The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners

These twenty stories do not require something fancy like a projector and a big screen. These twenty show what happens when writers fish in the rivers of their own imagination. from Introduction by Edward P. Jones

I loved these short stories. Some were by writers I had read before: Wendell Berry, Dave Eggers, Anthony Marra, Alice Hoffman. Most of the authors were new to me and I was pleased to be introduced to their work.

Only then, with a great deal of distance, could she look back and bear witness to that which once hovered above her. from Blackbirds by Lindsey Drager.

It was fun to read “The Pleasure of a Working Life” by Michael Deagler for it’s Philadelphia setting and mentions of locations I once knew quite well. Likewise, show more Lindsey Drager’s “Blackbirds” set in Michigan.

Other stories took me into lives and settings beyond my personal experience like “Sickled” by Jane Kalu, set in Enugu.

Anthony Marra’s “Countdown” takes a character from his novel The Tsar of Love and Techno set during the Russian-Chechen conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine inspired him to consider the character’s later life. In the story, Alexei and his wife and child endeavor to flee from Russia. It is a tense, stressful journey that kept my stomach in a knot. The ending just gutted me.

I enjoy short stories for their slice of life and for the truths they relate.

She does not tell you that she loves you, nor does she tell you that everything is going to be okay, because both of you are past believing things like that. And as the sun climbs over the lip of the sky, and the two of you watch its ascent, gold filling the corner of your apartment, you begin to understand that there is only this moment, and then the next, and then the next, and that the only thing to do in the meantime is to keep on living. from The Arrow by Gina Chung

Thanks to Vintage for a free book. show less