# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published October 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-best-translated-short-story-collections*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Burning Plain** — score 1000/1000
   Juan Rulfo's spare, haunted stories of rural Mexico after the Revolution.
2. **Ficciones** — score 999/1000
   Jorge Luis Borges's labyrinthine 1944 stories of infinite libraries, forking paths and invented books.
3. **Kafka: Collected Stories** — score 862/1000
   Franz Kafka's short fiction gathered in one volume, from The Judgment to A Hunger Artist.
4. **Palm-of-the-Hand Stories** — score 862/1000
   Yasunari Kawabata's tiny, luminous stories written over four decades.
5. **Strange Pilgrims** — score 819/1000
   Gabriel García Márquez's twelve stories of Latin Americans adrift in Europe.
6. **Selected Stories of Chekhov** — score 742/1000
   The Russian master's understated tales of ordinary lives, small disappointments and quiet epiphanies.
7. **Singer: Collected Stories** — score 742/1000
   Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish tales of demons, dybbuks and Jewish Poland.
8. **Mouthful of Birds** — score 732/1000
   Samanta Schweblin's eerie, compact stories where menace creeps into domestic life.
9. **Call to Arms** — score 732/1000
   Lu Xun's pioneering 1923 collection that launched modern Chinese short fiction.
10. **The Elephant Vanishes** — score 568/1000
   Haruki Murakami's early stories of disappearances, odd jobs and quiet surrealism.
11. **Cosmicomics** — score 568/1000
   Italo Calvino's playful tales narrated by a shapeshifting witness to the birth of the universe.
12. **Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories** — score 568/1000
   Ryunosuke Akutagawa's sharp retellings of Japanese history and folklore, including the title tale.
13. **Last Evenings on Earth** — score 568/1000
   Roberto Bolaño's wandering poets, exiles and drifters in a bracing early collection.
14. **Blow-Up and Other Stories** — score 353/1000
   Julio Cortázar's unsettling tales where the everyday slips into the fantastic.
15. **Men Without Women** — score 353/1000
   Murakami's 2014 collection about loneliness, loss and the men left behind.
16. **Revenge** — score 353/1000
   Yoko Ogawa's eleven interlinked, chilling tales of obsession and strange coincidence.
17. **The Aleph** — score 218/1000
   Borges's 1949 collection built around a point in space that contains every other point.
18. **Lispector: The Complete Stories** — score 0/1000
   Clarice Lispector's intense, interior stories gathered in Katrina Dodson's celebrated translation.

Tags: books, fiction, short stories, translation