November 2025 short story leaderboard, final standings
4th edition now, I think.
Benjamin Georg Coles
3/11/202611 min read
Uploading this a bit late, but it’s not like anyone’s waiting, so yeah.
84 stories read this past November! Many that I’m sure will stay with me for the rest of my life.
The rules, as ever:
- No short stories I’ve read before.
- No more than one story per author (per year).
- Stories that finished in the top ten the previous year earn their authors the right to have another story read this year. (Authors whose stories didn’t make the top ten may of course get wildcards.)
- Generally, story selection to be determined by a mix of recommendations I’ve received or found, by my own whims and whatever happens to land in my lap at the right time, and of course by what I can get (free) access to, either online or in print.
On that last point, I could not – despite trying pretty hard – get access, either online or through the libraries around me, to any more short stories by Maurice Shadbolt, whose ‘The People Before’ finished at #4 last year – though it’s clear from bibliographies Shadbolt wrote multiple volumes of short stories. I had a similar problem last year or the year before with Carlos Fuentes. Especially as both these authors are long-dead, I find this a fucking outrage.
Anyway, here we go:
Big World (2004) by Tim Winton
Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (1979) by Alasdair Gray
The Surrogate (2003) by Tessa Hadley
Who Will Greet You at Home (2015) by Lesley Nneka Arimah
I'll Give You Barcelona (2023) by Blindboy Boatclub
The Necklace (1884) by Guy de Maupassant, translation by Jonathan Sturges
Orphans' Progress (1965) by Mavis Gallant
The Haunting of Hajji Hatok (2021) by Jamil Jan Kochai
My Name Is Not Malini (2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka
Big Blonde (1929) by Dorothy Parker
Prosinečki (2018) by Adrian Duncan
The American Brick Problem (2006) by Tash Aw
Europa (2013) by David Szalay
The Overcoat (1996) by Gina Berriault
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio (1933) by Ernest Hemingway
Doubtful Sound (2023) by Eleanor Catton
Orientation (2020) by Ben Pester
The Empty the Empty the Empty (2009) by Jenny Zhang
Winter in Abruzzi (1962) by Natalia Ginzburg, translation by Dick Davis
All Mothers Were The Same (1991) by Joseph O'Connor
The Island of the Immortals (1998) by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Englishman (2020) by Douglas Stuart
An Unashamed Proposal (2025) by Kiran Desai
Headlights (2009) by Samanta Schweblin, translation by Megan McDowell
The Soccer Balls of Mr Kurz (2023) by Michele Mari, translation by Brian Robert Moore
Letter to a Young Woman in Paris (1951) by Julio Cortázar, translation by Paul Blackburn
An Angel Passed Above Us (2025) by László Krasznahorkai, translation by George Szirtes
Happy Endings (1983) by Margaret Atwood
The Appropriation of Cultures (1996) by Percival Everett
Descendant (1987) by Iain M. Banks
My Best Soldier (1991) by Ha Jin
Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes (1951) by J. D. Salinger
The Destructors (1954) by Graham Greene
The Fugitive (2016) by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Story of Your Life (1998) by Ted Chiang
Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal (2013) by Banu Mushtaq, translation by Deepa Bhasthi
Why I Live at the P.O. (1941) by Eudora Welty
My Good Friend (2023) by Juliana Leite, translation by Zoë Perry
Elias (2025) by Jon Fosse, translation by Damian Searls
No Witchcraft for Sale (1952) by Doris Lessing
God's Children Are Little Broken Things (2016) by Arinze Ifeakandu
Some Rain Must Fall (1998) by Michel Faber
Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris (1962) by Edna O'Brien
Swimming Lessons (1987) by Rohinton Mistry
Jealous Husband Returns In Form of Parrot (1995) by Robert Olen Butler
Suicides (1938) by Cesare Pavese, translation by A. F. March
Just a Little Fever (2022) by Sheila Heti
Now More Than Ever (2018) by Zadie Smith
An Evening With The Author (2001) by Olga Tokarczuk, translation by Jennifer Croft
Man of the World (1956) by Frank O'Connor
Harmonica Hare (2014) by Yōko Ogawa, translation by Stephen Snyder
A Family Man (1977) by V. S. Pritchett
The Arriver's Tale (2016) by Abdulrazak Gurnah
A Slice of Life (1925) by Vladimir Nabokov, translation by Dmitri Nabokov
To All Their Dues (2018) by Wendy Erskine
The Affair of the Clasps (1896) by Maxim Gorky, translation by Vera Volkhovsky
Everything In This Country Must (2000) by Colum McCann
Uncle Ben's Choice (1966) by Chinua Achebe
The Walls (2011) by M. John Harrison
So Many Different Worlds (2021) by Anuk Arudpragasam
Gomez Palacio (2001) by Roberto Bolaño, translation by Chris Andrews
The Alphabet of Trees (2017) by Paul Lynch
Figures in the Distance (1983) by Jamaica Kincaid
The Era (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Intimacy (2025) by Ayşegül Savaş
Jackals and Arabs (1919) by Franz Kafka, translation by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
Monkfish Moon (1992) by Romesh Gunesekera
Jewellery (1954) by Alberto Moravia, translation by Angus Davidson
The Dragon-Ship (2016) by Paul Murray
Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale (1978) by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, translation by Susan Perry Alexander
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (1968) by J. G. Ballard
How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche? (1985) by Lorrie Moore
Smote (Or When I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley) (2015) by Eley Williams
Emma Lunz (1948) by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Andrew Hurley
Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament (1984) by Clive Barker
Artificial Flowers (1962) by Gabriel García Márquez, translation by J. S. Bernstein
The Feather Pillow (1907) by Horacio Quiroga, translation by Margaret Sayers Peden
Adrift (1996) by Koji Suzuki, translation by Glynne Walley
Erostratus (1939) by Jean-Paul Sartre, translation by Lloyd Alexander
Two Words (1989) by Isabel Allende, translation by Margaret Sayers Peden
Lieland (2010) by Etgar Keret, translation by Miriam Schlesinger
The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1898) by H. G. Wells
The Doll (1937) by Daphne du Maurier
My Greatest Ambition (1984) by Morris Lurie
I loved the Winton so much I wanted to read more by him ASAP, and happened to come across his novel Breath at the International Bazar bookstall. Big World, in retrospect, seems like a bit of a practice run for Breath, so if you like the one, consider checking out the other. A friend of mine, a novel-writer, recently said to me that short stories are more easily perfect than novels are. I think that’s true – and, from a certain point of view, obviously true: the smaller the scale, the less there is to go wrong. To my mind ‘Big World’ was a perfect story. Breath was not quite perfect, but had more to offer than ‘Big World’ did. Much more, in fact. Perfection isn’t everything.
The Gray contains possibly more creativity than I’ve ever before encountered in a single short story. I struggled a bit to get my bearing at the very start, but then it was a thrill and an education to read.
‘The Surrogate’ – I’ve been very impressed by all the Hadley stories I’ve head – it felt like only a matter of time before I found one that resonated with me majorly, and here it is.
The Blindboy Boatclub – there’s always an extra excitement for me to discovering stories that are dealing with absolutely contemporary themes, contemporary problems, contemporary mindsets, and this one is also in plain language, constantly entertaining, full of personality and local colour.
The Maupassant – another one that I don’t hesitate to call perfect.
The Szalay… Took me in totally. Loved the subtlety and lack of subtlety in the concluding image.
The Hemingway! This little episode felt far from the usual focus of literary attention, but so vibrant, so precious. Most stories tell me, implicitly, ‘just get out and live, with an open mind and open heart’ – this one especially.
The Kochai… I’ve often had this thought that, if you really know someone deeply, thoroughly, you can’t help but love them, in some important way. This was the ideal narrativisation of that thought.
The Duncan and the Mari – I’ve longed for football-themed literary fiction, and these two are wonderful and very different examples. I don’t think I agree with the grand philosophical conclusion to ‘Prosinečki’, but that hardly matters. I so appreciated the way in which said grand philosophical conclusion was crafted/derived from the material of an intricate football-playing journey. The Mari, meanwhile, struck me as a fun, innocent, even slightly frivolous story – frivolous just in the sense of not very serious, with no judgement implied on whether that’s good or bad. I think such frivolity – which is certainly not pure here – has its place in storytelling, for sure. I was very happy to see that such a story got published in The Paris Review.
‘The American Brick Problem’ – the immeasurable human cost of so much ‘progress’. Global North colliding with Global South, the youngsters caught in between. The care and the terrible lapses of care.
‘Doubtful Sound’ – felt relief and gratitude, finding this state of mind so well-captured in a story.
The Cortázar – This gave me an extreme feeling of delight – of a kind I perhaps often experienced as a child, but rarely do now.
The Krasznahorkai – great concept, well-executed, and yet it felt to me almost like cheating, not a real story. Because all the power is in the frame, and the remaining 98% is just like an unexceptional rant about the wonders of technological progess and human development.
In the Zhang, a certain kind of pre-adolescent voice and mentality was captured uncannily well, I thought.
The Joseph O’Connor… the writing seemed to me so-so in the opening pages, and then the story just grew and grew and it seemed to me a great and important story by the end – even if I struggled to fully buy one crucial element, the narrator’s obliviousness, from the middle on. Maybe that’s the point in time I’m reading from though.
The Everett… This was the rare story that proposes an ingenious solution to a big problem. Sure, in the key of comedy, rather than manifesto. Makes you think though.
The Leite… seemed slight when I first read it, but thinking about it afterwards, I felt more and more appreciative of it.
The Fosse… A study of loneliness that, at times, bored me a little, but then that boredom perhaps worked to make the end affect stronger.
The Ha Jin and the Lessing struck me as alike in that they’re both, in their set-up and tone too, just great personal anecdotes. Simple, unpretentious, powerful bits of observation, yet also slightly amusing, and very personably told.
The Mushtaq – I read the first few pages with a lot of excitement, so much so that, when I found I couldn’t access the rest of the story online, I went out and bought a hard copy of the collection Heart Lamp. It was a good story, but I felt it didn’t really live up to that initial excitement. I’ve since read the whole collection, and there were several stories in it that struck far more of a chord with me. ‘Fire Rain’, ‘A Decision of the Heart’, ‘Black Cobras’ and the title story, certainly.
The Chiang is great – so well-researched and conceptually intriguing – but felt very constructed, very artificial to me, and that was most visible in the name change of the father/husband, which was done purely to conceal the big twist, and which there isn’t any attempt to justify – as far as I can see. The Michel Faber, also, lost marks with me because it felt overly constructed.
‘Man of the World’ by Frank O’Connor – it was something about the tone, the arc, the feel that was too similar to other O’Connor stories I’ve read. Yeah, it felt to me just a bit emotionally repetitive, though it is a great story.
The Gurnah probably shouldn’t be on this list, as it is, if I understand rightly, closer to a lightly edited dictation taken of a real refugee’s story. It’s a clear, pointed, important testimony, for sure.
The Arudpragasam didn’t do all that much for me, but there were flashes of the magic that I found in another of his stories, ‘The Visit’, a few months before. I wanted to read something by Arudpragasam because of that story, which blew my mind. Immediately an all-time favourite. Would have been top of this list if I’ve read it in November. And, amazingly, it’s a novel extract, I think. So a rule I was considering to ban novel extracts from my short story reading season has been ditched.
The Eley Williams… beloved of A Personal Anthology guest editors, but I just couldn’t… I couldn’t even understand some of it or feel all that motivated to try hard to. Virtuosic, I suppose it is. Very intellectual and literary. Abstruse, I can say with confidence. I found the word ‘bourgeois’ coming to mind too – which I can’t remember ever happening before when reading a story. Maybe if I’d approached it with a different level or kind of attention I’d have felt differently.
The Barker… There was something impressive about this, but it did seem very silly to me as well.
The Wells… I quite liked the very start, I saw the skill there, but no, it was a dud from Wells this time. Predictable, two-dimensional. I could imagine myself writing it, and being frustrated that I couldn’t do anything more interesting with it.
The Lurrie… a fine little story, fun, but a lot of it felt like boasting of how special he was, or like self-mythologising maybe. Relatedly, there wasn’t much depth to it, that I could see.
LOOKING BACK ON LAST YEAR…
‘In the Hills, the Cities’ (#13) needs to be higher – mad, shocking story.
The feelings of ‘Nnabuike’ (#27) have really stayed with me. That one also needs to be nearer the top.
I suppose that means at least a couple have got to come down, but I’m not sure which they should be… I guess the Sally Rooney and Edna O’Brien could both come down a little, not much though.
The others seem about right, from the perspective of me as I am right now.
MY ALL-TIME FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES
So, including stories I read in November of 2024, but not any I read in this just-past November. (I’ll see how those ones sink in.)
Ordered alphabetically (by author’s name):
- In a Bamboo Grove (1922) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translation by Jay Rubin
- The Visit (2025) by Anuk Arapagasam
- The Stone Boy (1957) by Gina Berriault
- The Corpse Exhibition (2014) by Hassam Blasim, translation by Jonathan Wright
- Clara (1997) by Roberto Bolaño, translation by Chris Andrews
- Last Evenings on Earth (1997) by Roberto Bolaño, translation by Chris Andrews
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Alastair Reid
- The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915) by Ivan Bunin, translation by D. H. Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf
- The adventure of the married couple (1970) by Italo Calvino, translation by William Weaver
- The Burning of the Abominable House (1973) by Italo Calvino, translation by Tim Parks
- The Chance (1979) by Peter Carey
- Why Don't You Dance? (1978) by Raymond Carver
- Axolotl (1956) by Julio Cortázar, translation by Paul Blackburn
- The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story (1877) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
- The Bible (1943) by Marguerite Duras, translation by Deborah Treisman
- Track (2017) by Nicole Flattery
- The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster
- Twenty-Six and One (1899) by Maxim Gorky, translation by Ivan Strannik
- Town of Cats (1935) by Sakutarō Hagiwara, translation by Jeffrey Angles
- Egnaro (1981) by M. John Harrison
- Cicisbeo (2003) by M. John Harrison
- The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1937) by Ernest Hemingway
- My Life Is A Joke (2015) by Sheila Heti
- The Daemon Lover (1949) by Shirley Jackson
- Eveline (1914) by James Joyce
- A Painful Case (1914) by James Joyce
- The Dead (1914) by James Joyce
- A Hunger Artist (1922) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Before the Law (1915) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (1924) by Franz Kafka, translations by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir
- Blue Notebook, No. 10 (1937) by Daniil Kharms, translation by Robert Chandler
- The Hitchhiking Game (1963) by Milan Kundera, translation by Suzanne Rappaport
- The Second Hut (1951) by Doris Lessing
- The Town Manager (2003) by Thomas Ligotti
- The Paper Menagerie (2011) by Ken Liu
- The Husband Stich (2014) by Carmen Maria Machado
- Toba Tek Singh (1955) by Saadat Hasan Manto, translation by Khalid Hasan
- Light Is Like Water (1978) by Gabriel García Márquez, translation by Edith Grossman
- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children (1955) by Gabriel García Márquez, translation by Gregory Rabassa
- Sister Imelda (1981) by Edna O'Brien
- Guests of the Nation (1931) by Frank O'Connor
- Orientation (1994) by Daniel Orozco
- The Return (1946) by Andrei Platonov, translation by Robert Chandler
- I Used to Live Here Once (1976) by Jean Rhys
- Cat Person (2017) by Kristen Roupenian
- For Esmé - with Love and Squalor (1950) by J. D. Salinger
- The People Before (1963) by Maurice Shadbolt
- Two Men Arrive in a Village (2016) by Zadie Smith
- The Postmaster (1891) by Rabindranath Tagore, translation by Utsa Bose
- Seams (2021) by Olga Tokarczuk, translation by Jennifer Croft
- The Ballroom of Romance (1972) by William Trevor
- The Dressmaker's Daughter (2004) by William Trevor
- You (2019) by Debbie Urbanski
- The Depressed Person (1998) by David Foster Wallace
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20 (1998) by David Foster Wallace
- The Door in the Wall (1906) by H. G. Wells
- The Country of the Blind (1904) by H. G. Wells
- The Pearl of Love (1925) by H. G. Wells
- The Happy Prince (1888) by Oscar Wilde
- Thank You (2013) by Alejandro Zambra, translation by Megan McDowell
- Rentafoil (1866) by Émile Zola, translation by Douglas Parmée