New Story Collection Roundup: February 2026 (On Bret Anthony Johnston, Kim Samek, Lauren Groff, & Lim Sunwoo)

This is the latest in a series in which I sample from new story collections. Obviously, no collection is reducible to a single story or two, so the evaluation of the story should not be taken for an evaluation of the collection as a whole.

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This month’s collections are pretty exciting. The big name is Lauren Groff, who’s something of a midlist star and whose previous collection, Florida, was a finalist for the National Book Award. To be honest, I’d never really gotten the Groff hype from the handful of stories I’d previously read, but one of the stories I sampled from Brawler (“Under the Wave”) is quite good.

The other author I had any familarity with was Bret Anthony Johnston. I read the title story of his new collection a few years ago and retained nothing, so I wasn’t expecting a lot. However, both the Johnston stories I sampled here are strong, especially “Soldier of Fortune.”

Both Groff’s and Johnston’s collections are entirely composed of previously published stories; in Johnston’s case, these stories span almost two decades.

This is Kim Samek’s first book, and I had never heard of her before obtaining I Am the Ghost Here. She’s hilarious and quite brilliantly creative. Three stories in, I would guess that it’s going to be one of the best debuts of the year.

Finally there is Lim Sunwoo’s With the Heart of a Ghost. Lim is a young South Korean writer, and I think this is her only book to date, originally published in Korean in 2022. I haven’t read much Korean literature—Han Kang’s The Vegetarian might be the extent of it—but the stories sampled here are enjoyably droll.

Some of these stories can be read online and are linked below.

Collections Sampled:

Lim Sunwoo (trans. Chi-Young Kim), With the Heart of a Ghost (Unnamed Press, Feb. 10)
Lauren Groff, Brawler (Riverhead, Feb. 24)
Bret Anthony Johnston, Encounters with Unexpected Animals (Random House, Feb. 24)
Kim Samek, I Am the Ghost Here (Dial, Feb. 24)

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Bret Anthony Johnston, “Soldier of Fortune” (Glimmer Train, 2010)

A Gen X coming-of-age story set in Corpus Christi, 1986, with a strong sense of time and place. What exactly it’s about is kept skillfully up it sleeve most of the way—initially it seems like an “Araby” type story of a boy’s first love for an older girl, then about the effects of a domestic tragedy on the neighbors, and finally a complicated synthesis. The story hinges on a particularly gruesome accident immortalized a decade early by David Foster Wallace. The teenage narrator’s family is generous in their aid, but they also view their neighbors’ tragedy as potentially contagious, afraid to get too close lest they be brought within its orbit. Focalizing this through the young protagonist ends up being important to the story’s doling out of exposition; the last turn of the screw caught me, at least, by surprise, while being deftly set up. Johnston’s writing is good, finding natural forms of drawing on the narrator’s military fetish: “As he pushed our lawnmower across the street—the engine idling, the blades scattering debris like when a Chinook lifts off—I followed him with the rake and bag of clippings.” B+

Kim Samek, “Egg Mother” (Catapult, 2022)

Like “I Am the Ghost Here,” this begins with an absurdist hook: “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg.” This risks becoming gimmicky, but Samek is really good at this. The narrator’s transformation happens a few months after giving birth, and so would seem to be an odd metaphor for post-partum blues. And it is, in part, allowing for reflections on the physical, emotional, and temporal toll of motherhood. But it is more circuitous, more surprising than that sounds—and funnier. The Egg Mother is encouraged by her therapist to journal, and the entries are better than most flash fictions. E.g.:

When I was ten, I threw a rock up into the air and then walked toward the house. I made it just a few steps before the rock crashed down on my head. Woozy, I wobbled over to my bed and fell asleep in a warm pool of my own blood. My father discovered me and rushed me to the hospital. He told me I was as dumb as the rock that fell on my head. I saw double, so I tried to be smart about it, hanging around things that would bring me pleasure in twos. There were two ice creams, two dolls, two of my summer-camp crush, Patrick, who had whiskers like a cat. But there were also two of my dad, and I was double-scolded until my brain remembered how to see just one angry dad again.

Samek deftly balances the absurd and the sincere, arriving at an ending that is at once moving and haunting. B+

Bret Anthony Johnston, “Time of the Preacher” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 2024)

Probably the best COVID-era story I’ve read to date. This one’s about an encounter between Holland, a libertarian carpenter, and his ex-wife (Mandy). It’s largely focalized through Holland, and so we get some fun poked at the liberal-types who hire him to build fences and gazebos. Mandy has married upward since their divorce, and they haven’t spoken in the nine months of pandemic until she texts him to help her dispel a snake from her renter’s house. The lingering injuries of the relationship bubble under the surface as Holland searches for the snake, and it’s unclear to both him and the reader whether the snake exists or is an invented pretext. Meanwhile, Johnston evokes the uncertainty and fear of life at the time, as the eponymous preacher seems to have up and abandoned the house he’d been renting—a gloomy omen. Johnston excels with visual and psychological details—“the sickle-backed widow in the corner house,” the “stomach-jump of being known.” B

Kim Samek, “I Am the Ghost Here” (Guernica, 2023)

This story uses post-Barthelme absurdism to defamiliarize tropes of second-generation immigrant experience. The deadpan opening line reads “It is not until my older brother is thirty-three that I learn he’s controlled by a puppeteer.” We quickly learn that this is not a metaphor, exactly; he (Jeff) has hired a woman (Michelle) to live inside and control him. This retroactively explains a change in personality that began after he went to college; the rub is that both the narrator and her parents generally agree that he’s a much more pleasant, impressive person when Michelle is pulling the strings. Samek’s writing is funny and this is a sufficiently amusing conceit on its own, but we eventually learn that Jeff was compelled to seek an agent due to the pressure placed on him by his mother in particular, a Thai immigrant. Samek finds a nicely oblique way of getting at the familiar idea of living up to familial expectations, including a surprising, sad denouement. B

Lauren Groff, “Under the Wave” (The New Yorker, 2018)

This is probably the best Groff story I’ve read to date, though it took a while for it to win me over. The overture is phantasmagorical, requiring a second read upon realizing what has just occurred—a tsunami has just killed the protagonist’s husband and infant son. What follows are descriptions of a makeshift refugee site and the woman’s informal adoption of an apparent orphan girl. The spectres of The Road and The Last of Us loom large over this section, and as is usual with Groff her writing is pretty but too delicate. A storm is “a bruised boil of purple sky in the high windows.“ Elsewhere, “Cloud unpeeled from moon.” It’s nice, but the lyrical turns of phrase too often feel like the end rather than the means, a substitute for characterization or storytelling.

After several days the woman manages to get a ride home for herself and the child (we learn that the family had been renting a vacation home where the tsunami struck). Groff’s narration stands at a remove from the characters, and the function becomes clear as the mother decides to have the girl assume her son’s identity, registering her for kindergarten in his name. It’s an ethically loaded series of decisions, but Groff doesn’t really tip her hand regarding the mother’s motives or sanity. Is it selfish or altruistic? Is she fucking this kid up by gender-swapping them? It requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but the story shrewdly ends with the child at eight years old, not too far away from the point at which biological development will complicate the scheme. B

Lim Sunwoo, “With the Heart of a Ghost” (With the Heart of a Ghost, 2022/2026)

The opening, titular story of Lim’s collection, her first book to be translated into English, combines two conceits: the 24-year-old narrator’s boyfriend has been in a coma for two years, and one day a spectral clone of herself appears. The ghost—who repeatedly insists she is not a ghost—can only be seen by the narrator (Eonni), can feel everything the narrator is feelings (without having access to her thoughts), and can communicate with animals. They are virtually inseparable because they grow extremely cold if they are not close. I found these arbitrary ontological features fairly amusing. As you would imagine, the two conceits here are not coincidental. Eonni’s life is in a bit of a standstill as she remains committed to her boyfriend even as her feelings have waned; one thing she realizes about her ghost is that the latter expresses their emotions more candidly. The ghost is, essentially, an objectification of her affect—I did not think of Inside Out while reading, but it comes to mind now. It’s a fey, wistful story that thoughtfully blends the real and the fantastic. B-

Kim Samek, “Everything Disappears When You’re Having Fun” (I Am the Ghost Here, 2026)

If you’re like me, you watched Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company last year and afterward felt the sore absence of office chair conspiracy plots. Good news! This story is in fact about a chair that suddenly begins to teleport its sitters into the middle of the ocean. Except this is a bit of a feint, and it’s more about the friends you make while reluctantly sharing joint custody of the demonic chair. This made me laugh a lot, especially early on, though it starts to lose some steam toward the end and isn’t as affecting as the first two stories in the collection. But that’s a high bar; this is still very funny. B-

Lim Sunwoo, “That Unfamiliar Night” (With the Heart of a Ghost, 2022/2026)

This is the third story I’ve read in the last couple months about infertility—all by women. As in Rachel Khong’s “Colors from Elsewhere,” the protagonist (Huiae) deals with this inadequacy in a rather lonely way, seeking solace from outside of her marriage. In this case it’s via a reconnection with Guemok, a high school friend who became a pariah after a grossly negligent accident of her father’s. Huiae initially tries to avoid Guemok, who is now a prosletyzer for a Christian cult, but they eventually begin meeting regularly. It’s a nice story about friendship and forgiveness. B-

Lauren Groff, “Annunciation” (The New Yorker, 2022)

Groff has become a star of literary fiction in recent years for both her novels (which I haven’t read) and her short stories. This is the fourth of her many New Yorker pieces I’ve read, and unfortunately I still don’t really get the hype. This long story centers on a college graduate, the eldest of six children raised by (it seems) a single mother, who impulsively drops communication with her family and drives from New England to Northern California to start a new life. After some initial hiccups she gets her footing in a converted pool house in Mountain View rented out by an eccentric older woman. She takes a job digitizing social workers’ files and becomes interested in her colleague, a van-dwelling mom who donates her meager income to an evangelical pastor rather than, say, rent an apartment for her and her daughter.

It’s a story about a young woman experiencing her first taste of autonomy and the women who shape her identity. The title would seem to point to a conspicuous absence in the story — that of any male characters. Like Mary, the women in the story seem to procreate and have been created asexually; when the narrator, who relates the story retrospectively, finally brings us forward toward the present, she states, “I created my own family.” There is a mythical element to the story enhanced by allusions to fairy tales early on.

On the whole, this struck me as “well-made” — unimpeachably competent but without the vigor to leave a lasting impression. C+

Index to all of the stories I’ve rated and reviewed.