A slew of literary luminaries are releasing short story collections in 2026, and we couldn't be more excited! Here at Bookclubs, we love reading a short story collection together to shake things up from our usual diet of novels. There's something so wonderful when an author is able to make you think, feel, and wonder in just a handful of pages.
As an added bonus, short stories allow everyone at your book club meeting to join the discussion, even if they haven't finished the whole book. It's perfect for those extra busy times of year.
Read on for our most anticipated short story collections of 2026, and create a free Bookclubs account to add the most intriguing titles to your "Books I Want to Read" bookshelf to remember them for later!
Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson
Publication date: December 9, 2025
Okay, technically this came out in 2025, but it was too late for our 2025 lists and we want to give a shoutout to the master of science fiction and fantasy. The collection contains ten standalone reads, including one novella, "Moment Zero," from the mind behind Tress of the Emerald Sea and the Mistborn Saga.
Brawler by Lauren Groff
Publication date: February 24, 2026
The short story master (Florida) and novelist (The Vaster Wilds, Matrix) is back with another short story collection. The nine stories in Brawler range from the 1950s to the present day and are set across the United States from New England to Florida to California. Together they reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.
Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich
Publication date: March 24, 2026
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich (The Sentence, The Night Watchman), a collection of short stories featuring a range of characters—a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.
The News from Dublin by Colm Toibin
Publication date: March 31, 2026
The newest book from the Irish author (Brooklyn, Long Island). Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.
My Dear You by Rachel Khong
Publication date: April 7, 2026
From the author of Real Americans, a short story collection about love, life, and the anguish of becoming oneself in a time when it’s so easy to be someone else. My Dear You takes on dating, marriage, and the pressures of having or not having children; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. At their very core, they are tales of love in its many forms: being in love when you’re not supposed to be, or not being in love but wishing you were; failing at dating apps or finding yourself in weird but wonderful lifelong friendships; struggling in heaven to remember your loved ones.
The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki
Publication date: June 2, 2026
From the author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness, a short story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget, and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned. Ozeki turns her singular gaze to the short story, exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. With her distinctive blend of wit, warmth, and deep humanity, she brings us twelve richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds—grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life.
The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oates
Publication date: June 16, 2026
In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone. These new stories by the prolific author blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.
It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez
Publication date: July 14, 2026
The author of The Friend releases her first collection of short stories. In It Will Come Back to You, Nunez selects thirteen of her best stories from the decades-long sweep of her career, tracing the origins of her style and her remarkable artistic range. Moving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her expert balance between gravity and levity while probing the philosophical questions that illuminate her work.
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