Here are 100 books that The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers fans have personally recommended if you like
The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers.
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I have always loved short stories for the way they pull readers into a complete universe and leave a lasting impact, all in a much shorter span than a novel. This is what makes them special! I love when an author presents an indelible image to recall later, or a passage that makes me go back to roll the words over my tongue again, or a turn of events that leaves me heartsore, or filled with longing, or purpose, or appreciation. Often, these shorter glimpses leave a longer impact because they are required to get and keep attention quickly. And the really good short stories do exactly that.
Although Tove Jansson’s characters are diverse in age, position, and location, each one is immediately knowable in her masterful short fiction.
I love the way she draws me in—often in a sentence or two—and makes me feel I’ve just stepped into the story in real time. Even when her topics are surprising and fantastical, the heart of humanity beats loudly, and I’m reminded of how much we all have in common.
Tove Jansson was a master of brevity, unfolding worlds at a touch. Her art flourished in small settings, as can be seen in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and in her internationally celebrated cartoon strips and books about the Moomins. It is only natural, then, that throughout her life she turned again and again to the short story. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories is the first extensive selection of Jansson's stories to appear in English.
Many of the stories collected here are pure Jansson, touching on island solitude and the dangerous pull of the artistic…
Jimmy Whistler arrived on the tail-end of WWII and that inured him to the constant conflicts of life. By the time he was a young man, the Sixties taught him not to worry so much, though constant conflict still prevailed. After a stint in the Marines, he maintained his way…
I have always loved short stories for the way they pull readers into a complete universe and leave a lasting impact, all in a much shorter span than a novel. This is what makes them special! I love when an author presents an indelible image to recall later, or a passage that makes me go back to roll the words over my tongue again, or a turn of events that leaves me heartsore, or filled with longing, or purpose, or appreciation. Often, these shorter glimpses leave a longer impact because they are required to get and keep attention quickly. And the really good short stories do exactly that.
Most certainly influenced by McCullers and other great voices from the American South is Michael Knight, whose stories are steeped in their setting and its particular concerns.
I love how he shows a community through the kaleidoscope of people living there, each with their own concerns and experiences. As a lover of stories with relatable characters and situations, the quiet honesty of these stories touches me on a deep level.
"Michael Knight is more than a master of the short story. He knows the true pace of life and does not cheat it, all the while offering whopping entertainment." Barry Hannah
Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight's stories have been lauded by writers such Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Barry Hannah, and Richard Bausch. Now, with Eveningland he returns to the form that launched his career, delivering an arresting collection of interlinked stories set among the "right kind of Mobile family" in the years preceding a devastating hurricane.
I have always loved short stories for the way they pull readers into a complete universe and leave a lasting impact, all in a much shorter span than a novel. This is what makes them special! I love when an author presents an indelible image to recall later, or a passage that makes me go back to roll the words over my tongue again, or a turn of events that leaves me heartsore, or filled with longing, or purpose, or appreciation. Often, these shorter glimpses leave a longer impact because they are required to get and keep attention quickly. And the really good short stories do exactly that.
If it’s one aspect of storytelling I truly appreciate, it’s the element of surprise, and Lisa Cupolo’s debut collection delivers that again and again.
She presents a broad range of characters in locations across the globe; they make unpredictable decisions and face forks in the road. Like the other books I’ve chosen, these stories highlight humanity and relationships in an intimate way that makes us feel empathy and curiosity, often unexpectedly.
"What exquisite stories these are, each of them immaculately composed, each of them powerfully transporting... This book deserves prizes." —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
Each of the ten stories in Have Mercy on Us is an illuminating window into a human life. In the way of all the best fiction, these stories enlarge our understanding of what it means to be alive and to love, with characters who leap off the page. In this award-winning collection, the people are varied in age, race, and origin. An old man travels to a village in Kenya in an attempt…
Jimmy Whistler arrived on the tail-end of WWII and that inured him to the constant conflicts of life. By the time he was a young man, the Sixties taught him not to worry so much, though constant conflict still prevailed. After a stint in the Marines, he maintained his way…
I have always loved short stories for the way they pull readers into a complete universe and leave a lasting impact, all in a much shorter span than a novel. This is what makes them special! I love when an author presents an indelible image to recall later, or a passage that makes me go back to roll the words over my tongue again, or a turn of events that leaves me heartsore, or filled with longing, or purpose, or appreciation. Often, these shorter glimpses leave a longer impact because they are required to get and keep attention quickly. And the really good short stories do exactly that.
At times creepy and always provocative, Samanta Schweblin’s stories always make me look at the world in a new way.
From the moment I read her short novel Fever Dream, I knew I would read anything she writes, and this newest collection of short fiction did not disappoint. I feel a sort of delicious unsteadiness experiencing her visions, which create worlds that are shocking while being eerily recognizable, too.
A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, 'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.' -O, the Oprah magazine
The world of Samanta Schweblin's short stories is dark and destabilising. Here, home is not a place of safety but the site of hidden danger, silent menace, unspoken resentment. Picture-perfect doors and spotless windows conceal lives in disarray, slowly unraveling in the face of obsession and fear, jealousy and desire.
I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.
The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.
Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.
'One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. I haven't felt this way since I first read Beloved . . .' Oprah Winfrey
Lose yourself in the stunning debut novel everyone is talking about - the unmissable historical story of injustice and redemption that resonates powerfully today
Hiram Walker is a man with a secret, and a war to win. A war for the right to life, to family, to freedom.
Born into bondage on a Virginia plantation, he is also born gifted with a…
I am Lecturer in US Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London, and I work on issues of national security and identity, political rhetoric and the role of the everyday in shaping politics, especially media and popular culture. I have written extensively on American politics and US foreign policy over these past years with two published monographs and more than a dozen articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, plus a couple of op-eds and multiple TV and radio appearances. My most recent research project explores the role of populism under the Trump presidency and its political impact in the United States.
This book is maybe my favorite novel ever written about politics and the lengths that some men are willing to go in the pursuit of power.
It features a memorable cast of characters, most importantly, of course, the figure of Governor Willie Stark, the quintessential populist politician, who manipulates others for his own gain and demonstrates a total lack of morals. Set in the 1930s, the story of Stark’s rise to power and eventual downfall always strikes me for how contemporary it feels and how many parallels it offers with the populist politics of our own time.
My mother was a student who divorced when I was very small. Lacking resources, we moved frequently, rarely staying anywhere for more than a few months. It has left me with an abiding sympathy for stories of outsiders trying to figure out what exactly they did to be relegated to the other side of the glass, peering in. This is why when I decided to write about werewolves, I made them wolves first and humans only very secondarily. Because my sympathy is always with the monsters.
Five thousand years after leaving the labyrinth, the Minotaur has traded in a diet of virgins for a job as a cook at a North Carolina joint called Grub’s Rib, a casually cannibalistic reference that gives a sense of Sherrill’s dark humor. His life is punctuated by problems that are both conventional (he lives in a trailer park and pines for one of Grub’s waitresses) and un- (his horns are awkward in the tight confines of kitchen and trailer, his tongue makes speech difficult, his penmanship is disastrous). What makes the Minotaur so appealing is that unlike the mortals around him who really have no excuse for cynicism, “M” clings desperately to possibility. “Even in the most tedious unending life there comes, occasionally, hope. One simply has to wait and be ready.”
Five thousand years out of the labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
Steven Sherrill is a graduate of UNC Charlotte and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The recipient of a NEA…
I’ve always loved the idea of time travel. I was born in a Northern mill town where King Cotton ruled. By the time I was a teenager, all the mills had shut, leaving behind empty hulks. I desperately wanted to experience the town in its heyday. I devoured the Blackburn-set memoir The Road to Nab End, by William Woodruff: I could hear the clogs strike the cobbles, picture the waves of workers, smell the belching chimneys. While I couldn’t travel back in time for real, I could in my imagination. My debut children’s novel, out in Spring 2026, is about a time-travelling seventh son.
I’ve always been fascinated by terrible periods in history: the Nazis, witchcraft trials, and the American Deep South in the days of slavery. I need to know why people behaved in the heinous ways they did; paradoxically, a bit like time travel, the more I read, the less things make sense.
Our heroine is an African-American woman from modern times who finds herself sent back to early nineteenth-century Maryland when slavery was rife. We experience her reactions to it through a modern lens. It reminded me of the TV series Outlander in the way it builds whole lives back in time. It didn’t pull any punches and wasn’t always easy reading, but I couldn’t put it down.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon…
I’ve practiced criminal law in Appalachian Kentucky as both a defense attorney and a prosecutor—not at the same time—for twenty five years. I can tell what’s genuine from what’s contrived in no time flat. Sometimes I can suspend my disbelief, but usually I can’t, so I lean toward books that get the details and intricacies right. If you’re looking for some modern Appalachian crime tales told by people who know how to a tell a story and know how to get the details of the place right, this list is for you.
This was the first book I read written after 2000 that got modern life in Appalachia dead on right and it changed the way I looked at my own writing.
I love the way the past intersects with the present as Clay’s own life flirts with violence, all while he seeks the truth behind his mother’s death during his childhood. I was never sure where it was all headed until the final pages.
In his New York Times bestselling debut novel, Silas House introduced himself as an important voice for Appalachia, and indeed, for the entire rural South. In Clay's Quilt, now a touchstone for his many fans, House takes us to Free Creek, Kentucky, where a motherless young man forges his path to adulthood, surrounded by ancient mountains and his blood relatives and adopted kin: his Aunt Easter tied to her faith and foreboding nature; his Uncle Paul, the quilter; the wild girls Evangeline and Alma; and a fiddler whose music calls to Clay's heart. As he struggles to stitch up the…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
Taylor is one of the authors who made me want to be a writer. He’s a magician of the short story, compressing events and characters from the upper South into luminous stories that can seem more real than life. He wrote longhand in poetic lines, usually drafting about a hundred pages for every ten he kept. The result is a rich reduction of scenes that move us to laughter and tears. Taylor holds the mirror up to life, and you can’t help but be drawn in.
From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.
