The Best Stories of January 2026 (and the Rest)

On Stephanie Meade Gresham, Nell Freudenberger, & Gideon Leek et al.

One of my goals for this year is to read and review as many new (2026) stories as possible. January is a pretty lean month, many of the bi-annuals and quarterlies having published their Fall/Winter issue at the end of the last year, and I haven’t yet gotten to some of the month’s collections I’m looking to read more from (Rende, Bordas). I did make my way through some of Senaa Ahmad’s The Age of Calamities. I was pretty excited for it based on the excellent “Let’s Play Dead” (reviewed here), but the two previously unpublished stories from the book that I read were pretty disappointing.¹ Not sure I’m going to keep pushing.

This has been a good opportunity to spotlight some smaller journals and names. (As I read through the fiction of 2026, I’m aiming to read at least one story from virtually every publication I can get my hands on.) Other than Ahmad, I hadn’t read any of these authors before, and I didn’t recognize the names of a good half of the authors. My favorite story of this bunch is by an author (Stephanie Meade Gresham) still pursuing her MFA—pretty impressive.

Stories are ranked from best to worst; see my ratings key before assuming B = meh.

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Stephanie Meade Gresham, “Ten Times Sadie” (Split Lip, 2026)

The opening clause — “The night I start being a dog for Mom” — sets one up to expect the fantastic, but instead this is about a mutually constructed fantasy. The narrator does not literally transform into a dog, but instead pretends to be one in place of the spaniel Harvey, who’s been claimed by the narrator’s father in her parents’ separation. When the narrator’s father gave her mother the ultimatum, “It’s the kid or the dog,” her mother pauses more than a beat before surrendering Harvey. By becoming “Goob,” the narrator participates in an elaborately sad grieving dynamic, in which the mother is mourning the loss of her husband and pet while the narrator is willing to do whatever is necessary for her mother’s affection given the dearth of other sources.

It’s a wry, sad situation that Gresham sees through without belaboring or going mawkish. I’d forgotten the title by the end and got a little weight in my throat upon being reminded. Impressive stuff for a writer still in school. B

Nell Freudenberger, “The Precipice” (Harper’s, 2026)

I teach English at a private school and so am probably partial to any story of this kind that passes the bullshit test. Freudenberger begins by characterizing the two English teachers at the narrator’s all-girls school in 90s California. One, Wheeler, is charismatic, performatively, and seemingly predatory, while the other, Boyd, is a depressive, gruff type who sets high expectations for students. This sounds schematic, but Freudenberger maintains complexity—Wheeler and Boyd get along; they both seem to care genuinely about teaching; the retrospective tone, from the now grown-up narrator, is wistful rather than condemnatory:

Wheeler’s promotion at Boyd’s expense didn’t appear to have gotten in the way of their relationship; in fact, they seemed to us to be the best of friends, as well as allies against what they considered a repressed, repressive administration. Their jokes were irreverent and off-color, and they made them in front of students. We called them by their last names, without the honorific, and they referred to us the same way.

The story ends up going in a direction with Wheeler that isn’t difficult to anticipate, but is more of an afterthought than the central event. More interesting, I think, are the narrator’s bittersweet recollections, which suggest that some things have been lost in the (understandable, of course) infantilization and bureaucratization of the education system since the 1990s. The Boyds have been swept out with the Wheelers. The other interesting element is the reflection on the inadvertently prophetic element of fiction—a persuasive demonstration of the power of the unconscious. These aspects raise this above what appears to be a rather familiar coming-of-age plot. B

Gideon Leek, “The Last American Landmine” (Hobart, 2026)

Leek’s prose is reminiscent of Tao Lin’s—short, declarative sentences, very little figurative language, dryly humorous. The narrator (Mike) is a young (presumably white) man who begins a relationship with Hanh, a Vietnamese-American, who after two months leaves him to find her birth parents in Vietnam. That sounds like Earnest Multicultural Lit, but the tone is largely comic. Mike doesn’t seem especially bad, just kind of neglectful—he is surprised that she does not enjoy watching him hit in a batting cage for an hour or attending the live taping of a comedy podcast. Hanh’s search for her roots, meanwhile, seems born of an unreflective spontaneity. Mike ends up going on a search-and-rescue trip across the world with Hanh’s father, which includes them watching Step Brothers together on the flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The story is quick and funny, but while Leek has discovered a potent symbol to conclude with, it’s a bit out of proportion to the rest of the story’s (intentional) shallowness. I’d be interested to read something a bit longer from Leek. B-

Sadia Shepard, “Kim’s Game” (The New Yorker, 2026)

This story contains a lot of novelistic richness of detail in its brief space, creating a complex portrait of its protagonist, Helen — a missionary who’s lived in rural Brazil for over three decades, who’s experienced a gradual loss of religious zeal over time, whose brother and partner-in-faith has recently died, and whose romantic prospects were thwarted early on. A strong sense of her character builds by accretion over the pages, and there is decent dramatic tension in her passive-aggressive conflict with a young, arrogant anthropologist. The story ends up being simpler and more familiar than I hoped, but it’s a fairly enjoyable journey. B-

Anelise Chen, “Interviews with Certain Vegetables” (The Baffler, 2026)

This story begins with a “note from the translator,” explaining that what follows is a transcription of the narrator’s communication with vegetables, an ability temporarily brought about by long COVID. The rest of the story is divided into three monologues from the respective perspectives of a potato, a white asparagus, and corn. The potato describes its multiplicitous existence, as “cultivated potatoes are reproduced clonally…and can be arguably considered one individual.” Its virtual infinitude across time and space makes it a wise commenter on the human condition. It’s the best section, though perhaps in part because the first. The asparagus-narrator, like the vegetable itself, is a bit of a letdown. The conditions of narration don’t make much sense—whereas the potato’s complex consciousness is justified scientifically, the asparagus for whatever reason is both an individual and has access to species consciousness. The translation note hints at its cultivation’s reliance on “cheap labor,” but the story never broaches the subject. The historical-economic conditions of existence are taken up in the corn section, which considers its ubiquity, environmental impact, and the “invisible” hands that go into its production. There is some “food(!) for thought” here, but I also felt like I was reading a very short version of the micro-histories that have become so popular in recent years. B-

Christian TeBordo, “From a Donor File” (X-R-A-Y, 2026)

A little hermit crab story that takes the form of a memo from a university gifts officer, written in the anonymous third-person. The opening sentence, e.g.: “Charles ‘Chip’ Prime, Jr. has no previous connection to the University and was not considered a prospective donor prior to his contacting this Advancement Officer requesting an urgent meeting at the Quattro Bar of the Four Seasons in East Palo Alto, California.” The tale ends up being mostly a brief history of a WWII-era German-American immigrant who comes up with the grift of claiming a patent on prime numbers and billing companies for their use (and/or selling licenses). As the surprisingly well-informed Officer notes, “he is credited with inspiring, and even modeling, the global pivot to financialization, and to this day, voting board members are known to ask, Is this another Prime Number?’ when considering new imaginary products and properties.” I found this all quite amusing but less a story than an unfinished bit. The shell genre doesn’t seem particularly necessary to the story being told, nor does the mediating figure of the tycoon’s failson. Would gladly have read more about this Jordan Belfort of numerics. B-

Joseph O’Neill, “Light Secrets” (The New Yorker, 2026)

Have never gotten around to O’Neill, and this doesn’t do anything to raise the urgency. The narrator has a friend (P.) about whom there is a “nasty rumor” which goes unspecified in the story. When the narrator and P. meet, they avoid discussion of the rumor but get to talking about the titular “light secrets,” which refer to the good (morally, but also skillfully) people do that goes unacknowledged. It would seem that O’Neill wants to explore the kind of complex accounting of a life that gets reduced by contemporary culture to “cancelled villains” and “ethical heroes” (though the story notes that this problem is at least as old as Shakespeare), but he never goes much deeper than the somewhat cutesy notion of the “light secret.” I also found the narrator somewhat incoherent—he does not know the distinction between a nervous breakdown and a burnout, but casually mentions uberrima fides and quotes Julius Caesar. This is a New Yorker story, so there is a dinner party. C

Senaa Ahmad, “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune” (The Age of Calamities, 2026)

The shtick is getting old now. As with “The Napoleons Are Multiplying,” the historical personage here — Joan of Arc — feels incidental to the story. Ahmad’s fictions tend to collapse the historical fantasy and the fairy tale, treating the historical subjects like archetypes or celebrities rather than once-breathing people. This one’s about a depressed woman in the 1920s who, having repeatedly lost children in childbirth or infancy, has fled her husband to live out a meager existence as a cleaning woman. She has also decided to lend her body, while asleep, to Joan of Arc. Along with body swapping and maternal guilt, we get saints desiring resurrection, cat sacrifices, Klansmen. Ahmad’s prose is controlled and you get the sense that she’s executing her intentions precisely; I simply don’t think the ambitions here are terribly appealing. C

Senaa Ahmad, “The Napoleons Are Multiplying” (The Age of Calamities, 2026)

Pretty big letdown after “Let’s Play Dead.” Another historical fantasy, the premise here being that a couple dozen (and growing) Napoleons have spawned, fully-formed 29-year-olds, in an English town. We get the perspective of various Napoleons as they manage the consequent crisis of identity such a situation implies, as well as that of a curious parson. It’s ostensibly philosophical, but not particularly engaging or thought-provoking. C

Renesha Dhanraj, “Black Cake” (The London Magazine, 2026)

Set in Guyana during some kind of social unrest (the 1905 Ruimveldt Riots, perhaps?), this brief story suggests the pervasive terror of the place and time, especially for the newlywed teenage narrator. The writing is plain and declarative, and I longed for more social detail (there is little reference to the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese divisions). C-

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

1. For my purposes, fiction collected in 2026 but published previously does not count as 2026.