Faber & Faber releases a compendium of delicately designed short stories for its 90th birthday

Literary world giants Faber & Faber are kickstarting the new year with Faber Stories, a “landmark series of individual volumes” of short stories “bringing together past, present and future” of the publisher in celebration of its 90th birthday.

“From precious rediscoveries to gender-playful fictions, futurist fables to uncanny imaginings” the collection of 20 shorts, ten to be released today (3 January) and a further ten on 7 March, shines a light on Faber’s iconic releases and equally exciting modern roster of writers, from Kazuo Ishiguro to Alan Bennett, to everyone’s favourite author of the moment Sally Rooney, via a previously unseen story Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath.

Faber’s in-house designer Jonathan Pelham oversaw the project, and it features a host of brilliant illustrators, including Charlotte Ager, Braulio Amado, Darren Wall and Luke Bird, who’ve been tasked with adorning the covers with a restricted colour palette.

This compendium of Faber releases has been put together in collaboration Gaby Wood, the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, who comments: “It’s been an incredible pleasure, and a privilege, to search for short stories among the extraordinary group of authors Faber has assembled throughout its history,” she says. “Each of these stories offers a different answer to the question of what it means to be a master of the form, and the associations between them have given this set its shape. However, anyone scanning its titles will see that there’s room for many more."

Modestly priced at just £3.50 a copy, Faber Stories might just be the ideal way to answer your new year’s resolution of reading more.