Fifty Favorite Non-English-Language Short Stories
(alphabetically by author, with no more than one story per writer)
“Acts of Charity” by César Aira
“Rashōmon“ by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
“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 Southern Thruway” by Julio Cortázar
“The Blue Jar” by Isak Dinesen
“Adam and Eve in Paradise” by José Maria de Eça de Queirós *
“Under the Black Water” by Mariana Enriquez
“Time War“ by Alex Epstein
“Notice” by Jean Ferry
“Scenes from a Childhood” by Jon Fosse *
“Flourishing Beasts” by Yan Ge
“The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol
“The End of a Dynasty, Or The Natural History of Ferrets“ by Angélica Gorodischer
“The God of Adverbs“ by Paal-Helge Haugen
“Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” by Franz Kafka
“The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Foster” by Claire Keegan *
“Memories of the Future” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
“Gogol’s Wife” by Tommaso Landolfi
“Liquid Tales” by Hervé Le Tellier
“Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal” by Stanislaw Lem
“The Abandoned House” by Mario Levrero
“The Stump-Grubber” by Torgny Lindgren
“Bakarak“ by Luigi Malerba
“Disquisition on the Difficulty of Communicating with the Dead” by Giorgio Manganelli
“Yukio Mishima in Death” by Javier Marías
“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
“The Basque and Bijou“ by Anaïs Nin
“A Peddler of Tears” by Yōko Ogawa
“A Solitary Gentleman” by Aldo Palazzeschi
“A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” by Victor Pelevin
“The Wishing Table” by Anne Serre
“Hermit I-V” by Ana María Shua
“There’s a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella” by Fernando Sorrentino
“Mister Valéry“ by Gonçalo M. Tavares *
“Phantom Lights” by Miyamoto Teru
“The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy *
“The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
“I Smoked Very Well” by Alejandro Zambra
“Chess Story” by Stefan Zweig *
* sometimes published independently as a novella
— July 9, 2026