This month's collection of titles for our “She Writes” series focuses on short story collections. Too distracted by current events to focus on long reads? Try short stories. Join librarian Barbara Wenglin's Short Story Discussion Series via Zoom, featuring 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, on Thursday 12/17, 1/7/21, and 1/14/21. Click here for details. Below you'll find short story collections all written or edited by women and their available formats, but we also have a curated list with additional titles in OverDrive that you can checkout here. Find last month's post on historical novels here.

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook
“What distinguishes this collection from The Best American Short Stories of the Century, published 15 years ago?…the editors aimed to attract a younger, more diverse audience with younger, more diverse voices, ranging from Mary Gaitskill, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri to ZZ Packer, Sherman Alexie, and Nathan Englander.”–Library Journal

To Be a Man: Stories by Nicole Krauss
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“This triumphant first collection from Krauss (Forest Dark) crisscrosses the globe in 10 ambitious stories written over two decades that wrestle with sexuality, desire, and human connection…Krauss’s style is marked by a willingness to digress into seemingly superfluous details, yet the minutiae helps the author conjure a series of realistic environments, allowing each story feel lived in. This is a spectacular book.”–Publishers Weekly

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“In this collection of six short stories and a novella, Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, 2010) solidifies her reputation as one of the most thought-provoking contemporary storytellers. She introduces each of her protagonists, all women, on the brink of a life-altering crossroads. Whether these women react or respond to life's curveballs is steeped in the complexities of their moral compasses. Themes of grief, trauma, sisterhood, and love influence their choices, and the ways in which they evolve.”–Booklist

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston
Library Collection: Print and CD Audiobook
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“Not only does this collection include some of the greatest stories from the great Hurston, examining race, class, sex, and love within the context of African American culture, but it includes eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales unearthed from obscure periodicals and archives. The result is a refreshed view of Hurston as an American classic.”–Library Journal

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Library Collection: Print and CD Audiobook
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“In Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, she turns her keen eye onto members of the black community that don’t often receive center stage—a maker of YouTube videos that induce the tingly autonomous sensory meridian response in viewers (“Whisper to a Scream”), fruitarians (“The Subject of Consumption”), and the differently abled and the women who love them perhaps a little too much (“This Todd”).”–Publishers Weekly

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Library Collection: Print and CD Audiobook
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“Eight unearthly and imaginative stories comprise this debut story collection. “Especially Heinous” stands out as a peculiar and enchanting retelling of episodes from the TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). With its malevolent doppelgangers mimicking both lead characters, while a host of girls-with-bells-for-eyes haunt the increasingly unhinged detective Olivia, this novella ensures that its readers will never watch reruns of SVU without drawing upon Machado's novella as a frame of reference.”–Library Journal

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity–curry-making, hair-vermilioning–both buttress the characters of Lahiri's elegant first collection and mark the measure of these fragile people's dissolution. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history.”–Publishers Weekly A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“A posthumous collection of stories, almost uniformly narrated by hard-living women, that makes a case for the author as a major talent. From the 1960s through the '80s, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) published brilliant stories for low-profile publications-her six collections all appeared with reputable but small presses…A testament to a writer whose explorations of society's rougher corners deserve wider attention.”–Kirkus Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook
“The first collection of short stories by poet and essayist Zhang (Dear Jenny, We Are All Find) highlights the intersections between several Chinese and Taiwanese immigrant families living in and around New York City, all of whom are trying to bridge the gap between the old world they’ve left behind—forever altered by the Cultural Revolution—and the new lives that they are now trying to build for themselves in the United States.”–Publishers Weekly How Long ‘Til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin
Library Collection: Print
OverDrive and Libby: eBook and audiobook
“This collection of short stories by Jemisin, the first person to win the Hugo award for best novel three years in a row (most recently for The Stone Sky, 2017), eloquently develops a series of passionately felt themes. Many of these science-fiction and fantasy tales explore the nature of resistance…These stories span Jemisin's career; they demonstrate both the growth and active flourishing of one of speculative fiction's most thoughtful and exciting writers.”–Kirkus