Summer Is for Short Stories!

​By Veena Deo, originally published in the September 2026 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

​The outdoors keeps us engaged all summer long with gardens, family gatherings, cabins, vacations, and so on. Reading longer novels can be harder to sustain, and hence profitably exchanged for short stories and even essays. Consummate readers will read what we like without a doubt. Amid podcasts, audio books, YouTube videos, and other social media, we might consider going back to turning pages like we used to do.

​Our Library offers many collections of short fiction that might be worth considering. We love our mysteries, novels, biographies, thrillers, sagas, of course. We all have our own genre preferences. Yet I’d like to draw attention to the short story as a worthwhile reading option in case you haven’t taken it up lately. 

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Edgar Allan Poe suggested that a short story can be read in one sitting and still deliver a sense of great satisfaction. This brevity, Poe argued, can achieve a “unity of effect,” or an uninterrupted emotional experience. Junot Díaz wrote that the short story requires “unnerving levels of exactitude.” The prose must be spare and precise, razor-sharp and multifaceted, and able to perform more than one job at once—advancing the plot, revealing a character, establishing a rhythm, creating an image, or setting up something that matters. Writers have never thought of short stories as easier than novels to write. As a matter of fact, short stories are incredibly versatile and need considerable skill.

There are many writers one could choose from in our Library’s collection of volumes. I thought I’d highlight four collections that over the years have been enticing to me. There are no links among any of the writers I have chosen, but the common feature always is a remarkable insight into human experience offered with great understanding and empathy even when the character is brutally satirized.

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) stuck with me over the years as a wonderful example of the portrait of small town midwestern America from a time that was foreign to me. As I read more American literature, I started hearing echoes of his themes in many other American writers as well. The central character in the stories, young journalist George Willard, has staying power. We watch his encounters with the older and younger residents of Winesburg, his confused sense of his relationships with his teacher, his mother, and his growth as a young man through his journalism. He gains a degree of confidence and independence to seek better opportunities. His journey through alienation is as real for him as I have seen in some of my young students only a few years ago before I retired.

Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumous Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) is a wonderful collection of her recently recovered stories, both published in magazines and unpublished ones. Some of the stories have been anthologized, but many were never widely known before. Most readers of American and African American writers understand the brilliant journalist, folklorist, anthropologist, novelist, and consummate storyteller, both loved and maligned during her own life by critics, who died penniless in 1960. Only since the 1970s, Alice Walker and others have brought her work to the forefront, and she is celebrated today as the most consequential writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short fiction is rich with imagery and narratives that blend the real and the idyllic, the whimsical and the serious, the natural and the cultural. Her stories evoke the forces that shaped African American lives in the 1920s—from farmers to gamblers to factory workers—without making suffering the defining feature of those lives. In her lifetime, Hurston’s use of African American vernacular drew both praise as well as censure. But if you read her stories, they will make you laugh and cry. She is an extraordinary writer. And this book is worth reading.

Sugar and Other Stories by A.S. Byatt (1992) is a collection of short stories that explore complex themes such as mortality, family relationships, and memory. The stories are noted for their depth and emotional resonance, showcasing Byatt’s talent for character development and narrative style. The titular story is an in-depth exploration of a daughter’s memory of a father and his family when her father lay dying. The questions she works through are poignant and resonate with all of us who want to recall the exact truth of any relationship as we contemplate loss.

Last, but not the least on my list, is Canadian writer Alice Munro's short story collection Too Much Happiness (2009). Munro is both a Nobel Prize for Literature winner and a Booker International Prize winner for her work as a short story writer. The titular story in this volume is about a famous Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky. It is mostly in flashbacks very close to the time of her death. This story is about a real-life person with all the facts of her life kept intact. But the unfolding and telling is testimony to Munro’s artistry.

​Summers are great for easy and escapist reading, but they are good for a short story of some depth too.