Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2025

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.

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Before he sits down to write each day, Pravesh Bhardwaj seeks inspiration in the form of short stories freely available to read online. Often, he’ll tag stories #longreads and post them to X for others to enjoy. Of the 217 stories he shared in 2024, here are the 10 he enjoyed most. 

“Presence” by Gina Chung (Electric Literature)

Gina Chung is a Korean American author based in New York City. Her debut novel, Sea Change, was published in 2023. “Presence” appears in her 2024 short story collection, Green Frog.

After Leo left, I had trouble keeping track of myself.

I had just moved into a new apartment, and I felt like I was existing in an endless twilight. I would drift off for a nap in the living room, only to find myself standing in the kitchen, washing a dish I didn’t remember using. Or I would leave a cut of meat to defrost in my shining, empty refrigerator and forget it was there for days, until the sour smell of old blood dripping into the crisper reached my nose. I lay on my couch and watched car headlights and long shadows chase one another across my ceiling as the hours went by, listening to Billie Holiday and sipping whiskey. Leo had loved Billie Holiday, owned every album she’d ever made on vinyl. I wondered where all those records were now, if they were collecting dust in storage somewhere, or if they were still nestled in the built-in bookshelves in our old apartment.

The money from my divorce settlement would last me for a while, but not forever, and although I knew this, had tallied up the remaining numbers in my accounts to determine how long I’d be able to go without seeking new employment, I couldn’t bring myself to begin the process of starting afresh. Despite the genericness of my name, Amy Hwang, even the most negligent recruiter or hiring manager could find out everything they needed to know about my connections to Gnoss and its founder with even a cursory Google search.

I stared into the abyss of my past accomplishments, listed row by row on a CV that I had once been so pleased about, so proud of compiling, like a house I had laid brick by brick. Now I felt as though I was staring out through the bars of a locked window in that same house, imprisoned by the vestiges of a life that would never be mine again.

“Matrimony” by Adams Adeosun (Isele Magazine)

Adams Adeosun is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a 2023 MacDowell fellow. The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing has named him the recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Friday evenings, at six, Romola balanced her account at MRS Filling Station and caught a taxi to Riverside Hotel & Bar, where she worked until midnight. She was a pump attendant every day, a waitress only on Friday nights, she told her customers when they asked why she wasn’t more frequent at the bar. The clientele was largely married men, their mistresses, and bachelors who arrived lonely, already half-drunk, planning to entice the waitresses with wallets placed on tables where disco lights illuminated them. 

At first, Romola told her Riverside customers that she was also a pump attendant because she hoped it would increase patronage and, in turn, her monthly bonuses at MRS. When this did not happen, she continued to say it anyway because it made them laugh. They would pause for a second as if she had insulted them, then open their drunk mouths wide, the noise out of them a train’s chugging. But Aisha wasn’t laughing even though Romola had found a way to shoehorn her other job into their pleasantries. She stared into the empty glass Romola had brought her and, on finding it crusted with washing detergent, inverted it on the table.

“I can get you another one,” Romola said.

“I can’t imagine how hard that must be.”

“It’s not difficult at all. We have cleaner glasses at the counter.”

“No, not that. I mean working two jobs where you never sit down.” Aisha drank her Guinness straight from the bottle. Gold, another waitress, liked to say that two kinds of people ordered the dark, bitter beer: diabolical men and women at rock bottom.

“I sit behind the counter when it’s not busy.”

“It’s not busy now. I want you to sit with me.”

“The manager won’t like that.”

“Last Coffeehouse on Travis” by Bryan Washington (The New Yorker)

Bryan Washington’s novels include Memorial (2020) and Family Meal (2023), which won a Lambda Literary Award. His short story collection, Lot, was published in 2019.

For a few months, I stayed with my aunt’s friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there. Now it’s filled with condos, and they’re all a trillion dollars a month. But, in those days, she owned the house, and also a coffeehouse a few blocks away.

I was too broke to pay rent, so every morning saw me behind the counter. This was the arrangement. I’d just broken up with my ex—a doctor with legible handwriting, an ungenerous top—because he was moving to Austin and I wasn’t down to do that.

Margo lived with her young son, Walter. Sometimes he went by Walt, the name his father called him, but his father was gone. My aunt had introduced the two of them to me as her Good Friends, which meant they’d either met at church or been involved in some kind of beauty-shop gossip entanglement—but, when I was standing in their doorway, effectively unhoused, none of that had mattered to me.

Walter looked up at me with absolute disdain. Margo only shrugged.

I really appreciate your hospitality, I said, nearly bowing.

Don’t call it that, Margo said. It’s a favor. Your aunt will pay it back.

This made my aunt’s eye twitch. But it wasn’t a lie. I’d been living with her for a while, and, ever since she’d walked in on me sucking off a hookup in her living room, every word she lobbed my way felt loaded. So she smiled, pushing me forward a bit.

You’ll hardly even notice him, she said, rubbing my back. He’s no trouble.

Better not be, Margo said.

“Mare’s Milk” by Daniel Mason (Harper’s Magazine)

Daniel Mason is an American physician. His works include The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)—which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and North Woods (2023).

On the first of June, 1901, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, a doctor and writer of short stories and plays, a famous man who also suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines, sat at a table, surrounded by other consumptives, before a bottle of mare’s milk and an enameled tin cup.

It was his first morning in Aksionovo, at the Andreev sanatorium, a thousand miles from Moscow. He had come with his wife, Olga, on the recommendation of a specialist, who, two weeks prior, had told him in no uncertain terms that great measures needed to be taken, both lungs were damaged with irreversible necrosis, no longer could he expect to forestall the bacillus by simply wintering in Yalta. He had two choices—Switzerland, or koumiss, mare’s milk, fermented by Bashkir herdsmen, and renowned in circles both fashionable and medical for its curative effects.

Count Tolstoy, added the specialist, had also been to Bashkiria, many times, for his nerves.

Chekhov thought of Tolstoy as an ignorant crank who held too many opinions on topics that he knew nothing about, particularly scientific ones—and as a writer of such perfection and beauty as to validate the entire existence of literature itself.

“The Fragrant Conscious World” by Rachel Lyon (Bennington Review)

Rachel Lyon is a novelist in Western Massachusetts. Self-Portrait with Boy (2018) was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Fruit of the Dead (2024) was named a most anticipated book by Elle, Oprah Daily, and People.

When the test results came back no one was surprised. Kitty had been acting strangely for years. Warren’s mother called to tell him. He was in the middle of a shift at the restaurant but by then he was sick enough of the job that he’d taken to going out the back entrance for smoke breaks whenever there was a rush, though he didn’t smoke. Needless to say, his coworkers loathed him. When he stepped out to take the call by the recycling bins of cardboard boxes and wine bottles, through the slow-closing door one of them gave him the finger. She was a pocked-face girl with an exquisite neck tattoo. He’d never bothered to learn her name. He gave her the finger back, then felt guilty about it.

Listen, Wren, his mother said. Nana Kitty has Alzheimer’s.

The Chicago wind blew hard into the phone, releasing tears from his eyes.

Hello? said his mother.

I’m here, he said.

She said, I think you should come home and take care of her.

What? Me? Why?

Who else is there? his mother asked.

You?

I have a job, Warren.

So do I, Mother.

Barely. Come on. You hate your roommates, you hate your room, you hate the commute, you hate the cold. You’ve been in Chicago two years—

Sixteen months, he said.

—and you haven’t found your footing. It’s not your ecosystem, bud. Why don’t you come home?

What about a home health aide? he said.

Do you know how much that would cost?

I’m not going to do it for free.

I’ll pay you a hundred dollars a week. You’ll have your own room, rent-free. You can save up to go back to school.

“A Knife at the Throat” by Doug Crandell (The Sun Magazine)

Georgia-based Doug Crandell is the author of many books including They’re Calling You Home (2012) and The Flawless Skin of Ugly People (2007). His story “Shanty Falls,” which appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2019, was chosen for the Best American Mystery Stories 2020. He received a Pushcart Prize in 2017.

It was spring, and the river bottom teemed with larks. Groundhog burrows along the banks flashed with furry brown, their holes deep enough for fence posts. My older brother Curt and I shucked off our T-shirts and braved the cold gusts of an April morning in Indiana—anything to avoid a farmer’s tan that would label us as rednecks.

Our parents were behind on mortgage payments, and we needed to plow and disk almost ninety acres of rich black loam to avoid foreclosure on the farm, which had never truly been ours in the first place. Our folks had agreed to a high-interest loan with the previous owner and then taken out more loans from the bank to pay for seed, tractor repairs, and diesel fuel. Now there was drought in the forecast. We knew it, and the bank knew it, too. The day’s field work ahead of us was only an exercise in staving off the inevitable. Still, Curt explained to me how we’d get it done: “You take the first thirty acres with the plow, and I’ll follow you with the disc.” He handed me a thermos of coffee, the goose bumps on his pale forearms like sprouts searching for the sun.

Curt was seventeen, and I was fourteen. Going shirtless in the cold spring air and drinking the strong, sugary black coffee was our attempt at manhood. But there was something else going on in our lives more important than our efforts to become men: Curt’s best friend, Randall, had been diagnosed with cancer. His was one of several cases in the western part of the county. A “cluster.” There were rumors that pesticides were the cause: the groundwater laced with them, the poison leaching into wells. We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.

“A Child’s Smile” by Jadd Hilal (Words Without Borders)

(Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud)

In “A Child’s Smile,” Jadd Hilal interweaves the lives of four generations of women from a family that has fled to Lebanon after their Palestinian city was violently invaded by the Haganah. Hilal earned his PhD in literature in 2011. He lives in a suburb of Paris, where he teaches high school philosophy and literature.

My father was a hard man. Hard on everyone. It saved our lives one night, in Shefa’Amr. My parents and I were sleeping in neighboring bedrooms. My nightmares had given me the courage to crawl into their bed and risk my father’s stern look. After a few minutes, unable to fall asleep, I saw a figure enter the room and hunch down in one corner. It struck me as odd, its shadow looming large, but I wasn’t worried. Why would someone enter our home and not another? And why this room? To steal? There was plenty to take in the living room, where, for that matter, there was nobody. Not very strategic really.

Then I understood. That was where my father kept his rifle, an impressive weapon about whose accuracy he used to loudly brag—too loudly, clearly—all over town. I cried out, “Papa! A thief!”

The show began. My father leapt from the bed, as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all, and flung the stranger backward. The gun fell to the floor. The man’s face became visible in the semidarkness. He seemed surprised, frozen in place, by the tremendous strength contained in such a small body. He remained that way for a second, then ran from the room. My father grabbed the rifle and set off after him. His short legs moving like a centipede’s. I followed them. And I smiled. Again.

“Bartow Station” by Jamel Brinkley (Boston Review)

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023). His collection, A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), won a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

Jimmy shakes his massive head and frowns. “Are you kidding me, bro? You don’t listen so good, do you?” When I don’t respond, he adds, “Don’t talk so good either.”

We sit side by side on a bench in the locker room. Tying our laces. Most of the other guys are already in their uniforms.

“This dude,” Jimmy says, projecting like an actor on a stage. “Gets hired off the street like a damn unicorn and then comes in wearing some roach-stompers.”

A couple of the other guys laugh, but most of them ignore Jimmy. They seem annoyed by him, and suspicious of me.

“And those socks,” he says, shaking his head again. “White’s no bueno. They gotta be black or they gotta be brown. UPS is military, bro. Atten-hut!” He stiffens and salutes.

I don’t say anything.

“For real, get you some new shoes, quick, or your feet are fucked. I mean, they gonna end up fucked anyway, but still—”

“This is just a gig, man,” I tell him. “I’m not here to collect a pension or anything.”

“Bro, what the hell, lower your voice when you say some shit like that. People kill for these jobs.”

The buzz of other conversations fills the room. As some guys start leaving, it slowly drains away.

Jimmy gives me a meaningful look. “You run fast, bro?” His head tilts left and then right, as if his neck can’t hold it. “Fucking dog chased me in Bushwick. German shepherd. Looked like a sweetheart at first but then”—snap—“went rabid just like that.”

More guys file out of the locker room. The morning meeting is downstairs.

“You run fast, bro?” Jimmy repeats. I nod. I do run fast.

“The Prepper” by Morgan Talty (Narrative)

Morgan Talty teaches at University of Maine and is a citizen of Penobscot Indian Nation. His debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez, was published in 2023 and won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and the New England Book Award, among others.

“Mahčawi-áwαssis” is how Mom starts her letters. Unusual child, she began to call me when I was sentenced. “Kosemol”—I love you—was always part of the letters, but it was never the last thing she wrote. She ended each letter with “Aməssanínαkwat.” It is a disgrace. I never knew, and still don’t, what she meant by “it.” Maybe if I hadn’t done what I did to my grandfather (he was dying, for Chrissakes, and he made me believe), if he hadn’t been part of my crimes, her letters would end only with “kosemol.”

I was more sick in the head back then. And if I were eligible for parole, that’s exactly what I’d tell the Maine board.

I don’t know when it started, my illness, my not feeling right. As a child? A young adult? In middle school on the rez I took a vow of silence after a white teacher told me to stop answering so many questions in history class. Almost two years I didn’t talk. I mean, I did, alone and sometimes with my grandfather, who I know relayed my words to my worried mother—my mother who perhaps relayed them on long-distance calls to my father, who couldn’t care less about me—but I never spoke to anyone else. When I broke my silence it was not even on my behalf. I spoke without thinking. I was walking the rez roads down to a social (I wanted ribs from the BBQ) when I realized a truck carrying dirt was about to hit a small girl and I yelled—screamed, really, with all that I had held in for two years—for her to move. She did. It just came out of me—I’d had no control. I felt so bad I’d broken my vow that that night I kneeled in front of the open woodstove, flames licking at my face, and thought about sticking my head into the fire as punishment. But my grandfather was there, he was always there, always always, and he said to me, “Why would you want to do that, gwus? You saved a life.”

“Audition” by Yasmin Adele Majeed (Joyland Magazine)

Yasmin Adele Majeed is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Kundiman fellow. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, American Short Fiction, the Asian American Literary Review.

My mother always claims my first memory of her is a false one, but I have never believed her. The memory stuck, and it stuck because it’s true. I was four years old; we were living in the apartment complex in Alhambra with crooked palms in the courtyard. It was my birthday. I wore my favorite dress and was seated in the kitchen with my father, the ice cream cake dotted with wax, and a pile of  plucked candles. I don’t remember blowing them out, or what I wished for, or when I realized my mother was gone, just that my father asked me to find her and it felt like a game. Where did she go? Was she behind the radiator, where I once fell asleep during hide-and-seek? Was she crouched in the leaking shower or under the rose-printed bedspread or tucked into some corner of the pantry?

The apartment was small and it didn’t take me long to figure out she wasn’t hiding there. But I refused to return to my father as a failure.

I was in my bedroom when I saw her through the window. She was on the curb, watching the cars. Far enough away that when I knocked at the glass, I knew she could not hear. But still, a moment later, she turned and I saw that she was crying. Even as a child, I could read the look on her face clearly. She did not want to come back.

But she did. 

Check out all of Pravesh’s previous recommendations. 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015. Follow along with his 2025 X thread.

Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).