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Looking for a reprieve from the news cycle? Escape into Australia’s recent past and the near future in outer space with our March fiction picks.

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

Helen Garner (Pantheon, 208 pp., $27, March 2026)

Looking for a reprieve from the news cycle? Escape into Australia’s recent past and the near future in outer space with our March fiction picks.

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

Helen Garner (Pantheon, 208 pp., $27, March 2026)

In times as bleak as these, many people may feel a desire to escape into a different era—at the very least, that seems to be the case for the editors and publicists at Penguin Random House. This month, the U.S. publisher released a collection of short stories by celebrated Australian novelist Helen Garner that debuted in her native country nearly a decade ago. She wrote many of the stories in the last century, during the 1980s and 1990s.

“Most of Garner’s stories are fronted by Australian women living in the transformative period of feminism’s second wave,” American author Jonathan Escoffery writes in the foreword to the new collection. Garner’s blunt prose eschews euphemisms and confronts matters of sex and gender head-on. Crossword-playing fathers grow visibly uncomfortable as, across the living room, their daughters and wives muse about tampons and periods. When two female friends discuss experimenting with lesbianism, the one who has only ever had sex with men asks, “[I]f both of you have the same equipment does that mean it’s more equal?”

For all her piquant observations of Australian life (“Have you ever noticed,” one character says, “how Australian men, even in their forties, dress like small boys?”), Garner devotes many of her pages to other continents. She takes readers to England, France, Germany, and, briefly, Pakistan. A recurring character is from........

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