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Today I am going to crow about short stories, specifically sci-fi and fantasy short stories! One of the things I wanted to do in 2025 was to read a short story every day, because I feel like I don’t read enough of them. I do read several collections every year, but I often feel like I don’t remember as much about stories as well as I remember the details of a novel. (A wise friend once suggested that it is because we spend more time with novels, so we get the information tapped into our brain for longer.) I thought that if I specifically worked each day to read one, it might help. And so far, I am having such a wonderful time picking out stories and reading them! There have been disappearing monkeys, women with angel wings, demonic possession, apartment building absurdity, and more. It’s a blast!
One of the things I like about short stories is that sometimes it feels like the stakes are higher, because there are fewer words in which to convey a point or resolve the action. And every story is an exciting unknown adventure! Even though I am reading a story by a different author every day, I still plan to read whole upcoming collections by one author for my new books reading. And it reminded me of several of my favorite collections. There are many, many incredible collections of SFF stories out there in the world for you to explore, and these five are a great place to start, whether you want stories for a reading challenge or just for fun!
Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe
This is an award-winning work of queer fabulism. (It won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror.) These are works covering important real-life subjects, salient pieces about bodily autonomy, change, emotions, and love while dealing with the outside world trying to inflict its opinions on you. My favorite is probably a take on “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, called “I Am a Beautiful Bug!”
At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories by Kij Johnson
One of my favorite things about short stories is the titles, and this debut collection has a lot of titles worth the price of admission, like “The Bitey Cat,” “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” and “Schrödinger’s Cathouse.” There are so many stories, each of them strange and wonderful, including the titular story about a woman who follows a —yep—river of bees to its mouth! I knew when I started this collection and the first story was about monkeys in a magic act that disappear into the unknown, only to return later each night, that I was in for a good time.
No One Will Come Back For Us by Premee Mohamed
Premee Mohamed quickly became an auto-buy author for me after reading And What Can We Offer You Tonight, and she has multiple award-winning books, including this debut collection of cosmic horror. These are tales of the unholy that emerge to reign over lands, oceans, and space, terrorizing the worlds and pushing science and humanity to the brink of madness. (And watch for her new collection, One Message Remains, out February 11.)
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker
Small Beer Press is one of my favorite small presses, because they continuously introduce me to authors I end up loving. (They also published At the Mouth of the River of Bees.) This collection was my first Sarah Pinsker, and it is such a great mix of beautiful, weird stories that incorporate science and feelings. They are tales of love and loss and technology, and they give you a glimpse of how Pinsker prophetically later released a book about a virus that keeps everyone inside. My favorite of this group is probably “And Then There Were (N-One),” a mystery in which hundreds of Sarah Pinskers at a convention must solve the murder of—wait for it—Sarah Pinsker.
All the Names They Used for God: Stories by Anjali Sachdeva
Last, but not least, is possibly my favorite collection of all time. I know I talk about it a lot. Even babies who were only born a few hours ago are saying, “Good grief, Liberty is talking about that book again.” But it’s THAT GOOD. This stunning collection includes tales of a woman who decides to dig deep to find comfort, an explosion in a factory, a group of genetically modified septuplets, and in my favorite story, a fisherman in love with a mermaid who is followed around by a giant shark. These stories will make your brain spin on its axle.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the Book Riot podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram.
