Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting is a collection of short stories that portrays a contemporary Ireland with touching, dialogue-heavy realism. This is the second collection of stories from Doyle, who has also written nine novels. The stories here are largely focused on aging men who are coping with the loss of family, the breakdown of the body and the disintegration of marriages.

As moribund as the collection sounds, each story is imparted with brilliant moments of joy—or at least an understanding by the characters about the general malaise of their lives. Doyle’s characters express gratitude for small moments of happiness, however insipid—or temporary—they may seem.

In “Ash,” Kevin is struggling to understand why his wife repeatedly shows up at the house after saying she is leaving him. He spends a week trying to figure out if his marriage is really ending, largely in council with his brother, mostly via text message. One morning Kevin calls the family down to see the eruption of the Icelandic volcano on the news. As they watch, his daughter asks him what ash is. Kevin realizes that she couldn’t have any concept of ash (the burners are electric, the fireplace is gas, there is no devout Catholicism in the schools anymore). As he explains ash as best he can to her, Kevin and his wife smile at one another. It is the first warm moment between the two in a long time, and a good example of Doyle’s style, in which a moment of beauty, nearly inexpressible in its simplicity, arises and overwhelms a mundane reality.

Bullfighting is a contemporary collection, touching on the 2010 volcano, the current recession and modern forms of communication. Still, the characters are timeless Irishmen, adrift in a subtly modern world. The use of the modern in this type of realism can often be either jarring or absent; in Bullfighting, Doyle grounds the stories in the present while remaining faithful to the classical realism he so adeptly employs. With this collection, Doyle is operating in the same mode as Chekhov and Raymond Carver—and with comparable mastery.

Although Danzy Senna is primarily known as a novelist, literary critics should sit up and take notice of her arrival as a short story writer. With her superb collection You Are Free, Senna emerges with insightful stories that explore gender, race and motherhood.

A female protagonist links each of the stories in You Are Free; what makes them most interesting is the fact that not all of these characters are likable ones. In the powerful “The Land of Beulah,” a woman takes out her frustration from a failed relationship by abusing her new puppy, which she justifies through giving up her social life in order to “care” for the dog. In “What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?” an interracial couple with a new baby struggles to interact with their neighbors (also interracial with a child) whose reverse racism and odd parenting methods ultimately put them at war with one another. And in the eerie opening story “Admission,” tensions mount between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to an elite private Los Angeles preschool, which they applied to on a whim.

Senna—having received stellar praise for her novel Symptomatic—is no stranger to exploring women in stages of pre- and post-motherhood. Her analysis of the mother—tethered down by children, responsibilities, dogs and jobs—is swiftly counterbalanced by the single woman, weighed down by work, relationships and the looming prospect of having children. In the end, the question of who exactly is free applies to all of the women within these stories, making the reader pause and wonder what it is they long to be free from.

Danielle Evans’ book of eight stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, is long anticipated. Her first story, “Virgins,” was published in the Paris Review and then selected for The Best American Stories 2008. “Virgins” is a quietly devastating tale of two teenage girls navigating the rocky road to adulthood. Bored and loaded with bad choices, the girls go clubbing, and Erica leaves her friend in a risky position while she herself opts for a more benign, but still unsavory, introduction to sex. Written with what readers can now see is Evans’ characteristic insight, humor and craftsmanship, this story is just one of the gems in a polished collection.

Evans takes as her subject people in transition: adolescents, children split between divorced parents, college graduates drifting between partners and jobs. Erica in “Virgins” is a prototype for several of the other young women who appear in these pages—independent but longing for connection, educated but not savvy enough to avoid the hurts of love and life. In “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” the narrator wonders if and how she will be able to move on after an evening spent being purposely cruel to her old lover’s fiancé. In “Jellyfish,” William mulls over his planned move from Harlem to Brooklyn as he runs late to a monthly lunch with his adult daughter, Eva. Waiting in the restaurant, Eva craves her father’s attention but when he finally arrives, full of plans for a new apartment that could accommodate both father and daughter, all he can feel is her resistance.

Evans’ characters are African-American or mixed race. They live in a country where the barriers of race and class may be harder to distinguish than in previous decades, but societal challenges are ever present. Situations may have changed, but perceptions and self-esteem have not.

This is evident in “Harvest,” a story about a group of college girls joking and laughing about ads in the campus paper offering students high prices for human eggs. Though the chatter is light, the girls know that even their middle-class backgrounds and Ivy League educations won’t make their eggs desirable. What seems like a casual evening in the dorm becomes a powerful meditation on race and class, value and commerce. Similarly, in “Snakes,” a biracial girl spends the summer with her disapproving white grandmother whose attempts at scaring her with stories of deadly snakes in the lake leads to a terrible accident and a life-changing lie.

In the final story, “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” brainy high school cheerleader Cee Cee jeopardizes her graduation and college career with an act of senseless vandalism. She is abetted by Geena, a classmate with less academic options but whose popularity and friendship supported Cee Cee through high school. Cee Cee makes a decision in order to save herself, but it is one for which she may end up paying dearly.

Moral ambiguity is explored beautifully in the best of these stories as well as the deeply felt moments of choice and regret. Evans is young to be so wise, but that youth is to the reader’s benefit; she is a writer we hope to be hearing from for a long time. 

In Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li explores the big themes—individuality, honor, family ties and love—and sets them against a richly detailed tapestry of Chinese life. Though each story takes place in modern-day China, they are formally rigorous and crafted with an elegance that harkens back to stylists like Chekhov and William Trevor. At the same time, the contemporary settings and Li’s modern sensibility bring freshness to old themes.

The nine stories take place in small villages or provincial corners of Beijing. Li’s focus is the ordinary person trapped where the demands of history, community and family collide, and characters suffer from an internalized sense of guilt or shame. Though not overtly political, Li’s stories denote the struggle between individual and community—a particularly potent subject given China’s social and political history.

In “A Man Like Him,” Teacher Fei, a lifelong bachelor, conspires to meet a man who has been publicly—and wrongfully—accused of an indiscretion. Fei has his own past troubles that he hopes will be absolved by this meeting. In “House Fire,” five friends band together to form a detective agency devoted to domestic issues. When a man comes to them for advice regarding an unsavory rumor about his wife and father-in-law, the case threatens the unity of the group and they must decide whether or not to accept it.

But Li is also interested in the way love blooms in the most unlikely places. The title story is the masterpiece in the collection—an expertly crafted work in which a professor introduces her middle-aged son to her favorite student—an action that ignores the natures of both individuals, but also opens up their lives to the possibility of happiness. Similarly, “Number 3, Garden Road” depicts a life-altering evening in the lives of two residents in a Beijing apartment house. Both moved in when the building was new, Meilan as a child, Mr. Chang as a young husband. Many years later, Meilan has returned, twice divorced, and hopes for the newly widowed Mr. Chang to notice her at the neighborhood dances. This story, with the assertive Meilan and deliberately obtuse Chang, comes the closest to humor, but it is a most gentle kind and one that draws inspiration from wise observation.

Li is ruthless in depicting the depths of her characters’ emotional shortcomings; nevertheless her lucidity and eloquence make this collection a literary pleasure.
 

The second half of the word “hardscrabble” comes from the Dutch schrabbelen, "to scratch," as in “to scratch out a living” and other familiar phrases. This is just what Idella and Avis, the titular sisters in Beverly Jensen’s beautiful work The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, accomplish: they work, scratch, laugh and scramble their way through the pages of this amazing book.

Jensen didn’t live to see her work in print. She died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 49, before any of her writings could be published. After her death, her husband's efforts at publicity brought attention to her work, and a number of well-known authors, including Howard Frank Mosher and Joyce Carol Oates, went on to champion her writing. Many of her short stories were anthologized, and one, “Wake,” was selected by author Stephen King for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of 2007.

This novel-in-stories focuses on sisters Idella and Avis, characters based on Jensen’s own mother and aunt. Their life in New Brunswick, Canada, near the end of World War I, is hardscrabble indeed: In the first story they are barely eight and six years old when their mother dies after giving birth to a baby girl.

No big epiphanies attend the lives of these two sisters as they make their way into the United States in their late teens. There Idella, the elder, marries and settle in Maine. Idella’s thin but sturdy frame echoes her approach to life, as she endures and somehow survives an unhinged mother-in-law and a wandering husband, while Avis lives a more peripatetic existence, dotted with a high turnover of boyfriends. But the book is not about plot turns. Its beauty and strength are in the small exchanges and heart-tugging vignettes that jump from nearly every page.

Here a few words can transform a tragic circumstance into a wry and humorous scene, or turn the gift of a fancy dress from a moment of joy to one of jealousy and pathos. Whether sharing their own pratfalls or their incisive takes on human nature, when Idella and Avis are together they are unstoppable. From a night on the town in “The Opera” to a hilarious ride in the country in “Cherry Cider” to the flinty sadness of “Wake,” we’re in thrall to these remarkable stories. This duo will steal readers’ hearts, while leaving a sense of sadness that there will be no more to come from this talented writer.

Barbara Clark writes from South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

In recent years, many in the literary world have declared the short story to be a format that, while not dead, is in decidedly poor health. Though the short story’s popularity may be debatable, there are a number of talented writers making great contributions to the genre—and bringing the too-often overlooked short story to the foreground of the literary community.

Lee Smith is one of those writers, and her new collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, is a treat. The Southern-born Smith has been a lauded force on the literary scene since the early 1970s, with a dozen novels and three previous collections of stories to her name. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger contains seven new stories blended with seven from older collections; the result is a lyrical, moving mix of tales featuring strong and complex characters, delivered with Smith’s trademark wit and insight.

The standout stories here include one about a teenage girl who, while coping with her father’s breakdown and mother’s denial, begins to speak in tongues; a young, unhappy bride whose passive-aggressive move before a car trip leads to an appalling tragedy; a hapless man whose wife is being ravaged by cancer; and a corpulent woman who finds real freedom in being caught for her crimes. Smith’s characters run the gamut—they are young and old, barely literate and highly educated; some tales are told in the first person while others are in the third-person narrative. The one common thread is Smith’s astute—and unmistakable—Southern perspective.

As in any collection, some of Smith’s stories are more compelling than others, but most are filled with humor, pathos and satisfying moments of revelation and clarity. The stories shine as a collection, but standouts like “Toastmaster” and “Stevie and Mama” are especially impressive when considered on an individual basis.

Whether you are a short story devotee or simply a lover of good fiction, you will find much to admire—and savor—in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger.

Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

The short stories in New York Times bestseller and PEN/Faulkner award finalist Ron Rash's new collection, Burning Bright, flow so seamlessly into each other that the reader is tempted to devour them all in one sitting like a novel. But doing so would mean losing the formidable power of each individual story.

Ranging in time from the Civil War to the current day, the authentically short stories—the longest by far is 29 pages—are tight, hauntingly melancholic studies of men and women in their darkest hours, their remarkable strengths and sobering, fascinating faults, set against the lush, atmospheric backdrop of Appalachia that Rash has so firmly mastered.

From the first story, "Hard Times," about the brutality of family and community survival during the Great Depression, Rash weaves a thread of desperation and longing for brighter days throughout the collection. In "The Ascent," one of two current-day stories dealing with the demon of meth addiction, a young boy finds solace in the company of two frozen corpses; in the title story, "Burning Bright," a recently remarried widow calmly protects her mysterious but loving new husband—who just might be an arsonist—from the town that conveniently forgot her after her first husband's death.

"Falling Star" is the heartbreaking tale of a man who knows his wife has outgrown him and the suspended moment in time just before his unforgivable attempt to keep her is discovered, and in "Lincolnites," a young Civil War wife protects her family's future with an act of intimate, matter-of-fact violence.

The region is a character in and of itself. Its myths and legends and history permeate every story, even if Rash has not obviously placed them within the narrative—though when he does, in stories like "Corpse Bird," about a modern, educated man's fear for a neighbor's child when an owl lands in his tree three nights in a row, it is exquisitely effective.

All 12 stories are worthy, a rarity in many short-story collections, and all call for a slow, careful re-read. Those readers who normally eschew short stories for lacking character development or depth will want to take a chance on Burning Bright, and those who embrace the art form already will want Rash's newest offering in their permanent collection.