Fifty Favorite Non-English-Language Short Stories
(alphabetically by author, with no more than one story per writer)
“Acts of Charity” by César Aira
“Tickets on Time (Extracts from the diary of Jules Flegmon)” by Marcel Aymé
“Everything” by Ingeborg Bachmann
“The Other Side of the Mountain” by Michel Bernanos *
“Three Versions of Judas” by Jorge Luis Borges
“The Colomber” by Dino Buzzati
“The Light-Years” by Italo Calvino
“The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov
“The Cave” by Liliana Colanzi
“The Blue Jar” by Isak Dinesen
“Under the Black Water” by Mariana Enriquez
by Alex Epstein
“Scenes from a Childhood” by Jon Fosse *
“Flourishing Beasts” by Yan Ge
“The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol
by Angélica Gorodischer
by Bohumil Hrabal
“Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” by Franz Kafka
“The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Memories of the Future” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
“Gogol’s Wife” by Tommaso Landolfi
“Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal” by Stanislaw Lem
“The Abandoned House” by Mario Levrero
“Bakarak“ by Luigi Malerba
“Disquisition on the Difficulty of Communicating with the Dead” by Giorgio Manganelli
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez
“The Cage” by Barbara Molinard
“Faith and Mountains” by Augusto Monterroso
“A Window” by Haruki Murakami
“A Peddler of Tears” by Yōko Ogawa
“A Solitary Gentleman” by Aldo Palazzeschi
“The Wishing Table” by Anne Serre *
by Ana María Shua
“There’s a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella” by Fernando Sorrentino
“Phantom Lights” by Miyamoto Teru
“The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy *
“The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
“The Private Lives of Trees” by Alejandro Zambra *
“Chess Story” by Stefan Zweig *
* sometimes published independently as a novella
— July 8, 2026