FP Staff Picks: Our Favorite Short Stories
This month we’re thrilled to be publishing ARID DREAMS by Duanwad Pimwana, translated by Mui Poopoksakul. In thirteen stories that investigate ordinary and working-class Thailand, characters aspire for more but remain suspended in routine. They bide their time, waiting for an extraordinary event to end their stasis. A politician’s wife imagines her life had her husband’s accident been fatal, a man on death row requests that a friend clear up a misunderstanding with a sex worker, and an elevator attendant feels himself wasting away while trapped, immobile, at his station all day.
Inspired by these powerful tales, the FP team has gathered our absolute favorite short stories, from Helen Oyeyemi’s "books and roses" to Jeffrey Eugenides’s "Bronze.”
From the book What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
—Hannah
From Her Body and Other Parties.
—Sophia
From The New Yorker.
—Jamia
From Stories of Your Life and Others (or, depicted on screen as the feature-length film Arrival, starring Amy Adams).
—Nick
Originally in Tin House, but also in a variety of anthologies including Go Home!
—Jisu
From The Interpreter of Maladies.
—Lucia
From Stories.
—Valentina
From The Houseguest and Other Stories.
—Lauren
From The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
—Chandlar
From New Dimensions 3.
—Nick
From Leaf Storm and Other Stories.
—Valentina
First published in The New Yorker, now in Roupenian's debut short story collection You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories .
—Tyler
From An Indoor Kind of Girl.
—Emma
From The New Yorker.