15 Excellent 2023 Short Story Collections by Asian Authors

In this captivating debut collection, we follow the interconnected stories of three families over decades as they seek to reinvent themselves and create better lives in the bustling city of Bangkok. What results is a visionary and multifaceted portrait of a city at odds with itself — a city desperately trying to keep up appearances to match a modern, capitalist world while hiding brutal truths under the surface.

Jai Chakrabarti, the award-winning author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, examines family in its varied shapes. The people in these stories navigate the intersections of race, religion, and culture and balance the costs and gains to build the families they seek.

Two years ago, Izumi Suzuki’s work was published in English for the first time in the collection Terminal Boredom. This second collection gives English language readers even more of her inventive and atmospheric stories that explore life on the outskirts using science fiction and fantasy elements.

Praised by Booklist as a “virtually perfect [debut],” The Sorrows of Others is a brilliant collection about outsiders, in various senses of the word. These stories are set in both China and the United States, following the Cultural Revolution, highlighting the lives of those confronting loneliness and longing. With writing that is simultaneously muted and powerful, Zhang is definitely a writer to be watching out for.

Happy Stories, Mostly was longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2022 and introduces readers to a rising queer voice from Indonesia. As the title suggests, these are stories about happiness…almost. Combining speculative and absurdist elements, Pasaribu explores the Indonesian queer experience and what it means to find joy seemingly within reach, but in the end being just too far to fully grasp.

Spanning past, present, and future, the stories of When the Hibiscus Falls sweep across generations of Filipino and Filipino American women and reflect on the connecting threads between them. From acclaimed author and activist M. Evelina Galang, this collection is a beautiful and contemplative meditation on identity and community.

In her 2020 novel Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang presented a delicate yet powerful portrait of a young Asian American woman trying to understand herself and her place in the world. An element that particularly stood out in Chang’s writing was her skill at capturing the complexities and dynamics of relationships. And in her first short story collection, she again examines relationships — how they are shaped, what we give for them, and what we take away.

In these 11 stories, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto gives readers a look at a Hawai’i beyond the tropical vacation destination. Instead we are presented with a Hawai’i brimming with mythology and ancestral wisdom, as seen through the eyes of the mixed Kanaka Maoli and Japanese young women who call the islands home. It is a gorgeous collection that contemplates ideas of womanhood, Hawaiian culture and identity, and how history shapes the present.

Kang Young-sook is an award-winning writer in South Korea who focuses on female consciousness explored through a range of genres, including fantasy, urban noir, and ecofiction. In this collection, characters experiencing various ecological disasters in their urban environments grapple with loss, instability, and impending catastrophe.

Esteemed author Paul Yoon’s third short story collection reaches far and wide between time and place to illustrate the sheer expanse and intricacy of diaspora. From Japan to Barcelona, from Russia to New York, Yoon weaves complex tales of belonging and identity, of cultures clashing and building upon each other to create the multitudes that exist within communities.

In the newest short story collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, readers are introduced to the city of Rome, not just as the location where these stories take place but as a major character in them. Lahiri conducts a deep examination of the city from the lesser-known perspective of foreignness, presenting an honest, complicated, but still beautiful, picture of Rome as experienced by immigrants and outsiders.

From SJ Sindu, known for her novels Marriage of a Thousand Lies and Blue-Skinned Gods, comes a new collection of provocative and exciting stories that indelibly capture our current moment in time with sharpness and humor. Readers will find a wide range of stories, from the realistic to the more speculative and covering topics like social media, racial violence, and the pandemic.

From the award-winning author of the novel On Fragile Waves, this book is a hefty collection of 22 short stories about living in a world that is so inexplicably beautiful and so inexplicably cruel, so filled with wonder and mystery and suffering. One of the highlights of the collection is the story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” about a colony of wasps whose nests unfold into gorgeous maps, and who must find and establish a new home. The story, originally published over a decade ago, was a nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award, and is an excellent illustration of the skill, innovation, and perceptiveness present in all of Yu’s stories.

The stories of generations of Arab women through history, from Lebanese revolutionaries to Syrian refugees, converge in Azurée, a young woman contending with her ancestral past and her Arab identity. Drawing from her own family’s Lebanese and Syrian roots, Estima paints an intimate and deeply compassionate portrait of the Arab immigrant experience in this collection of interconnected stories exploring family, love, faith, loss, and more.