10 Short Story Collections by Asian Authors Released in 2020

At the heart of these 15 stories, spanning the U.S., India, and England, are characters who find themselves balancing deeply felt emotions with their professional lives. While these laborers, including bakers, engineers, journalists, and domestic servants, pursue money, power, love, or all three through their careers, they grapple with the challenges that arise around the clash of class, gender, and nationality.

From Singaporean sisters running a French restaurant in New York to a writers’ group in London, the characters in this collection of stories sweep readers into the world of the Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese diasporas in cities across the globe. The people in each story navigate friendships and family relationships as they confront the muddled space between cultures.

Between the author’s own hand-painted book covers is a collection of unique stories, including one about a Scottish fisherman who becomes obsessed with a crafty fish and another about successful Chinese women searching for relationships in a modern, urban Chinese society where the roles of men and women are rapidly evolving.

Filial piety, the model minority myth, and coming out to immigrant parents are just a few of the themes tackled by Vanessa Hua in her collection of stories centered around immigrant families in America. First published in 2016, Deceit and Other Possibilities was reissued in 2020 with three new stories.

Giving voice to members of the Korean diaspora, this collection features a variety of characters who are searching for a sense of home. From a teenager navigating life in the1980s to a suburban housewife interacting with a therapy robot, each character confronts a range of challenges including language barriers and generational culture differences.

Liu’s collection of science fiction and fantasy stories balance human emotions and old-world traditions with artificial intelligence, time travel, and dystopian principles. Readers are also rewarded with an excerpt from The Veiled Throne, the third book in the author’s Dandelion Dynasty series.

Dreams and reality converge in this debut collection of 12 stories set in both India and the U.S. From a newlywed who dreams of an alternate life as an escape from her marriage to a man who refuses to acknowledge her depression, to a woman who fights loneliness by “falling in” to Rothko paintings, Swamy’s characters bring readers deep into their worlds as they wrestle with life’s most intense emotions.

The lives of Laotian refugees are brought to life in Thammavongsa’s stories, featuring men, women, and children finding their place in North America. Thammavongsa explores the feelings of alienation that arise among refugees who are working hard to succeed while searching for their identities in the space between two languages, cultures, and value systems.

This collection of very short stories—most of them fewer than five pages—feature encounters between family and strangers that encompass a wide range of experiences, including a set of Iranian American parents discussing their daughter’s homework assignment on English idioms and two strangers in a coffee shop debating war. While the characters are mostly Iranian American, the stories’ focus on connectedness offers universal appeal.

Divided into two sets of stories, this collection is told from the perspective of sansei, third generation Japanese Americans who either experienced the Second World War internment camps or who had parents or grandparents who did. The first set of stories digs deep into the cultural challenges of sansei, while the second set explores themes inspired by Jane Austen’s literature, such as familial and societal expectations, in a more light-hearted tone.