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FictionShort StoriesDebut Fiction

The World With Its Mouth Open

Review by Eric A. Ponce

The everyday lives of people are filled with drama, no matter where they live. But in a place like the Kashmir region, wedged between the conflicting political and cultural influences of India, China and Pakistan, that everyday drama plays out under a different, more intense spotlight. In his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people illuminated by that spotlight. Readers will find these characters at various points of crisis, confronted with grief or gratitude, hope or hopelessness, and always the paralyzing freedom of choice.

Writing about drama doesn’t necessitate confessions of undying love or explosions. Rafiq chooses instead to tease out tension from brief, intimate interactions. In the opening story, the protagonist, Nusrat, runs into the brother of an old friend. She engages him in small talk and, as they walk the city streets, she is reminded of the life she lived as a young girl, a life filled with possibility and without the demands of womanhood and marriage. This brief exchange cracks Nusrat open, revealing a vast and paradoxical inner world. Meanwhile, in other stories, the narrators bare their hearts in unrelenting and unashamed grief: In “Flowers From a Dog,” the narrator visits the grave of an ex-lover who left to be with a wealthier man. Over the course of the visit, we experience the speaker’s loss in a poetic, existential lament.

Though politics is never directly discussed, the history and culture of Kashmir set the stage for these poignant tales. “Crows,” finds a young boy who hates studying being beaten by a tyrannical teacher. Knowing the poverty experienced by this boy and his family, and seeing their desperate hope for a better life for him, one can’t help but feel torn: Why should the boy suffer, being abused for not wanting to learn things he doesn’t care for? His naivete and pure longing for joy are heartbreaking. All these stories are, because people are.

Zahid Rafiq peers into the inner lives of 11 people living in Kashmir in his debut short story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ruined a Little When We Are Born

Review by Matthew Jackson

The first thing you’ll notice when you open Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born is just how many stories she’s managed to pack into this slim volume. There are more than three dozen of them, some running less than two pages as part of her continued practice of flash fiction, others running to more conventional short fiction lengths, all of them united by common themes of family, femininity and motherhood. 

Rooted in the Indian diaspora, many of the stories in Ruined a Little When We Are Born are centered on rituals of one kind or another, ranging from the mundane to the arcane. In the opening story, “Mother, False,” a girl experiences shocking physical changes upon the death of her mother. In “Shabnam Salamat,” the arrival of her father’s new young bride sparks an awakening in a daughter. In the bewitching “There Are Places That Will Fill You Up,” a girl connects with her long-lost mother in a search for new meaning, with surprising results. And in “Milky-Eyed Orgasm Swallows Me Whole,” a woman has a conversation with the physical manifestation of her sexual climaxes.

Through beautifully constructed sentences that read as much like prayers as they do like prose, Zambrano’s stories slither and grow like unpredictable, invasive vines, creeping inside your brain and refusing to leave. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she gives herself 10 pages or just one; this is an author who understands that the job of fiction is to generate empathy and genuine emotional response in the reader, and who knows how to extract those things with poise and confidence. 

There’s a swagger to this book, a sense of being in gifted hands, and yet there’s also a dramatic vulnerability that comes through, particularly in the stories about growing up, learning what adulthood means or realizing that parents are not superheroes. Whether she’s exploring Indian folklore or introducing an old woman to the strange powers of a dishwasher, Zambrano is always in command, always writing earnestly and vividly. Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in this case, “art” is very much the key word.

Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, "art" is very much the key word.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

The Last Dream

Review by Matthew Jackson

In a career spanning more than five decades, writer and director Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as an endlessly versatile storyteller and a true emotional explorer. Whether he’s examining wrinkles in the nature of human sexuality or probing motherhood in its many forms, Almodóvar always manages to reveal kernels of compelling, often surprising, truth.

Now, in his first work of prose published in English, Almodóvar has turned that same deeply textured, boundless talent to short stories. The Last Dream, like all his work, jumps between genres, subjects and formats, with some stories playing with elements of memoir. In the title story, Almodóvar retells the events of the day his mother died, while in “A Bad Novel” and “Memory of an Empty Day,” he examines his own nature as a writer and an aging person who’s hungry for immersion in a world that’s changing around him. In “Adiós, Volcano,” he pays tribute to the late singer Chavela Vargas, a fixture in many of his films, and in “The Visit” he reveals the groundwork for his film Bad Education.

But the stories aren’t limited to Almodóvar’s own life and career. The more fantastical include “The Life and Death of Miguel,” a story which he tells us was written when he was quite young, in which he examines a Benjamin Button-esque world where life and death happen in reverse. In “Joanna, The Beautiful Madwoman,” he tells the story of a princess driven mad by circumstance. In “Confessions of a Sex Symbol,” he dives into the mind of a porn star, while in “The Mirror Ceremony,” he examines a vampire’s strange conversion.

The sheer depth and breadth of the collection is astonishing, and it’s made more astonishing by the economy of language. A slim volume of just a dozen stories, The Last Dream is light on embellishment or lengthy description. Almodóvar’s prose is lean but evocative, elegant but grounded, and translator Frank Wynne has done a remarkable job rendering it into stylish, beautifully spare English. Almodóvar’s characters, like those in his films, are full of yearning and wonder. Both for fans of great short fiction and for fans of the director, The Last Dream is a must-read.

Renowned director Pedro Almodóvar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
FictionShort StoriesSatireLiterary Fiction

Rejection

Review by Thane Tierney

Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
FictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYAShort StoriesLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

The Hold List: Born this way

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Chasing Redbird

Sharon Creech’s Chasing Redbird was the first book I ever read by myself, which was a big deal for me; I am dyslexic and struggled to read when I was younger. I was captivated by the main character, Zinnia Taylor, because she was a misfit, just like me. Zinny has six siblings, and in their chaotic home, she often gets lost in the fray. She prefers to spend time with her Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate who live next door and provide her with a safe haven. When Jessie dies unexpectedly, Zinny withdraws even further from her family. As she wrestles with her grief and guilt, she discovers an abandoned 200-year-old pioneer trail on her family farm and becomes obsessed with restoring it to functionality. Her family thinks she’ll give up, but Zinny has to see this project through. It may be the only way to heal her broken world. Creech treats the topic of grief and family dynamics delicately and beautifully, painting a profound picture that will speak to readers of all ages.

—Meagan Vanderhill Cochran, Production Manager

Earthlings

From childhood, we’re trained to take part in society, learning what behavior is praiseworthy, and what behavior is outrageous. By adulthood, most of us conform automatically, but for some, it comes less easily—like Natsuki, the protagonist of Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings. As a child, Natsuki feels like an outsider, and she is relieved when her stuffed hedgehog, Piyyut, reveals to her that she is actually an alien from planet Popinpobopia. Her alien’s perspective lets her see her town for what it is: a “Baby Factory” in which humans serve society by working, getting married and having babies that will grow up to become society’s tools in turn. Natsuki struggles to accept that future, though she longs for the security of being normal. Her isolation increases when a teacher sexually abuses her, and no one believes her when she seeks help. Like Convenience Store Woman, Murata’s other novel that has been translated into English, Earthlings pushes readers—hard—to see the absurdity of what is and isn’t considered acceptable. While the subject matter remains bleak, by the end of the book, Natsuki finds allies, and their acts of defiance take on a kind of euphoric hilarity, despite the severity of the consequences.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor

Kaikeyi

In Vaishnavi Patel’s Kaikeyi, Princess Kaikeyi is the lone daughter in a family with seven sons. After her father banishes her mother, she is left with only the stories of the gods that her mother once shared with her. Now on her own as the sole woman in her family, she is determined for her voice to be heard. However, her world shatters when the king quickly marries her off for the sake of securing an alliance, despite Kaikeyi begging to remain independent. Before she journeys to the kingdom of her betrothed, she discovers a special magic that can influence how she is perceived within relationships. With this newfound spark of confidence, she plows through societal barriers, fighting on the battlefield for her new home and joining her husband’s council, where she resiliently presses the other men in the room to make changes in their kingdom. After years of ruthless judgment and scorn, Kaikeyi and her two sister-wives, Kausalya and Sumitra, start a women’s council for members of the community to seek advice and direction. Kaikeyi is a persistent force throughout the story, never afraid to disrupt the conditions of society. She rubs people the wrong way and inspires others, making her a dynamic character whose persistence and courage will win readers’ hearts.

—Jena Groshek, Sales Coordinator

The Complete Stories

A keen observer of idiosyncratic behavior, the inimitable Flannery O’Connor spun unforgettable, expansive short stories that brim with characters whose feelings of otherness alienate them from society. The most well-known is The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a story that is often readers’ entry point to this Southern writer. The Misfit is “aloose from the Federal Pen” and, with unfailing politeness, executes a family on their way to a vacation in Florida. Complex and contemplative, The Misfit finds “no pleasure [but] in meanness” yet tries to square his crimes with a sense of right and wrong. Other misfits in O’Connor’s stories include Olga in “Good Country People,” an unapologetically surly spinster whose leg was shot off in a hunting accident, and who gets hoodwinked by a Bible salesman. Some of her misfits crave redemption and empowerment—O’Connor was, afterall, a Catholic—while others are unwilling or unable to change. Perhaps the greatest misfit in O’Connor’s stories is the midcentury South itself. A region straining to be better? Or one unwilling to shed the yoke of violence? The Complete Stories is a compendium you can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading, feeling freshly enlightened each time.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

If you've ever felt like the odd one out—the black sheep in your family, or loner in your community—you'll love these four books with protagonists who can't help but stand out.
FictionAudioShort Stories

The Black Girl Survives in This One

Review by Tami Orendain

The 15 short tales that make up The Black Girl Survives in This One (10.5 hours) have one thing in common: Their Black girl protagonists make it out of the horror story alive. Beyond that, these terrifying vignettes are anything but predictable, stretching the limits of the horror genre towards sci-fi, gothic, comedy and more.

Author and film historian Tananarive Due reads the anthology’s introduction, situating the book in the history of horror writers’ erasure and stereotyping of Black girls. Narrator Shayna Small reads the stories, honoring each unique atmosphere with different accents and inflections, making every story a distinct experience. Across the collection, her narration has a hushed, mesmerizing tone, luring listeners into each chilling tale.

Fans of horror are sure to enjoy The Black Girl Survives in This One’s array of new, creative takes on the genre.

These terrifying short stories starring Black girl protagonists are anything but predictable, stretching the limits of the horror genre towards sci-fi, gothic, comedy and more.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning

List by the editors of BookPage
3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning.
STARRED REVIEW

3 short story collections as brilliant as summer lightning

With the swiftness of a summer storm, the short stories in these collections electrify and illuminate.
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Fiction

10 contemporary writers (Ali Smith! Tommy Orange!) apply their considerable talents to the signature style of Franz Kafka in this anthology.

Read More »
Book jacket image for Beautiful Days by Zach Williams
Fiction

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.

Read More »
Book jacket image for Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao
Fiction

In Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails, a fox spirit helps Asian women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

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With the swiftness of a summer storm, the short stories in these collections electrify and illuminate.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ninetails

Review by Maya Fleischmann

Myth and folklore intertwine seamlessly with the tumultuous lives of Asian women in this mesmerizing collection of stories.

Each story in Ninetails: Nine Tales reveals the poignant struggles of young Asian women marginalized and scorned, struggling to eke out their identity, follow their heart and break free from political oppression and social expectations. At the heart of these tales of strength and transformation is Ninetails, a fox spirit known by many names—hulijing, huxian, fox demon or fox fairy—who helps women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

The central story, divided into several parts, is called “The Haunting of Angel Island.” Set in the 1900s, against the backdrop of the Angel Island immigration station located in San Francisco Bay, it features Tye, a Chinese interpreter who witnesses the harrowing experiences of women detainees. Other stories include the tale of a silicone love doll who yearns to be human, the plight of a Korean girl bullied in a land foreign to her, and the story of two friends connected by being cheated on by the same man. Unfolding with gripping intensity through author Sally Wen Mao’s vivid depictions of the gritty settings and sobering situations that confront her characters, each premise is made even more powerful by the magical element introduced when a fox spirit manifests to liberate the women from their misery, or inflict retribution for wrongdoings.

Some of the stories in Ninetails end abruptly and can feel a little disjointed; nevertheless, Mao’s compelling depiction of Asian women’s experiences is powerfully unsettling in its authenticity. Through themes of revenge and redemption, these stories illuminate our enduring capacity for resilience.

In Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails, a fox spirit helps Asian women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Beautiful Days

Review by Matthew Jackson

There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. You can sense tension lurking like a camouflaged animal in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of the worlds Williams builds.

In Beautiful Days, his first collection, Williams delivers intensity on page after page, but it’s how he uses the tension he creates that makes the work so remarkable. In stories that take the mundane to wondrous, frightening and deeply affecting places, Williams keeps finding new ways to remind us of the strangeness of being human, and the many ways our lives can transform in an unexpected instant.

There are no real limits to the subject matter of the 10 tales within this volume. The settings shift from skyscrapers to secluded cabins, seductive bedrooms to the quiet house next door. The characters are parents, roommates, neighbors, co-workers, even mice whose lives hang in the balance of another character’s quest for the right trap. In “Trial Run,” a man visits his office amid a snowstorm, only to find a storm of a different kind waiting inside. In “Red Light,” a sexually adventurous fitness buff finds himself in a particularly mysterious bedroom. And in “Wood Sorrel House,” which might be the most unsettling short story you read in all of 2024, new parents find themselves in a house outside of time, watching in horror as their baby refuses to age even as their own bodies fail.

Many of these stories push their subjects into the realm of the unreal, the supernatural and even the horrific, but genre conventions do not concern Williams any more than neat endings do. What’s most striking about Beautiful Days is not the premises of the stories, but the way in which the author lets them unfold at their own quirky pace, like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons. His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, dropping us into 10 distinct worlds that might all be part of the same dreamy landscape, or might be individual pocket universes. Either way, we can get lost, because Williams has a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Conceived as a tribute to Franz Kafka on the 100th anniversary of his death, A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories features short stories by 10 contemporary writers in the idiosyncratic style of the literary genius, a style Merriam-Webster defines as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Watching writers that include Ali Smith and Tommy Orange apply their considerable talent to this task makes for a mind-bending and consistently enjoyable reading experience.

One of the principal pleasures of this project is the range of subject matter and variety of styles the authors bring to their stories. In “God’s Doorbell,” for example, Naomi Alderman reimagines the biblical account of the Tower of Babel in a fashion that seems especially relevant to our current concerns with the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Yiyun Li’s “Apostrophe’s Dream” is a whimsical piece presented in the form of a dramatic work featuring squabbling punctuation marks as its characters.

But when one thinks of Kafka’s short stories, what most often surfaces is the image of an individual trapped in a bizarre, inexplicable situation. The volume features several works in that genre, among them Elif Batuman’s “The Board,” where the prospective purchaser of an apartment confronts the baffling commentary of the building’s implacable governing body. In “Headache,” by Leone Ross, the protagonist is drawn against her will into an increasingly problematic health care system.

Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman has acknowledged Kafka as an early influence, and so it’s fitting that the collection ends with his story, “This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing,” whose enigmatic title comes from an entry in Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks. In Kaufman’s story, a novelist identified only as “I.” descends, after a disastrous launch event for his latest novel, into an ever more complex and seemingly inescapable literary labyrinth as his identity shape-shifts, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird is a roller coaster ride that will delight the adventuresome reader, even if the twists and turns of some of its most daring stories may challenge those who enjoy more conventional short fiction. Somewhere, though, it’s easy to imagine Kafka paging through these varied and deeply imagined tales and nodding in admiration.

10 contemporary writers (Ali Smith! Tommy Orange!) apply their considerable talents to the signature style of Franz Kafka in this anthology.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Table for Two

Review by Eric A. Ponce

You can learn a lot about someone by getting dinner with them. At a small table, in the glow of candlelight, you might find yourself connecting with a new acquaintance as if they were an old friend. In Table for Two, the new collection of stories from beloved novelist Amor Towles, that level of intimacy is reached and at times exceeded. Towles presents his protagonists with such a high degree of detail that readers will feel like they know the characters personally. While this is the hallmark of any good fiction, Towles elevates these stories further by setting them in complex political landscapes and amid moral quagmires. The result is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.

One choice that distinguishes this collection is its geographical organization. Towles begins with six stories that take place in New York City. The first of these, “The Line,” actually opens in rural Russia, where our “hero,” Pushkin, lives an idyllic life. However, after the Bolshevik revolution, his wife, Irina, insists that they move to Moscow. From there, through many winding twists of fate, the couple ends up in New York City, far away from their feudal beginnings and their Communist awakenings. The five following stories take place in the New York of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, displaying the city at its wealthiest through characters trying to take some of that wealth for themselves. The second half of the book is a novella set in early 20th century Los Angeles, capturing a unique time in the city’s history when financial success coupled with an increasingly seedy underground laid the foundation for LA to become one of the largest, most diverse cities in the United States.

The most engaging, artful part of Table for Two, however, is the unique ability Towles has to approach his characters simultaneously through authorial intervention and through getting inside their heads. Frequently, Towles writes about the characters as though he and they know what is going to happen, or as though they know what the moral of their story is. Rather than spoiling the plot or coming off as heavy-handed, this technique allows readers to fully engage in the stories, pushing them to consider for themselves: What does success mean? What lengths would you go to for money? What does it mean to be happy with your life? Towles forces the reader and his characters to address these questions, and the answers you find in this book will move you.

Amor Towles’ latest, Table for Two, is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.
FictionShort Stories

So Late in the Day

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

With the publication of exquisite literary gems like Foster and Small Things Like These, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s reputation among American readers is slowly, but steadily, growing. The three elegantly-crafted stories collected in So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men will only enhance that increasing regard.

In the title story, Cathal, a Dubliner on the cusp of middle age, faces a lonely weekend as he looks back on the demise of his relationship with Sabine, a French woman he met at a conference two years earlier. What Cathal originally regarded as innocuous and fully justified observations about his lover mutate into profound character flaws and reflections of his misogyny considered through Sabine’s eyes. Ruminating, he recalls a line he read, “about how, if things have not ended badly . . . they have not ended.”

“The Long and Painful Death” is the story of an unnamed female writer who has won a highly competitive two week residency at a cottage on Ireland’s Achill Island once owned by German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. Her retreat is interrupted almost immediately by a German literature professor who wants to see the house, and when she hosts him for tea and cake he makes clear his views about her worthiness as even a temporary occupant of Böll‘s former home.

The subtle air of menace that hovers over “The Long and Painful Death” emerges full-blown in “Antarctica,” which was originally published as the title story in Keegan’s debut collection. In this disturbing final story, a “happily married” woman uses the excuse of a Christmas shopping trip to Somerset, England, to find out what it’s like to sleep with another man. It doesn’t take her long to connect with a suitable candidate at a pub near her hotel. At first, their mutually fulfilling sex exceeds her modest expectations, but the story’s chilling final pages are worthy of a tale fashioned by Stephen King.

In a book that barely exceeds 100 pages, it’s tempting to race to the end. But Keegan’s lapidary style almost demands that her work be consumed slowly, sentence by lovely sentence, as when a character feels “the tail end of a dream—a feeling, like silk—disappearing,” or when a hen’s plumage appears “as though she’d powdered herself before she’d stepped out of the house.” These stories invite rereading to appreciate how a skilled author can construct character and build narrative tension with unaffected grace.

Claire Keegan’s lapidary style demands that her work be consumed slowly, sentence by lovely sentence. Her latest collection, So Late in the Day, will only enhance her increasing regard among American readers.
FictionShort Stories

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Some 50 years ago, Edna O’Brien shook up preconceptions about the inner lives of Irish women with searing, lyrical fiction that spoke the truth about sexual yearning, moral repression, insidious abuse and symptoms of depression long shrugged off as chronic melancholy. Much has changed in Ireland since then, yet the sharply unapologetic stories in Louise Kennedy’s accomplished collection The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac tap into the same vein of quiet despair.

These 15 perceptive stories center largely on women confined by their circumstances, futilely grasping at elusive happiness. The very title of the opening story, which lends its name to the collection, sets the tone as a young woman, abandoned by her crooked husband, languishes like a prisoner in a newly built house that will soon be repossessed. Many of the situations that launch these stories are heartbreaking: A young mother internalizes feelings of anxiety and guilt over her developmentally challenged child (“Brittle Things”); a middle-aged woman watches her marriage wither after she and her husband agree to terminate a pregnancy (“Garland Sunday”).

Kennedy’s has a notable gift for infusing even fraught scenarios with a jaundiced Irish humor. The old friends who travel to Tunisia for an ill-conceived girls’ holiday in “Beyond Carthage” are savagely drawn bundles of human imperfection. In “Powder,” an awkward tentativeness is palpable between a young woman whose boyfriend has died and his grieving American mother as they drive through the west of Ireland scattering his ashes. One of the most penetrating stories, “In Silhouette,” harkens back to the troubles in Northern Ireland, as a ghost haunts the sister of the man who killed him. The troubles, of course, formed the backdrop of Kennedy’s well-received debut novel, Trespasses, which brought wide recognition to her as a writer in her 50s sharing her voice for the first time. The stories in The End of the World is a Cul de Sac reflect the formative experience of living through years of conflict, and confirm her place as a trenchant, keen observer of the violence and turmoil that live inside.

The sharply unapologetic stories in Louise Kennedy’s accomplished collection confirm her place as a trenchant, keen observer of the violence and turmoil that live inside.

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