28 Short Stories / “literary Advent calendar” if you insist

Just around the time I found my craving Angela Carter and rereading the short stories in The Bloody Chamber, and also kept encountering* and reading other short works of fiction, I was also bumping into the idea of a literary Advent calendar.

The idea is simple: read one short story every day for a month. (WHAT IS CHRISTMAS IN THIS CALENDAR SCENARIO? Actually reading a novel? … Being the character of a short story? Writing your own fiction?! Maybe it’s not simple?)

For the last few years I have been FREAKING OUT that Advent Calendars are going mainstream. I have seen makeup sampler “Advent calendars” or coupon/deal ones and I’m not linking to or even screenshotting stuff like that. It’s distasteful to me to make the pretty explicitly religious observance of Advent into a blitz of shopping or consuming, pre-Christmas.

And still—still! The idea of a curated list of short stories to read, one per day for a month, appeals to me.

Maybe it’s these short days seemingly made for reading short stories; daylight is scarce. We can only find just a quick moment of light offered by reading a flash of a story. (Because it is languorous to read outside, at the beach or otherwise in the sun, when daylight is plentiful. Lazy summer days pair well with a long novel!)

So here is a curated list of short stories / flash fiction. I like my writers living and indie. Or at least, born in contemporary times!

These are stories I like to read in late autumn / early-to-midwinter. I’m not even going to number them: Go in any order! I have assembled a list where, I think, some similar themes and deep conversations between pieces are happening, and the revelations in these words may vary depending on the order you read.

I’m also very into wolves this season. You will read a lot about wolves.

28 Stories to Read During Late Autumn-Early Winter

• “The Tiger’s Bride” by Angela Carter
• “Wild Things” by Kathy Fish
• “Self-Portrait as Root Vegetable” by Kathryn Kulpa
• “Some Appetites” by Mia Dalia
• “Mertyr” by Pascale Potvin
• “Candlelight” by KC Mead-Brewer
• “The Last Tree on Earth” by Ramón Isao 
• “All the Office Ladies” by Cathy Ulrich
• “Triptych” by Steve Chang
• “House Beautiful” by Jenny Allen
• “How to Deal with Millennial Love” by Nicole Caratas 
• “The Loneliest Creature on Earth” by Jen Michalski
• “SUBMECHANOPHOBIA, OR THE FEMININE URGE TO BE AN AIRPLANE ON THE LAKEBED” by Eli Kourtis
• “I Am a Knife” by Roxane Gay
• “F-ing Hoodie” by Sue Mell
• “First-Person Eye-Witness Reports: The Factual Sightings of Nessie” by Meg Pokrass
• “Blame it on the Wind” by Karen Schauber
• “Stew” by Kim Magowan
• “The Girl with a City Insider Her” by Jeannette Ng
• “Jim on his Deathbed” by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
• “The Foreign Cinema” by Lauren Alwan
• “The Greenest Gecko” by Ploi Piropokin
• “The Salem Wolf” by Howard Pyle
• “In the Blink of an Eye,” “Hunger,” and “The Day Mrs. Wong Brought Wonton Soup” by Christine Chen
• “If Even the Angels” by Tommy Dean
• “Halloween” by Venita Blackburn
• “Even if I Fall Away, I Will Not” by Brandon Taylor
• “The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter

* The Delaware Art Museum has a fun exhibit about the Harper’s Monthly Magazine short story writers and illustrators from 100+ years ago. I spent a long time reading in there!