Open Books Challenge 2026: Short Story CollectionUnpublished

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Fourteen acclaimed authors showcase the beautiful and diverse ways holidays are observed in this festive anthology. Keep the celebrations going all year long with this captivating and joyful read! From Lunar New Year to Solstice, Día de Los Muertos to Juneteenth, and all the incredible...

NYPL BEST OF THE YEAR BEST OF THE BEST, BLACK CAUCUS OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION A stunning collection of oral histories from Black elders who grew up in the Jim Crow South The past is not past. We may think...

Celebrate the unheralded people and stories that helped shape the game of baseball! Meet unsung pioneers, like John "Bud" Fowler, William Edward White, and brothers Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weld Walker, four African Americans who integrated white teams decades...

A magical collection of stories new and old spanning across all of Anne Bishop's most beloved fantasy worlds. Here, together for the first time, the shorter works of New York Times bestselling fantasy author Anne Bishop are included in one dazzling volume. A...

Beginning readers will love these spooky stories from New York Times bestselling author Max Brallier! Pick a book. Grow a Reader! This series is part of Scholastic's early reader line, Acorn, aimed at children who are learning to read. With easy-to-read text, a short-story...

In a collection of personal stories and essays, award-winning and bestselling artists from Matt de la Pena and Veera Hiranandani to Max Brallier and R.L. Stine write about how hope always wins, even in the darkest of times. Where does hope live? In your family? ...

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR AND ELECTRIC LIT * A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY LIT HUB, THE OC REGISTER, THE MILLIONS AND MORE * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF AUGUST 2025 BY PEOPLE MAGAZINE * NAMED A MUST-READ BOOK BY THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF...

Perfect for fans of All Out and Cemetery Boys, this anthology claims a seat at the table of fantasy literature for trans and gender nonconforming stories. Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify!, you'll embark on fourteen different...

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder "Edwards combines the well-known (Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers) with the obscure (former actor Ernest Dudley) in this impressive anthology of 14 short stories featuring scientific and technical know-how...fans of TV's CSI will enjoy...

One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books & a Powell's Bookstore Staff Favorite of the Year! Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life...

"An emotion-filled collection." --Kirkus Reviews Two teens take the stage and find their voice . . . A girl learns about her heritage and begins to find her community . . . A sister is haunted by the ghosts of loved ones lost . . . There is no...

Pura Belpré Honor Book BEST OF THE YEAR Chicago Review of Books · Kirkus · Los Angeles Public Library Publishers Weekly Flying Start High Spirits is a collection of eleven...

Bestselling author Chris Grabenstein and the Mystery Writers of America bring together twenty peerless puzzles--from bestselling authors such as Peter Lerangis, Stuart Gibbs, Lauren Magaziner, Kate Milford, and, of course, Grabenstein himself--in an anthology of mystery short...

Princess Truly gardens and has fun with her friends, across three rhyming stories perfect for beginning readers! You can read with Acorn! Pick a book. Grow a Reader! This series is part of Scholastic's early reader line, Acorn, aimed at children who are learning to read. With easy...

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having 'an imagination that most of us would kill for,' Nalo Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful. In Hopkinson's first...

A School Library Journal Best Book of 2020 It's time to bare it all about bodies!   We all experience the world in a body, but we don't usually take the time to explore what it really means to have and live within one. Just as...

Rocky Kanaka is known the world over as a dog rescue advocate. His millions of fans follow along each week as Rocky visits shelters and finds dogs in need. He often finds the most hopeless cases-dogs that have been abandoned because they're sick or their owners can no longer care for them, or they...

Discover an "absurd, funny, and thought-provoking" book perfect for "anyone who has ever felt socially awkward or inadequate" (Louis Sachar, author of Holes and the Wayside School series). Dear weird toes, crooked nose, stressed out, left out, freaked out ...

Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie's short fiction, including a brand new...

From the author of the New York Times bestselling Three-Body Problem series--now a Netflix Original series--A View from the Stars is a new collection of short fiction and nonfiction pieces. A VIEW FROM THE STARS features a range of short works from the...

The first LGBTQA+ anthology for middle-graders featuring stories for every letter of the acronym, including realistic, fantasy, and sci-fi stories by authors like Justina Ireland, Marieke Nijkamp, Alex Gino, and more! A boyband fandom becomes a conduit to coming out. A former...

Revolutionary and visionary, these twenty-two speculative stories edited by Lambda, Nebula and Hugo finalist Lee Mandelo explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures. USA Today Bestseller! From self-styled knights fighting in dystopian city...

"This stunning collection from one of the great writers on Black culture covers the gamut- aging, love, poverty, trauma and plenty of lightness in between."-People From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back and...

Love is in the air in Serendipity, a collection of stories inspired by romantic tropes and edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer. The secret admirer. The fake relationship. The matchmaker.

Under the shadow of gray clouds, three children venture into the woods, where they spot the corpse of an old man on a scaffold. Suddenly a wild figure emerges, with long fingernails and tangled hair. It is the Hattak fullih nipi foni, the bone picker, who comes to tear off rotting...

"Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values," writes guest editor Celeste Ng. "In a time when our values are being tested daily, it's hard to think of anything more important." The Best American Short Stories 2025 resonates precisely at this...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER . From We Need Diverse Books, the organization behind Flying Lessons & Other Stories, comes an inspiring middle-grade anthology that follows the loosely interconnected lives of multigenerational immigrant families, the residents at the Entrada apartment building. Edited...

Meet Baloney! This book is about him. And also Peanut the horse, his best friend. There's Bizz the bumblebee, too, of course. And Krabbit. He'd rather not be here, but what can you do? In this graphic novel for young readers, watch our pig protagonist perform some questionable magic, cheer him on as...

A dazzling YA anthology that spotlights the transformative power of books while equipping teens to fight for the freedom to read, featuring the voices of 15 diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators. Books are disappearing from shelves across the country. What does this...

A cave monster . . . an abandoned demon . . . a ghost who wants to erase history . . . a killer commandant . . . These are just some of the challenges confronting the young heroes in this highly entertaining anthology. All but one of the heroes previously starred in a popular book from...

Night after night, a father spins a new, fantastical bedtime story for his daughter from the other end of the telephone. Every night, at nine o'clock, wherever he is, Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often has to travel for work, calls his daughter and tells her a bedtime story....

Don't miss the #1 New York Times bestseller everyone is raving about! From the wild and wonderful imagination of the author of Dragons Love Tacos comes this hilarious, irresistible debut collection of six totally different stories with the same exact name. In these...

From theNew York Timesbestselling team behindRad American Women A-Zcomes an illustrated collection of radical and transformative political, social, and cultural movements in American history. "An engaging, fascinating, and necessary book that speaks truth to...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy "blends acerbic wit, shrewd insight and sharp-eyed observation [in this] bravura collection" (The Washington Post), including a story that revisits the main character from her iconic novel Prep<...

Edited by award-winning and bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of intersecting stories by both new and veteran Native writers bursts with hope, joy, resilience, the strength of community, and Native pride. Native families from Nations across the...

Featuring the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers and edited by bestselling Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of interconnected stories serves up laughter, love, Native pride, and the world's best frybread. The road to Sandy June's Legendary Frybread...

Adventure Friends Miguel and Clarke search for a lost dog in this full-color book perfect for beginning readers! Pick a book. Grow a Reader! This series is part of Scholastic's early reader line, Acorn, aimed at children who are learning to read. With easy-to-read text, a short...

Disabled young people will be proud to see themselves reflected in this hopeful, compelling, and insightful essay collection, adapted for young adults from the critically acclaimed adult book, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century that "sheds light on...