The 7 Best Short Stories You Can Enjoy in 30 Minutes
These short stories are great if you need a short but powerful burst of emotion.
Nobody pays short stories enough attention. If you want a masterclass in exposition, character development, worldbuilding, and pacing, don’t go for a full-length novel. Pick up one of the best short stories instead.
These very short stories are gripping, thrilling, immersive, and a great way to tell if you like that author. If you’re like me and hate reading new things because it feels like a commitment, short stories are an easy solution.
This may not be a list of the very best short stories of all time (a list that would be impossible to create!) but these are some very short, searing tales that will force you to think — in under thirty minutes.
1. Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor
In this short story, Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor writes a tale set in a village in Nigeria in the future, where Big Oil has partnered with the Nigerian government to create AI-powered machines, called Zombies, to protect the oil pipelines. It’s about capitalism, the environment, and machines coexisting with humans.
But it’s also about music, motherhood, and intrinsic human nature. I’m including this on my list of the best short stories to read in under thirty minutes because it took me about seven minutes to read for the first time, but I spent a long time afterward thinking about and re-reading it.
Nnedi Okorafor writes in the Africanfuturism and Africanjujusim genres, which focus on the Black experience in African countries and the African diaspora. Many people, myself included, have read an awful lot of Western-focused literature. Do yourself a favor and read this short story (as well as all Okorafor’s other work — I loved Who Fears Death especially) to get a better perspective of peoples and cultures outside of Western tropes. It’s also one of the best short stories online — you can read it right here as a PDF online.
2. Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl is better known for his fantastical children's novels, such as Matilda, The BFG, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you read those more closely, you’ll notice some dark themes. Those dark themes come out in full force in Lamb to the Slaughter.
Without spoiling anything, LttS is a book about a pregnant mother who commits murder and covers it up. It’s darkly funny, loaded with deep irony, and gallows humor. It’s not explicitly a pro-feminist work (murder of men isn’t feminist, after all!) but it does an excellent job developing Mary Malone as a full character and personality in a few short pages, which frankly was rare back in the day when Dahl wrote this.
Despite featuring a rather gruesome murder, I consider this to be one of the best short stories for kids. I read it as a child (I was very into Roald Dahl altogether) and found it fascinating. It’s a reflection of motivation, how humans perceive each other, and what happens when you push someone too far.
3. How Long Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin
OK, I’m cheating here slightly and including one of the best short story collections instead of a single story. Each of these was a very short story, but the collection did take longer to read cover to cover.
It’s no exaggeration to say N. K. Jemisin changed my life with her book The Fifth Season, which I included in my list of the best fantasy books with a solid romance plotline (and LGBTQ+ friendly!). Her short stories are incisive, sharp, and packed with personality. Each one of the 22 stories in this short story collection has a different message to impart.
What I love is that even though her stories don’t always have a happy ending, they always impart some kind of hope. They challenge you to see the good and fight the bad.
My favorite of the lot definitely has to be Red Dirt Witch. Jemisin introduces characters you won’t forget in a hurry, and the main character Emmaline is no exception.
4. Student of Ostriches by Tamora Pierce
If you like fantasy and you haven’t read any Tamora Pierce yet, you are really missing out. She was my introduction to “girls can fight, too!” fantasy, and she blew me away with her quartets. I regularly re-read her work just for comfort.
She released a collection of short stories called Tortall and Other Lands which covers the ground around her existing stories, as well as brand new characters. Student of Ostriches was my favorite of those. It follows a young girl called Kylaia al Jmaa who has to fight for her sister’s honor.
Nobody taught her fighting because she was a girl, so she learned from the animals around her (including the titular ostrich).
I consider it one of the best short stories for kids, too, because I read it right when I needed to as a twelve-year-old. This short story is great for its character development and pacing, but I especially like it for the feminist message: girls can do anything they want, even if it’s learning to fight by studying how an ostrich pecks.
5. Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed by Ray Bradbury
Many short stories are dark. Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories falls into that trend headfirst. His sci-fi/fantasy tales are literally hair-raising, as in I remember getting goosebumps when I read it.
This twisted tale stunned me from beginning to end. You think it’s not possible to pack so many plot twists into such a short story, but you’d be wrong.
DTWaGE, like a lot of Bradbury’s other work, explores a semi-near future of human colonization on Mars. I don’t want to spoil an ending, but this short story had me on the edge of my seat. It’s the story I remember best out of all of Bradbury’s work. He builds a totally implausible scenario and forces you to see how it could so easily come to pass in a short span of time.
6. Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Whoops, I put another collection of short stories on this list! If you want one of the best short stories that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy, pick up Sherlock Holmes. You can choose any of them — the very short stories are just as worth reading as the longer ones.
I won’t spend time discussing the plots since I’m sure most people are familiar with them one way or another. But I am always surprised by how few people have read the actual books, which are masterful. They’re best when read together — they build wonderfully on each other — but I recommend A Study in Scarlet as an ideal entry point.
And guess what? It’s totally free, so you can read this entire short story collection online as a PDF or download it from the Apple/Kindle story for free.
7. The Tiredness of Rosabel by Katherine Mansfield
I’m ending this list of the best short stories with a sad one. Written in 1908, this short story was published by Mansfield when she was only 20. This very short story makes the list because of the sensory emotions it evokes. It’s not a happy story, but when you read it, you can’t help but feel it’s you, right there, wishing for a better life and unable to access it.
TToR follows the titular Rosabel, who works at a millinery. We follow Rosabel on her way home, as the story juxtaposes her present situation, memories from the day, and imagining of what her life could be like.
You can read this short story PDF for free online right here. Do it during your lunch break — it’s just four pages long. But the story and Rosabel will linger in your mind for much longer.
It probably took you longer to read this collection of my best short story recommendations than it would take to read some of the stories on it! I love short stories — they’re harder to write. Most authors who write short stories are fantastic wordsmiths because they know how to make each one count.
As a result, these (sometimes very) short stories are a great way to read something in less than thirty minutes, get a new perspective, learn a little bit about the author, and probably feel some very strong emotions.
I don’t believe in any list that claims to have the end-all, be-all best short stories on there, but hopefully, this list has a few you would like to check out, fi you haven’t already.
