best-short-stories-2021

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s intricate story collection, My Monticello, explores how it feels to be Black or biracial in America. Johnson doesn’t shy away from any topic as she calmly delivers, with too-real certainty, a ruthless kind of truth. 

These six innovative, avant-garde stories showcase Johnson’s ingenuity. In “Control Negro,” a Black professor studies his son from a distance, scientifically examining the young man’s evolving life and comparing it to those of American Caucasian Males (ACMs). In “Virginia Is Not Your Home,” a young biracial woman yearns to break free of her roots by changing her name and leaving home. And in the eponymous novella, a group of neighbors from Charlottesville, Virginia, flee to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello after their neighborhood is destroyed by white terrorists. 

Johnson plots each piece delicately, arranging them so that the subtleties shine through. The stories range in content and in tone—some ironic, some hopeful, some slightly sadistic—but each pulls its own weight, and each feels completely natural alongside the rest of the collection.  Some are written in first person, while others unfold solely through second-person imperatives. Some are in past tense, others in present; some are epistolary, some more traditional. Throughout, Johnson’s one-of-a-kind voice offers a gateway to new perspectives, and necessary ones at that.

Part of the enjoyment in reading My Monticello is gaping at Johnson’s seemingly endless skill in plotting and sentence structure. While the novella is a bit slow-paced at first, and a couple of the stories could have benefited from a more apparent focal point, the collection is full of depth, and there are too many takeaways to count. 

Fans of story collections like The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans will appreciate this fictionalized outlook on America’s present and future. My Monticello is both unprecedented and inimitable, a beautifully thought out collection of elegant craftsmanship.

Generations of Cambodian immigrants and their children bring their heritage and culture to America’s melting pot in Afterparties, a bold and incisive collection of short stories by the late writer Anthony Veasna So.

There’s a mesmerizing quality to these nine beautifully brash, interconnected stories filled with feisty, flawed characters living in central California. Each tale touches on themes of history, family, sexuality and identity, topics that are inextricably tied to all cultures. 

In “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” Sothy is the Cambodian owner of a donut store, which she’s named Chuck’s because she thought the American-sounding name would attract customers. She is haunted by memories of the concentration camps she survived during the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge. However, a strange new source of dread appears in the form of a stranger who bears an unusual resemblance to Sothy’s ex-husband. As Sothy and her two American-born teenage daughters wonder about this stranger, they also come to a new understanding of their own complex identities as Cambodian Americans.

In several stories, So handles sexuality and religion unabashedly to illuminate the paradoxes of life. In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” teen narrator Ves reflects on his and his cousin Maly’s explicit sexual adventures amid preparations for the celebration of Maly’s dead mother’s reincarnation. And in “The Monks,” Rithy, who appears as Maly’s boy toy in “Maly, Maly, Maly,” is confined to a temple for a week to ensure his father’s smooth transition into the afterlife, making Rithy’s loyal duty to his unworthy father sound more like he is doing time.

So died in December 2020, leaving behind this collection as an important legacy that challenges stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans. Respecting the challenges of history while simultaneously giving voice to generations, these refreshingly unsterilized stories transcend race, culture and time.

Insightful and energetic, Afterparties’ tales about the complex communion of history and identity will intrigue fans of Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife.

In fiction, the corporal ecstasy of sexual tension often comes in peaks and waves. That’s not always how it feels in reality, however. In Brandon Taylor’s short story collection, sexual tension acts more like an undertow, lurking to pull its victims down below.

Author Roxane Gay has described the stories in Filthy Animals as “melancholic”—truly the right word for this collection. Taylor’s characters endure rape, sexual abuse, suicide, violence, cancer and familial abandonment while searching for friendship, love, sex or even just respect. Many of his characters are LGBTQ, partially closeted and living in the Midwest, which in many cases amplifies their struggles.

Several of the stories center on three young adults named Lionel, Charles and Sophie. Lionel is a former graduate student who recently tried to take his life. At a party, he meets Charles and Sophie, two dance students who are in an open relationship. The enigmatic and possibly sinister couple is drawn to Lionel’s fragility, and they begin to pull at his threads, trying to unravel him. Taylor’s depiction of the complicated power dynamics in an open relationship calls to mind Luster, Raven Leilani’s brilliant debut novel.

As difficult as the subject matter may be to stomach at times, Filthy Animals is full of beautiful writing. However, since some stories feature the same characters and others do not, the reading experience lacks cohesion. It’s easy to spend too much time trying to find connections where none exist, which can be a frustrating way to engage with a book.

Nevertheless, the characters in Filthy Animals are relatable in ways we may not want to admit to ourselves, especially regarding unmet desire. A reader doesn’t need to share Lionel’s mental health issues and sexual confusion to understand his shame at being truly seen. Fans of Taylor’s work will be fascinated by Filthy Animals, but newcomers should be aware that it’s an intense read.

A short fiction collection can be an enchanting contradiction. The assorted stories may defy easy classification as they span genres, styles and points of view, and yet they all spring from one writer’s singular voice. Cameroonian American writer Nana Nkweti commands such contradictions in her debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells, a cluster of 10 dazzling stories that are as diverse as they are vibrant.

There’s a great deal that unites the collection’s various worlds. Many of the stories address the immigrant experience and the resulting interaction of cultures, but even with that throughline, Nkweti’s tales explore a vast array of human experiences. Whether she’s probing the often shallow capitalist recesses of the adoption experience in “It Takes a Village Some Say” and the juxtaposition of faith traditions in “The Devil Is a Liar,” or exploring zombie outbreaks in “It Just Kills You Inside” and water spirits in the mythic romance “The Living Infinite,” Nkweti ensures that no two tales are alike, regardless of their thematic connective tissue.

Even beyond the variety of subject matter, Nkweti displays her virtuosity and elasticity through her prose. With the ease of a master, she shifts between points of view, between American and African slang, and between the straightforward and the avant-garde. Each story offers not only a different subject but also a different approach, a new plan of narrative attack to conquer each emotional landscape. The result is an intense, sweeping and altogether stunning reading experience.