The best short story collections that make domestic life seem very, very weird

Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.

These connected stories give us a picture of Rose’s life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.

This book is an outlier in the sense that most of the stories dwell in the fantastic. Women shed their skins. A girl becomes hypnotized by a circle of light. An apparently ordinary vintage shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market has something unnerving in the back room.

But I love this book so much that I take every opportunity to recommend it. It’s still (in a heightened mode) expressing the deep strangeness of domestic life—what happens in the spaces we live in, what tensions or tragedies or irreconcilable conflicts result from small clashes between closely related people—in a way that seems to me like one of the things that fiction is for. This book is a hidden gem, like finding a secret compartment in an old desk. 

A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. That’s it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because she’s busy living.

The kind of book that’s not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here. 

This is Li’s first collection, a series of stories mostly exploring the lives of Chinese immigrants to the US, though some of the stories are set in China, where Li was born. Li is one of the greatest short story writers alive today, period. Part of her greatness is her profound understatement: the prose is disarmingly simple, hiding how brilliant it is.

Reading this collection is like a conjuring trick in which a familiar room becomes unfamiliar, but you aren’t sure how; you only know that the interior has altered. A standout: The Princess of Nebraska, in which a Chinese woman studying in the US goes for abortion care, supported by an older man. I use the opening paragraph of this story when I teach as a demonstration of how to convey, apparently without effort, every significant detail within the first page, except one crucial detail, which you could never guess. 

She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.

Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is a brilliant novel about being alone, how generative that can be, and how fruitful it is.