SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGY 2026

As far as artistic experiences go, short stories are particularly hard to explain. They are usually smaller than a novel and usually longer than a poem – though Hemingway, always the rebel, is supposed to have penned the shortest story of all time: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Regardless of length, the best short stories combine the familiarity of long form narrative with the epiphanic release of a haiku. For this reason, there is something vaguely unsettling about them. “A novel wants to befriend,” the writer Joy Williams says, “a short story almost never.”