Short stories curated by Nebula Award for Best Short Story

Listing 119 stories.

A middle-aged woman leads a traveling circus act through the Midwest featuring 26 monkeys who climb into a bathtub and disappear and then reappear on her bus after the show. The impending death of one of the key monkeys causes her to wrestle with the meaning of life.

When a bartender discovers that bug bites give him dreams, he attempts to solve his marital problems by making his wife experience the dreams with him.

A woman celebrates her daughter’s sixth birthday by volunteering at the women's center. As she assists other women, she recalls her own trauma and struggles with the constant reminders of it.

A man and his girlfriend go to a cabin on the beach where a ship of Fae changes their fate.

After her sister dies, an actress in New York uses her supernatural powers to manipulate time and try to save her sister, but each attempt causes uncontrollable side effects that threaten to destroy the world.

An old man recalls how the death of King Kong caused him to lose someone he loved.

In an apocalyptic future, a team of undead time travel back to a doomed flight to rescue the passengers on board in a routine but elaborate mission. Getting the passengers through a portal is not easy without disrupting the fabric of space-time, but the passengers, healthy and alive, are the only hope to populate a desperate future world.

Faced with inexplicable suffering in a locked ward of a mental hospital, a young woman must choose whether to give up or live life on her own terms.

In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.

After getting caught up in a barfight, a robot discusses his faulty plans for immortality with an engineering-savvy old man and his imaginative granddaughter.