent figures within the systemic landscape, providing continuity, haunting the community.
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
A linked cycle of short stories that build up to a novelistic depiction of two Ojibwe families, this collection achieves the freedom of stories that stand alone even as it intentionally deepens the world and forges a history. The stories traverse decades non-linearly, creating juxtapositions and echoes that deepen the sense of place and reshape memory. Characters evolve and reappear in this mosaic of tales spanning fifty years, building generational layers that contend with the aftermath of persistent structural traumas. Erdrich’s lyrical language carries the weight of these stories on its wings.
Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
The shared geography of Stockton, California, from its nail salons to its wedding halls, forms the connective tissue of this short story collection centered on the lives of Cambodian Americans. Community rituals like weddings and Buddhist rites form the background of these stories concerned with the queer experience, with assimilation and the formation of identity. Recurring characters serve to provide familiarity with the world rather than a continuity of plot. A complex portrait of a community coalesces through the talk across generations that animates many of the stories and well-placed revelations that accrue meaning.
What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
The stories in this collection transcend the intimate and personal and engage actively with larger ideas of anticolonialism and antipatriarchy. These are stories of chosen families, found homes, gender queerness and alternate ways of being for children of immigrants. This collection is a meta-text of inaccessibility for the reader looking for traditional storytelling in English and the Western canon, the stories themselves rife with magic, stealing, secrets, forbidden spaces both inherited and historical, bequeathed and foreign, the acquisition of keys, the loss of keys. These stories are linked via shared metaphors, powerful motifs and philosophical obsessions. To quote from the last story in the collection, “If a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that, don’t you think?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tayyba Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer from Houston, TX. Her debut book, Talking with Boys, is now available.
Her work appears in journals such as Witness, Gulf Coast, and Meridian. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. Her awards include the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction, Black Lawrence Press 2023 Immigrant Writing Prize, shortlisted for C&R Press’ 2023 Fiction Award and runner-up in Witness Magazine’s 2022 Literary Award. She serves as Director of Workshops at Inprint, Associate Fiction Editor at Cutleaf Journal, and Assistant Fiction Editor at Conjunctions.