Novellas and short stories are the forms of fiction I love the most—their brevity means that they can come as close to perfection as is possible in prose. This means narrowing choices down to only a dozen is bloody hard. The easiest thing in the world would be to point to any 12 stories by Chekhov or Mansfield or Borges or Trevor and say, ‘Have at it!’, because you couldn’t really go wrong. Instead, though, I’ve tried to pick stories that are mostly less well known, but not too hard or ruinously expensive to find, which is why, for example, you won’t find any of my beloved Hungarian writers here. So, with that throat-clearing out of the way, here we go!
Some wonderful recommendations here, thank you.