We love short stories and their unique ability to distill so much insight and entertainment with artful brevity and fervour. This month we’re highlighting six collections that have recently hit our shelves.

Between Two Worlds selected by Tara June Winch and Behrouz Boochani

Offering a snapshot of contemporary Australia, this diverse collection of stories explores sense of place, family, loss, culture, sexual awakening and the abiding connections to people and place that make us who we are. Told with utterly fresh perspectives and a rich vein of literary talent, these stories are an invitation into the unique worlds of everyday Australians.

Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn

The stories in Here Be Leviathans take us from the storm drains under Las Vegas to the Alaskan wilderness; the rainforests of Queensland to the Chilean coastline. Narrated in Chris Flynn’s unique and hilarious style by animals, places, objects and even the (very) odd human, these short fictions push the boundaries of the form by examining human behaviour from the perspective of the outsider.

Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls by Anne Casey-Hardy

Teenagers sneak out to the creek for a wild New Year’s Eve party. A sleep-deprived woman who imagines she is pregnant to a Viking faces her scathing sixteen-year-old self. A woman in love wakes up in a van Gogh painting. These gem-like stories are about the desire to rush out and meet life; about getting in over your head; about danger, and damage, and what it means to survive - and not always survive - the risk of being young. They chart the borderlands between girls and women, daughters and mothers, freedom and fear.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

An engaged couple falls out over the husband’s dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.

Everything Feels Like the End of the World by Else Fitzgerald

A young woman is faced with a terrible choice about her pregnancy in a community ravaged by doubt. An engineer working on a solar shield protecting the Earth shares memories of their lover with an AI companion. Two archivists must decide what is worth saving when the world is flooded by rising sea levels. Everything Feels Like the End of the World is a collection of short speculative fiction exploring possible futures from an Australia not so different from our present day to one thousands of years into an unrecognisable future.

An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.