Your ultimate short and sweet summer reading list
Summer, when days are long but time is brief, is perfect for pithy stories that capture the spectrum of human experiences with just the right number of words.
The Dinner Table: 100 Writers on Food
Selected by Ella Risbridger (editor) & Kate Young
Fancy a fantasy dinner party with authors, chefs, TV hosts, musicians and poets for company? Young and Risbridger set the table and “invite” more than 100 of them, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath, James Joyce, Amitav Ghosh, Anthony Bourdain, Kevin Kwan, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Min Jin Lee, Rachel Roddy and Salman Rushdie. Amid the clink of glasses and forks scraping plates, the talk flows from books to art, recipes, drinks, eggs, bread, afternoon tea, wedding banquets and more. This big anthology serves fine writing picked out from newspapers and novels, magazines, memoirs, private letters and public statements on food, glorious food. Dip into excerpts if you are on the move. Or, sit back and tuck into a veritable feast.
The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners
Edited by Edward P Jones
Scheduled for release in October, this prestigious anthology features prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines in the previous year. Jones lines up a mix of well-known and up-and-coming writers, and introduces each of their works. Among the names are Alice Hoffman, known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same title; Dave Eggers, a Pulitzer Prize nominee for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; and Ling Ma, whose Bliss Montage: Stories (2022) was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. The O. Henry Prize is named after the American author (real name William Sydney Porter) best known for his much-loved classic tale about sacrifice, The Gift of the Magi.
Alice Munro: Selected Stories 1968-1994
Munro, Canada’s 2013 Nobel Laureate, was hailed as a master storyteller for plumbing the emotional depths of the everyday characters in her writing. The Nobel citation praised her ability to “say more in 30 words than an ordinary novel is capable of in 300”. Vintage has published two volumes of her selected stories, covering the first half of her career (1968-1994) and from 1995-2009, the latter dipping into five final collections. Fearless, touching, powerful and real, Vol One follows a travelling salesman on an impromptu journey with his children, and examines how relationships with family evolve over time, through the eyes of a female middle-aged Canadian writer. Various other pieces dwell on seduction and solitude, love, loss and memory, themes Munro fans relate to.
Bone Weight and Other Stories
By Shih-Li Kow
Brevity and poetry bookend Bone Weight, whose titular piece plants food for thought — Do heavy bones foretell a good life? — after a leaf blower has a tragic accident during Chinese New Year. I Climb into a Book is what a character does in the shortest of the 25 stories here, knowing that “an illiterate fog is coming at [her] like a slow hurricane”. Men who need obedience from girls and women; a demolition worker who dreams of clean air; parents torn between tradition and a new life; brief encounters during the pandemic; a cooking robot perfecting fried rice for a grieving family; and ordinary people trying to navigate displacement fill Kow’s collection as she weaves realities that speak quietly to readers.
Wednesday’s Child
By Yiyun Li
Li’s The Book of Goose, about female friendship, won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In this searing collection that spans 15 years of writing, the stories course from intimacy to alienation, ageing to death, estrangement, violence and the cracks that tear ordinary lives apart. The Chinese-American professor’s sad tales are built around tragedy and lingering grief. Wednesday’s Child has a woman going on a solo trip after her daughter’s suicide. Various other stories talk about that unimaginable pain, which Li knows personally: Two of her sons took their own lives. In her memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, published last month, she reflects on losing James in 2024, seven years after the death of Vincent.
Objects of Desire: 10 Malaysian Chinese Short Stories in Translation
Edited by Lee Hao Jie
PEN Malaysia launched book series Connections to celebrate the country’s linguistic diversity and introduce readers to works written in different languages. The first title under this series, Objects of Desire, features 10 stories translated by different people. These Mahua [Malaysian fiction in Chinese] efforts range from the surreal to the grounded and reveal the interests and concerns of contemporary writers. Formed in 2023, PEN Malaysia aims to promote multilingual literature among the arts and “to defend, if not also define” freedom of expression in the country. It is affiliated with PEN International, founded in London in 1921 to encourage friendship and international co-operation among writers everywhere.
The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories
Edited and translated by Bruce Fulton
If you have been following K-dramas and music diligently, how about some literature for diversity? This collection packs almost a century of Korea’s short-story tradition, from the Japanese occupation to the discord that carved the peninsula into two, and rapid urbanisation following the Korean War. The 26 stories span 1934 to 2013 and are arranged under five themes: Tradition, Women and Men, Peace and War, Hell Chosen, and Into the New World. Through the voices of established names and young writers, we meet peddlers and donkeys travelling across moonlit fields; artists drinking and exchanging banter in the tea houses of 1920s Seoul; soldiers fighting to live, war exiles who can never head home again; and lonely people seeking to connect in cold, chaotic cities.
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories
By Terry Pratchett
These 20 stories by Sir Terry, the UK creator of Discworld, were written when he was a reporter during the 1970s and 1980s, under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns. They were published in 2023, eight years after Pratchett’s death, following a painstaking search by “amateur Pratchett-ologists” Jan and Pat Harkin, retired doctors who raked over tons of back issues of the Bristol-based Western Daily Press to unearth them. Pratchett wrote 70 books over 44 years, starting with his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, set in a fantasy realm balanced on the backs of four huge elephants standing on a giant turtle swimming through space. In this compilation, fans will meet the first caveman to cultivate fire, ghosts and wizards, and travel through time and space, starting from the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork.
This article first appeared on June 9, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
