Every time I get a recommendation request where one of the five recent reads contains a collection of short stories, I get extra excited because it means I may be able to recommend a book of short ...

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...

Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

Apple Valley local Elizabeth Aguilar is celebrating the release of her debut book, "Chronicles of an Outspoken Chicana." In ...

As Ross McMeekin tells it, short stories are a kind of literary firecracker. “There’s an intensity and a compression to the form,” he says. “It’s almost a puzzle element with short stories, in that ...

Before Covid-19, there was no formula for social distancing, merely a concept of personal space in public places and safety guidelines like standing behind a painted line while waiting for a subway.

NPR's Scott Detrow talks with author Aaliyah Bilal about her new book Temple Folk, which tells the stories of dozens of Black Muslims over the course of several decades. In her debut short story ...

TALES OF DYSFUNCTION: When it came to crafting characters for her debut collection, The Ballad of Cherrystoke and Other Stories, author Melanie McGee Bianchi says, “I wanted them to be punchy … and to ...

Urdu Literature has provided a scintillating treasure house of fiction, beginning from the earliest novels like Umrao Jan Ada ...

Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen's University Belfast in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between was published in April 2026.