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These story collections from Southern California writers are for short attention spans

March 31, 2026

Love the idea of being a reader but can’t muster all the time or attention it takes to commit to a whole book? Try short stories, which deliver a big reading experience in a concise space. A few upcoming and recent collections from authors across the region might satisfy nicely:

Sunny (glamorous?) California

No matter how you make your money, living in such close proximity to the Hollywood machine makes it impossible not to feel a little famous sometimes, just like the characters in Sydney Rende’s debut collection. The cast of characters in “I Could Be Famous” portrays the cultural obsession with being seen and our very human ache to be adored. These stories follow ambitious women strolling rooftop parties and scrolling online dating apps with a “don’t I know you?” face while rubbing elbows with a big-name actor accused of cannibalism.

Looking for another ripped-from-the-headlines collection? Dive into “Pool Fishing” by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. This Orange County writer casts a line into the lives of women living on the edge emotionally, geographically and morally, and reels in stories from the desert to the coast, each one exploring what it means to want something fiercely — then live with the consequences.

Epic family sagas

You know how immersed you get in the lives of the characters on your favorite show, and how eagerly you await the next season? Consider these next collections in much the same way.

In 1963, the Arringtons did what every American family is supposed to do: they bought a house in a nice neighborhood. The problem? The neighborhood is white, and they are not. Introduced in Toni Ann Johnson’s award-winning “Light Skin Gone to Waste,” Velma and Philip Arrington and their daughters reappear in “But Where’s Home?”, a collection that traces their lives from the Civil Rights era to now — through humor, heartbreak and the complicated work of claiming space and choosing the people who become home.

Greenwich Village is home to the troubled, gifted teenager — and title character — Rainey Royal when we meet her in the first collection from author Dylan Landis, originally published in 2015. “The List of All Possible Desires” is a novel in stories that traces the tangled emotional inheritance of the Royal family across generations, from a prepubescent boy in postwar Paris to a jazz-soaked townhouse in New York, where Rainey invents and reinvents herself as an artist through the chaos and beauty of the ’70s and ’80s.

Out of this world, kind of

A woman’s limbs vanish into “the cloud” during wildfire-fueled power outages. A lonely DoorDasher stumbles into accidental reality-TV stardom. A gymnastics coach carries her heart around in a Mason jar. In “I Am the Ghost Here,” Kim Samek faces down the absurd terrors of modern life and the general sense that reality itself is glitching. These stories will make you laugh while leaving you with an existential bruise, wondering how to stay human when everything in life is engineered.

Love is already strange. Rachel Khong makes it cosmic. In “My Dear You,” a woman adopts a cat that summons the ghosts of her exes, a factory worker bonds with the sex doll she’s supposed to sell and God decides to replace humans with something better. In these surreal stories, Khong slips easily between the supernatural, the robotic and the immortal, while remaining grounded in heartbreak, longing and the hope for connection.

How bad was it?

Gina Frangello’s “Slut Lullabies” reads like the pages of your best friend’s diary, if your best friend was a disgraced socialite, an unhappy wife or a precocious teen. Follow each deeply felt character through the wreckage of their lives on a journey toward hope, told in Frangello’s oddly uplifting voice.

In “Crawl,” Max Delsohn drops us into 2010s Seattle — a city that brands itself as a queer utopia and quietly proves how complicated that promise is. These stories follow young transmasculine characters navigating sex, drugs, desire and a community that doesn’t always care. Exuberant and tender, “Crawl” is about becoming yourself in all of the places that don’t quite know what to do with you, yet.

Disclosure: SCNG is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission for purchases made using links to our shop.

Orange County Register

News Details

These story collections from Southern California writers are for short attention spans

Sunny (glamorous?) California

Epic family sagas

Out of this world, kind of

How bad was it?

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