Here are 100 books that The Garden Party and Other Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
The Garden Party and Other Stories.
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In addition to writing novels, I’m also a playwright. Whatever form I work in, I’m drawn to character, drama, and emotion. I aspire to write literary page-turners that feel as rich and complicated as real life. Also, I want the endings of my books to slay readers and break their hearts. Of course, when I say that, I’m not necessarily speaking of sorrow; sometimes your heart breaks from expanding, from a surfeit of feeling. Your heart breaks only to grow larger.
This literary rendering of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century comprises fifteen stories. Whenever I read them, I can feel Joyce’s adoration for this city—and the last story, "The Dead," is glorious.
The final line always slays me: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from…
Hello. My name is Mike Russell. I write books (novels, short story collections and novellas) and make visual art (mostly paintings, occasionally sculptures). I love art and books that are surreal and magical because that is the way life seems to me, and I love art and books that are mind-expanding because we need to expand our minds to perceive just how surreal and magical life is. My books have been described as strange fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, magic realism, fantasy fiction… but I just like to call them Strange Books.
I love stories that are many things at the same time. They can open a person up to a wider perspective, a greater awareness; that’s the kind of story I love to write. Kafka’s stories can be considered as absurd allegory, as surreal evocations of mystery and magic, as psychological study, as satire, as dark comedy… as all of these and more at once. Many of Kafka’s stories were considered by the author to be unfinished but to me they seem complete. Kafka famously tried to ‘finish’ all of his stories once and for all by instructing his friend to destroy them after his death. Thankfully, he was prevented from adding that final full stop.
This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
I love a good short story that can convey character, emotion, and complexity. While a novel allows the writer (and the reader) to delve into the chaotic complexity of a single set of characters, a good short story collection can explore a range of humanity and a diversity of moods or feelings. This was my motivation in writing my book. I believe a good short story collection on a well-grounded theme (such as the contributions to this list by Doerr, Kundera, and Munro) can often reveal more about human nature than an excellent novel.
This is the quintessential short story collection by a minimalist who doesn’t write just to write. I love the fact that the stories are not contrived. He doesn’t force anything.
The characters, the setting, and the story just interact and produce real, believable results. Hemingway doesn’t stretch credulity, the ridiculous, or the fantastic, yet transports you to his world with a few efficient lines.
The complete, authoritative collection of Ernest Hemingway's short fiction, including classic stories like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," along with seven previously unpublished stories.
In this definitive collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s short stories, readers will delight in Hemingway’s most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection, totaling in sixty stories. This collection demonstrates Hemingway’s ability to write beautiful prose for each distinct story,…
My childhood, very much shaped by World War II, led me the study of international relations and political psychology. I have written numerous books on conflict management and prevention, and also on ancient Greek thinkers and writers, and the elusive nature of knowledge. In recent years I have begun to explore these themes in fiction. This shift has been exhilarating and liberating and provides me the opportunity to present the tragic understanding of life and politics to a larger audience.
Chekhov is a master storyteller who conveys important insights into human nature with remarkable parsimony. Chekhov also provides contemporary readers with a certain detachment as he wrote in the nineteenth century and in Russia. Ancient Greek playwrights understood that distant settings provided analytical clarity to contemporary problems and also made people understand their universal nature. Chekhov also serves these aims.
With an Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University.
Anton Chekhov is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories. He constructs stories where action and drama are implied rather than described openly, and which leave much to the reader's imagination.
This collection contains some of the most important of his earliest and shortest comic sketches, as well as examples of his great, mature works. Throughout, the doctor-turned-writer displays compassion for human suffering and misfortune, but is always able to see the comical, even farcical aspects of the human condition.
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
Honestly, I could recommend all of Bonnie Dee’s back catalog, but this one in particular has always stuck with me. I think what I love most is that the setup seems like a standard Beauty and the Beast type tale, but instead, a thoughtful (and incredibly hot!) novel that doesn’t shy away from the fact that one of the characters is far from traditionally handsome, but embraces it.
I really cheered him on as he began to see himself in a new light, the way the man who loves him sees him.
Creating love from darkness is the greatest art…Living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris is wonderful for Teddy Dandridge, but disastrous for his finances. His unconventional artistic creations find few buyers. After a year of failure, he returns to England to fulfill a portrait commission for a wealthy family, but he finds a different, source of inspiration secreted away in their sprawling house. Isolated and rejected by his family, Phineas Abernathy haunts the west wing like a ghost. A physical deformity has locked him away from society for all his life. Filling his days with reading and drawing, he dreams of…
Growing up in an intellectual household with a New Yorker subscription, I became a fan of the short story early on, with J.D. Salinger, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver forming a baseline of personal taste and inspiration. I especially love stories that resonate with my own sense of yearning for life and love—and the deep losses that inevitably come our way. Decades of reading would pass before I began writing stories myself, and I’m thrilled to have a chance to recommend these moving and beautifully written collections.
I’ve been a fan of Tessa Hadley’s for years and tore through this book from 2023. There’s so much humor and surprise in these stories. And I loved the vivid details and painfully sharp contrast between what her characters hope for and what they wind up with in the aftermath of both minor and major events.
Heartbreaking tales of everyday life, of family and romantic relationships, filled with nuanced gestures, fateful misunderstandings, and raw emotion. I couldn’t ask for more from a story collection.
Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection
'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it' FINANCIAL TIMES
Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of…
Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo — magical, absurd, and humorous.
The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad…
As a lifelong computer nerd, I’m disappointed by the way we’re portrayed in the media. If you believe the stories, nerds are awkward and self-centered, with no room in their compulsive worldview for anything outside of their singular goals. This is absurd. Sure, some nerds are awkward and self-centered, but so are most of the people on this planet. To set the record straight, I’ve written stories about the many nerds I know, all of them with rich lives that extend far beyond their love of computers. These people are adventurers, jokesters, musicians, athletes, motorheads, connoisseurs, and more, with extreme passions that defy nerdiness.
As a kid, I loved these tales of the Glass children, smart and nerdy but interesting, fully developed, and passionate about their creative outlets. Franny and Zooey are two from the family, and Salinger writes about others in Nine Stories, as well as Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction.
These children validated my life, and I wanted all of them as my brothers and sisters.
"Perhaps the best book by the foremost stylist of his generation" (New York Times), J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey collects two works of fiction about the Glass family originally published in The New Yorker.
"Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It…
I'm a contemporary romance writer with two novels: No Hard Feelings and Crushing, stories about complex, messy women making mistakes and learning from them. As I work on my third novel, I'm remembering how hard it is to write when you're in a reading rut. Sometimes every book I pick up is disappointing, and reading feels like a chore, and I risk losing momentum. Sometimes I need something familiar to get back on track and remember why I love my job. These books feel like a long exhale. I can come to them with an overloaded brain, bad moods and doubt and discontent, and turn the last page restored.
While not exactly a light read – it contains adult explorations of trauma and violence – Purcell’s writing is drum-tight and entirely absorbing.
This book broke my months-long reading slump and writer's block, reminding me that all it takes to fall in love with stories again is one really, really good one. I’m not much of an annotator, but the pages of my copy are splattered with pen, most often exclamation marks and underlines and obscene exclamations of enthusiasm and grief.
Split between multiple perspectives, locations, and decades, The Lessons is a heart-wrenching romance without fluff, tropes, and suspended disbeliefs. A story of expectations and disappointments, promises and betrayals, it’s full of sharp observations about writing and writers, social constructs, and human behaviour.
I devoured it in days, and can’t wait to forget all the details so I can come back to it and fall in love all over…
What if your first love was your one and only chance of happiness? In our lives, some promises are easily forgotten, while others come to haunt us with tragic results. From the bestselling author of The Girl on the Page comes The Lessons, a compelling novel about love and betrayal.
1961: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her…
I started reading about the 1920s after I read Among the Bohemiansby Virginia Nicholson in 2008. I kept reading about the 1920s, particularly 1920s Paris, through my Masters and then my Doctorate in war fiction. I would read about interwar Europe, or America, or Britain, when I needed to work on my doctorate but was too tired to read about trenches or trauma, and it became an obsession. Then it became the subject of two novels, which involved more and more particular research. I love the period's brittle gaiety, its dirty glamour, a time of cultural and political revolution as people fought for a better world.
This book should not be out of print. It is beautifully written – economical, witty yet discreet, and joyful. Bowen was a young woman from Adelaide, in South Australia, who set off to London to be an artist and landed there during the Great War. She had a long affair and daughter with writer Ford Madox Ford, painted and partied in Paris, moved her daughter back to England in time to watch German bombers fly overhead during the Blitz. This book became another guide for how to live the creative life, the bohemian life, a life full of honesty and art. Like Hemingway’s memoir, it’s full of anecdotes of other writers and artists that were her friends for a time. It reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman artist, an artist and mother, ideas that still hold true as they are about the inner life of…
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…
I went through major surgery when I was in eighth grade. The physical pain was bad, but what hurt more was the emotional side. When I returned to school, the friend groups had shifted, shutting me out because of my extended absence. I had to face that time in life alone. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to works about kids who have to face challenges on their own. When we go through hard times, our true selves come out. They have to; we have no one else. We can’t pretend. We can only try to make it. The books I like show characters that shine through their hardships.
I never thought I’d love a book written in verse; poetry just isn’t my thing. Yet, Chris Baron’s work took my breath away. I was mesmerized and couldn’t put it down.
It’s about Ari, an overweight kid, who struggles with his self-worth because of his size. I’ve struggled with my weight too–all my life. So I understood what he was going through. It broke my heart when Ari harmed himself, but I appreciated seeing him make it through this tough time. He showed determination and grit.
"Beautifully written, brilliant, and necessary," (Matt de la Pena, Newbery Medalist), here is a body-positive book about how a boy deals with fat-shaming.
Ari has body-image issues. After a move across the country, his parents work selling and promoting his mother's paintings and sculptures. Ari's bohemian mother needs space to create, and his father is gone for long stretches of time on "sales" trips.
Meanwhile, Ari makes new friends: Pick, the gamer; the artsy Jorge, and the troubled Lisa. He is also relentlessly bullied because he's overweight, but he can't tell his parents―they're simply not around enough to listen.
