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Ten Best Short Story to Read in 2020
For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter. It’s a habit now: Before sitting down to write — my Hindi language ten-part Audible Original Thriller Factory is up and running, written and directed under series director and presenter Anurag Kashyap’s stewardship with narrators including Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu — I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write something or not.
Starting with Kristen Roupenian’s The Good Guy, to Etgar Keret’s Pineapple Crush, I posted 297 stories in 2019. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most:
The Pinch by Dina Nayeri (The Yale Review)
Four siblings of the Amirzadeh family plan to get together in Niagara falls to meet their elderly father who is traveling from Iran.
Parvin and Suraya rented a small but comfortable Niagara Falls cottage kissing the American border, just as their older sister Goli had instructed. Their father, Baba Ardeshir, had managed only a Canadian visa, so he wouldn’t be able to cross over to see their homes in Pompano Beach and rural Georgia. Instead, he would stay in Toronto with Goli, self-appointed matriarch since that 1972 day when their mother vanished into Holland or Germany, leaving Baba Ardeshir alone with four…
