Author: Caleb J. Ross

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at accredited online colleges about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

I consider myself an indiscriminant and voracious consumer of fiction. While I mostly read novels, occasionally I find myself balking at the prospect of beginning yet another huge work of fiction, too exhausted by a previous book to dive into the new world of the next one. In these moments of reader fatigue, I take great solace in the numerous gifted short fiction authors writing today. I could go on about the classics (Carver, O’Conner, Hemingway, etc.) but I think current short fiction authors are much more fascinating reads, partly because their work is so immersed in the present.

Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is a writer currently working out of Brooklyn, most recently recognized for her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, released in 2010. The novel is called a novel but it reads more like a short story collection, with thirteen chapters cataloging the lives of interconnected characters across several decades. The characters deal with disappointment in their careers (mostly centered on the music industry) and in love, with the unrelenting passage of time driving the theme of every story. Seemingly insignificant characters in one story will reappear as the main character in a story several hundred pages later with new dimension and nuanced development. A character who you first encountered in high school will end up a completely different person by the last time you see them. Each story also follows a slightly different narrative structure; one story is even written in Power Point! I highly recommend any story in Egan’s “novel,” as they can all be enjoyed independently of each other.

Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is a Native American author who writes about being a Native American in America, but the themes in his stories are relatable on a universal level. His short story collection The Toughest Indian in the World, published in 2000, is probably the best example of Alexie’s outstanding talent as a short fiction writer. Among his best stories in the collection is “Dear John Wayne,” an elderly Native American woman’s recollection to a professor about an affair she had with John Wayne over 100 years ago. More than just about being a Native American, the focus of Alexie’s stories can be distilled into the broader theme of identity. Who are you, what does it mean to be who everyone says you are, and how is that different from what you see in the mirror every day? His stories are often funny, and sometimes harsh and bleak in their subject matter, but they always ring true.

Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami became a superstar writer with his surrealist novels blending everyday life in Japan with unexplainable, even psychedelic events that make his characters question the nature of reality. But for all his mind-bending fiction, Murakami has also cultivated a strong collection of simple but powerful short stories. His collection After the Quake, published in 2000, features stories roughly associated with events following the 1995 earthquakes in Kobe, Japan. The stories reflect upon the unexpected events that can completely reshape ordinary life. The stories may initially read as breezy portraits of idiosyncratic characters, but look closer and you’ll see a depth of meaning behind every passage.  Even though the stories are translated from Murakami’s Japanese, they don’t seem to lose any narrative impact as they weave between the lives of Japanese people trying to cope with events beyond their control.