Reviews | November 03, 2025

How to Nest an Anthology: Four Short Story Collections from 2024 

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima. Tor, 2024, 192 pp., $24.99 (hardcover). 

Horse Show by Jess Bowers. Santa Fe Writers Project, 2024, 156 pp., $15.00 (paperback).  

Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson. Coffee House, 2024, 256 pp., $19.00 (paperback). 

Sex Romp Gone Wrong by Julia Ridley Smith. Blair, 2024, 224 pp., $17.95 (paperback). 

I don’t like it any more than the next writer of stories does—it bothers me, in fact—but it’s not hard to understand why novels sell so many more copies than collections of short fiction. Novels are easier to read than their story collection cousins are. They tend to build momentum as they go, at least a little. Many of them positively glide, streaking across wind currents of their own generation as they carry the reader through the reading experience. The further into a novel you get, the harder it can be to look away.  

Books of short stories rarely, if ever, inspire that gliding feeling. As wonderful as they often are, they do not build momentum. They lose it repeatedly, by design, as each story ends and the next one begins. They sacrifice consistency for the sake of variety, like someone who refuses to marry, preferring to have a series of partners they never get to know well but whose company they enjoy, one after another, on their way to a place we are all headed: the grave.  

But just as those folk must start again with every new relationship—learning what they can or care to concerning their latest paramour, beginning from nothing as they sit across the table at a restaurant or coffeehouse, knowing what they have will not last—the reader of a collection has to meet a new story every five, fifteen, or thirty pages. They must get acquainted with another protagonist, another situation, another set of concerns they know they will abandon as soon as they have grown more than a little familiar.