Do you like reading or are trying to get back into it, but don't have the time or focus for a long novel right now? Short stories may be just the cure for you. Here is a book list of short stories collections by Black authors exploring many diverse topics such as dating, race, sexuality, insecurities, and more. 

The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley

Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories—heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals. Touching and contemplative, each of these unexpected stories offers the best of one of our most gifted writers.

 

LOT: Stories by Bryan Washington

Coming of age in his family's Houston restaurant, a mixed-heritage teen navigates bullying, his newly discovered sexual orientation, and the ripple effects of a disadvantaged community impacted by an affair, a youth baseball season, and displaced hurricane survivors. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

 

 

Five Carat Soul byJames McBride

The stories in Five-Carat Soul spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They're funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic—all told with McBride's unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail. McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.

 

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?  By Kathleen Collins

Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins's stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues of race, gender, family, and sexuality that shape the ordinary moments in our lives. Also known as an artist and filmmaker, her stories create full-bodied men, women, and children who justify their lives while integrating the African American experience without becoming symbols or token images.

 

 

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

In a collection of boundary-pushing stories that are touching, contemporary and darkly humorous, the author illuminates the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship and the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous, from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide; while others are devastatingly poignant—a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture.

100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell

An irreverent, dirty, and profoundly intimate collection of vignettes exploring gay male desire, loneliness, sex, and self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.

 

 

The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott

This collection of short stories, set in fictional Cross River, Maryland, includes the tales of a struggling musician who is God’s last son and a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation about a childhood game sparks a riot in a once-segregated town. Deftly spinning genres of his feverish literary invention, Scott's The World Doesn’t Require You announces a bold, generational talent.

 

 

 

We Are Taking Only What We Need by Stephanie Powell Watts

The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties that bind and the gulf that separates generations, from children confronting the fallibility of their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again and again. Startling, intimate, and prescient on their own, these stories build to a kaleidoscopic understanding of both the individual and the collective black experience over the last fifty years in the American South.

 

 

 

 

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Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.