The New Yorker's Favorite Story Collections of the Year

"This collection of stories, by an acclaimed Chinese novelist... spans continents and centuries in its depictions of displacement... With wry humor and occasional earthy surrealism, Yan—who was born in Sichuan and lives in Britain—delicately renders both the linguistic and physical manifestations of longing. As one character reflects, it is both 'our nature to forget' and 'in our nature to resist forgetting.'"

"An icon of Japanese counterculture in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Suzuki worked as an underground actor, posed for the erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and penned science-fiction stories, before killing herself at the age of thirty-six. This collection showcases her unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena."

"Jhumpa Lahiri’s remarkable third collection of short fiction delineates the lives of newcomers to Rome and of those born there, as all find their histories and that of the eternal city entwined. The stories, two of which first appeared in the magazine, describe a relationship to place that can be by turns intoxicating and forbidding."

"The stories in Link’s new collection may be billed as 'reinvented fairy tales,' but they’re influenced by a vast pool of intertextual allusion... Link deploys puns, clever genre work, and metafictional flourishes that infuse the collection with an air of flux and fragility. To read her is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems."

"The fifteen stories in this collection, set variously in America and India, are propelled by familial anxieties. Chakrabarti’s characters reveal themselves through longings... Elsewhere, would-be do-gooders turn exploitative... These tales eschew neat conclusions, leaving their protagonists suspended, as one opines of life itself, 'between unbearable truths—salvation or suffering.'"

"These stories, by a Canadian novelist, poet, and musician who died last year, peer keenly into the penumbra surrounding death... Each story’s frame is precisely sized. Heighton’s stories wrestle with life’s uncontrollable endings and beginnings: birth, tragedy, failed resurrection. His characters grasp at time, even as it slips away—violent, sacred, apocalyptic, mundane."

"In her fourth collection of stories, Hadley brings her eloquent prose and her psychological acuity to the relationships—between siblings, friends, lovers, parents, and children—that shape us and change us, that call into question our view of ourselves and our place in the world. Several stories from the collection, including the title piece, first appeared in the magazine."

"This collection of short stories from an Italian writer with a cult following delves into the obsessions, anxieties, and detritus of childhood. One of the stories, 'The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz,' appeared in the magazine."

"At the core of his new collection is a disorienting version of the small-town tale. The residents in his archetypal old town are diligent about mowing and watering, touching up the paint on their shutters. Invariably, though, Millhauser’s characters are seized by a collective restlessness... Millhauser describes it all in precise detail, and much as he relishes the magical, he has a soft spot for the hum-drum. His genius is to be able to evoke both so urgently."

"These nine short stories follow Black American Muslims who drift toward and away from their faith, judge one another for immodesty, wrestle with upended family lore, and reflect with ambivalence on the impact the Nation of Islam has had on their lives... Built largely around vignettes, Bilal’s stories depict characters who serve as sensitive guides to matters of apostasy, racial prejudice, and gender roles."