The 18 Best Translated Short Story Collections

Fabulists, realists and ghost-story minimalists, all read in someone else's words. Pick the volume you would hand to a friend who has never opened a translated book.

1. 1
   The Burning Plain

   Juan Rulfo's spare, haunted stories of rural Mexico after the Revolution.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Ficciones

   Jorge Luis Borges's labyrinthine 1944 stories of infinite libraries, forking paths and invented books.
   999pts
3. 3
   Kafka: Collected Stories

   Franz Kafka's short fiction gathered in one volume, from The Judgment to A Hunger Artist.
   862pts
4. 4
   Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

   Yasunari Kawabata's tiny, luminous stories written over four decades.
   862pts
5. 5
   Strange Pilgrims

   Gabriel García Márquez's twelve stories of Latin Americans adrift in Europe.
   819pts
6. 6
   Selected Stories of Chekhov

   The Russian master's understated tales of ordinary lives, small disappointments and quiet epiphanies.
   742pts
7. 7
   Singer: Collected Stories

   Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish tales of demons, dybbuks and Jewish Poland.
   742pts
8. 8
   Mouthful of Birds

   Samanta Schweblin's eerie, compact stories where menace creeps into domestic life.
   732pts
9. 9
   Call to Arms

   Lu Xun's pioneering 1923 collection that launched modern Chinese short fiction.
   732pts
10. 10
    The Elephant Vanishes

    Haruki Murakami's early stories of disappearances, odd jobs and quiet surrealism.
    568pts
11. 11
    Cosmicomics

    Italo Calvino's playful tales narrated by a shapeshifting witness to the birth of the universe.
    568pts
12. 12
    Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

    Ryunosuke Akutagawa's sharp retellings of Japanese history and folklore, including the title tale.
    568pts
13. 13
    Last Evenings on Earth

    Roberto Bolaño's wandering poets, exiles and drifters in a bracing early collection.
    568pts
14. 14
    Blow-Up and Other Stories

    Julio Cortázar's unsettling tales where the everyday slips into the fantastic.
    353pts
15. 15
    Men Without Women

    Murakami's 2014 collection about loneliness, loss and the men left behind.
    353pts
16. 16
    Revenge

    Yoko Ogawa's eleven interlinked, chilling tales of obsession and strange coincidence.
    353pts
17. 17
    The Aleph

    Borges's 1949 collection built around a point in space that contains every other point.
    218pts
18. 18
    Lispector: The Complete Stories

    Clarice Lispector's intense, interior stories gathered in Katrina Dodson's celebrated translation.
    0pts

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