Reviewer Eithne Farry has assessed three newly available short-story collections, finding distinct preoccupations in each: the uncanny seeping into ordinary life in Samanta Schweblin’s latest, mordant playfulness and mortality in Lynne Tillman’s selected stories, and quiet, travel-linked intimacies in Aysegül Savas’s work. The reviews were published 16:54 BST on 5 September 2025.
In Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated by Megan McDowell and published by Picador (192 pages, £16.99), Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin uses subtle distortions to make the familiar feel unsettling. Farry highlights six tales that shift the eerie into domestic or apparently rational contexts: in "William In The Window" the spirit of a dead cat unsettles two writers at a retreat; "A Visit From The Chief" turns an act of generosity into a devilish home invasion; and "Welcome To The Club" examines consequence and sacrifice after a failed suicide attempt. The reviewer singles out "An Eye In The Throat," in which a father’s momentary inattention injures his young son’s voice and sets off a series of silent, ghostly phone calls that haunt the narrative.
Lynne Tillman’s Thrilled to Death, from Peninsula Press (319 pages, £12.99), gathers 39 stories spanning a four-decade career and is noted for its wordplay, tonal shifts and recurrent focus on doubt, anxiety and death. Farry points to pieces that range from the comic to the macabre: the narrator’s list of Hollywood stars in "More Sex," the family saga with murderous undercurrents in "Aka Mergatroyde," and metafictional moments in "Come And Go," where the author intervenes in a tale while acknowledging uncertainty about its outcome but asserting creative confidence with the line, "I know there will be stories. Certainly, there will always be stories."
Aysegül Savas’s Long Distance, published by Scribner (240 pages, £14.99), collects stories set in cities including Rome, Marseille, Istanbul and Paris as well as small-town Russia. Farry describes the collection as tender and attentive to the strains of long-range relationships and dislocated lives. The title story and a long-distance romance examine reunion and incompatibility; "The Room" follows a home tutor whose search for quiet is disrupted by a landlord’s revealed secret; "We Are Here" tracks a disaffected student unable to fit in with her lonely host. Other pieces test friendships and explore patterns in disappointing romantic encounters.
Farry’s round-up emphasizes how each writer uses short form differently: Schweblin leans into uncanny shocks that refract domestic trauma, Tillman exploits linguistic play and tonal variation to probe mortality and cultural anxieties, and Savas foregrounds quiet emotional shifts across geographies. The review situates the collections as representative of contemporary short fiction’s range, from surreal and unsettling to mordant and quietly observant.
All three collections are available now. Good and Evil and Other Stories is published by Picador, translated by Megan McDowell; Thrilled to Death is from Peninsula Press; and Long Distance is published by Scribner. Prices and page counts noted in the review are Picador £16.99 (192pp), Peninsula Press £12.99 (319pp), and Scribner £14.99 (240pp).