Nearly 40 years after Mark Helprin’s first short story was published in the New Yorker, the talented author continues his exploration of the genre with The Pacific and Other Stories. In his first book in almost 10 years, Helprin offers up 16 stories of mostly ordinary people whose outward peace masks the turbulence within their souls. Helprin’s characters are all ages and sexes, and live in such disparate locales as Venice, Brooklyn and Israel. But what they all have in common is a quiet faith in their own ability to make a difference.

In Monday, a middle-aged contractor who still believes that an honorable life is a worthy one, bestows an unheard of gift upon a young widow. In Perfection, a slight Hasidic boy shows Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel and the rest of the New York Yankees how the game of baseball should be played, with a Yiddish twist.

All of the stories are to the point one person, one problem. But such problems! Drifter Jacob Thayer, for example, must convince the inhabitants of a small town in turn-of-the-century Europe that the telephone is not God. In the title story, a young woman works in a factory while her husband fights World War II in the Pacific. She takes a small house in San Diego overlooking the ocean so there is nothing separating them but water.

Helprin skillfully bounces back and forth between whimsy and tragedy. The stories’ lack of connectedness is a thread in itself, a statement of humanity’s infinite capacity for sorrow and joy. Each of the men and women in this book are introspective, although they somehow contrive to be so without acknowledging any flaws in themselves. For better or worse, they’ve lived their lives to this point and now they are all searching. They are looking for love, death, hope, God and the better part of themselves. Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

With her 1981 short story collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Ellen Gilchrist set the standard against which her own and other American authors’ work is measured. That first collection introduced Rhoda Manning and Nora Jane Whittington, two recurring characters in Gilchrist’s fiction. Half of the stories in her new collection, I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, also feature Rhoda, Gilchrist’s most beloved creation.

Though Gilchrist’s characters live closer to Tara than Tobacco Road, their hearts still break like lesser mortals. Rhoda Manning older, wiser, with a bruised heart and ego to match offers stories about her father, a formidable patriarch, fomenter of family intrigue, a man Rhoda loves and resembles more than she admits. In these stories, Rhoda comes to terms with a host of flawed relationships. “GštterdŠmmerung,” written in 2000, is eerily prescient, with Nora Jane Whittington, the “self-taught anarchist and quick-change artist” from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, confronting an evil that foreshadows the carnage of 9/11.

Each of the stories is a gem, dealing with loss and redemption in equal measure: a young man mourns the loss of his child through abortion; a hairdresser mourns the loss of the only woman he could love, if only he could love women; a young girl loses her alter ego and fills the void in unexpected ways. Gilchrist wounds her characters with surgical precision and then with a healer’s art, gives them a second chance at life.

Gilchrist has a natural gift for poetry that translates flawlessly to the short story form. Her characters rise from the ruins of Faulkner’s decaying Old South, more adept at burning bridges than burning barns, a resilient breed that personifies the New South. Eudora Welty said that “some stories leave a train of light behind them, meteor-like, so that much later than they strike our eyes we may see their meaning like an aftereffect.” Gilchrist’s writing is like that, full of stories to read and reread for their humor, unflinching honesty and universal humanity that defies class and regional boundaries. Mary Garrett writes from Middle Tennessee.

It’s hard not to like Hannah Tinti even before you read Animal Crackers. She’s the lone editor and half of a two-woman crew at the avant-garde literary magazine One Story, which consists of one story per issue. While anyone who can persist at such a labor of love and still manage to put Ramen noodles on the table deserves admiration, Tinti also somehow found time to pen a stunningly original collection of stories on the human condition. You could also call it a look at the zoological condition, as each story features an animal. Depending on the story, the beast may be an animal doppelganger of a human character, represent his or her better self or darkest fears, or bear the brunt of a human character’s misery.

In these stories, Tinti walks lonely paths of pain as if she owned a trail map. They are written boldly, without a misstep or false note whether she’s writing about anthropomorphic zoo giraffes on strike in "Reasonable Terms" or an untamable and unbreakable woman in "Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus." The result is a prodigious debut full of dark humor, style and compassion that sets the bar extraordinarily high for Tinti in the future.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of reading Laurie Lynn Drummond’s debut collection, Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You to realize that this nomadic ex-cop can flat-out write. With spartan prose exposing a visceral power, Drummond has crafted the fictionalized tales of five Baton Rouge policewomen, based on her experiences as a uniformed officer in that same city.

Bringing to life the mind-numbing boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror that categorize police work, Drummond’s stories burrow into your guts and carve out a place for themselves. These women and their strengths, weaknesses and emotions come across as an amalgam of one cop, one woman. The same one who in “Absolutes” can shoot a man, then shove her hand into his chest to keep him alive, could also be the cop who viciously slaps her young daughter for chattering too much in “Cleaning Your Gun.” With Joseph Wambaugh’s ear for cop dialogue and a mystic earthiness all her own, Drummond makes her characters come to life, and at the end leaves us with an idea of what they’re searching for: a glimmer of decency and a bit of hope at the end of the day.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the Indonesian author of All That is Gone, makes each word resonate with meaning. Translated by Willem Samuels, Toer’s eight semi-autobiographical tales are teeming with cruelty and beauty. A winner of the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, Toer spent years as a political prisoner in his homeland in the 1960s and ’70s. Those years come through in his writing, a mix of longing and desperation that possess the stark, bleak beauty of a full moon or a trackless desert.

The stories, which take place in the author’s rural East Java hometown of Blora, begin with the haunting title story, in which a man looks back at his lost youth and innocence, captive to cobwebbed memories. That helplessness is mirrored throughout Toer’s collection, most notably by the citizens of Blora, who in the mid-20th century are under the thumb of various warring factions and conquerors whose hegemony extends to their thoughts and beliefs. In “Acceptance,” the book’s longest story, we watch as war causes the disintegration of a large family. Other tales are equally as grim child abuse, torture, political and physical domination are just some of Toer’s themes. Yet his skill is such that humanity is present in each tale, lurking in the shadows.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

It seems remarkable that Richard Russo, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, has never before published a collection of short stories. But The Whore’s Child and Other Stories is indeed his first.

While Russo has built his reputation as a chronicler of blue-collar, small-town America, the seven diverse stories in this collection cover a lot more ground, both socioeconomically and geographically. Many concern middle-aged men, although a contemplative 10-year-old boy and an aging Belgian nun are at the center of two of the most memorable tales. The nun is Sister Ursula, a self-dubbed whore’s child who joins a college fiction workshop and tries to make sense of some puzzling questions from childhood through her feverishly wrought memoir. The boy in The Mysteries of Linwood Hart drifts though a summer baseball season, philosophically ascribing desires to inanimate objects while failing to comprehend the real, if elusive, complexities of the adult world.

In an evocative story of childhood, Joy Ride, a boy and his mother hit the road in the family Ford. Mom wants to escape Maine and marriage, but as they head west to California things get ugly somewhere around Tucumcari. The mother’s surrender to the inevitable becomes clouded in denial 20 years later, telling us more about the corrective power of memory than about the act of rebellion itself.

A fatalism permeates Russo’s stories, though it is never a despair-laden fatalism. Most often, his characters are just trying to make some sense of the peculiar hand that fate has dealt them. So, while a father who learns that his daughter’s husband has hit her dutifully assumes his fatherly role, he does so a bit reluctantly, aware of his own imperfections. A writer who finally reaps financial benefits from his talent must temper his success with guilt when he considers the chronic insolvency of an equally talented friend.

There is much humor in Russo’s stories, sometimes cynical, sometimes wistful. It nudges the stories along and elevates his characters and his readers over emotional hurdles that might seem insurmountable in a lesser writer’s hands. The many fans of Russo’s novels will find much to admire in his short fiction, as well.

In Music Through the Floor, Pushcart Prize winner Eric Puchner shows just how startling a first work can be. The nine stories included here wake you up to the joy and oftentimes heartache of a tale well told. In Children of God, the misfits in the story are not the two developmentally disabled adults but rather the parents and normal people surrounding them. Child’s Play tells of little boys behaving like the cruelest of monsters. By the end, the reader is thoughtful at the implications of their actions and haunted by their subsequent future.

Puchner refuses to pander to his readers, and he faces the truths of the world with honesty. Love, family and the ways in which people go in search for both: it’s all here. And where some authors might struggle with endings their last lines and paragraphs dull clinks of disappointment Puchner’s final words are full and satisfying. It’s storytelling that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Yiyun Li lives in the United States, but she was raised in Beijing. In her new collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, her native country becomes a silent character, quietly informing her writing. Li has an elegant way of delivering a story; both The New Yorker and The Paris Review have published her work and there is a gracefulness to her style, a subtlety that runs throughout.

In After a Life a couple learns what it is to sacrifice for love, while in Death Is Not a Bad Joke if Told the Right Way the young narrator comes to learn as an adult that, Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he’ll become tomorrow. There is wisdom hidden here, and it’s told in prose gentle and quiet, yet so very strong and true.

Willful Creatures is Aimee Bender’s third work of fiction, and unlike most any other writer working today, she follows Aristotle’s adage: That which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable. Fairy tales for the 21st century, Bender’s stories conjure worlds where a man takes a Lilliputian for a pet and a couple with pumpkins for heads gives birth to an iron-headed child. The author’s delivery is straightforward and matter-of-fact. The surreal and the magical, as well as the normal and the traditional, coexist so perfectly that one is no better no more real than the other.

Often, Bender’s narrators display a detached calm, the voice sure and even as it describes cruel teenage torment or the curiosities of an unexpected romantic relationship. Precisely because of this style, she is able to highlight those universals of love, hurt, family, loneliness and grace to a higher clarity. The truth is not obscured by the common and everyday. The Lilliputian is his owner’s desire for connection made incarnate, and the iron-headed child is the vehicle by which Bender is able to show the limitless boundaries of a family’s love. Through fairy tales, fables, imagined worlds where the impossible becomes true, Bender pulls you in. More importantly, she makes you believe.

Fiction has always benefited from experimentation, and several recent short story collections show just how well a new generation of writers has taken to the challenge. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is the debut short story collection by Laila Lalami. Born in Rabat, Morocco, she is the creator of the literary blog Moorishgirl.com, and she opens this series of linked stories with an illegal nighttime voyage. A group of Moroccan immigrants have their hopes set on Spain and the trip across the Strait of Gibraltar is the only way there. In the stories that follow, Lalami focuses on a chosen four: a young mechanic with a young wife, a woman and her three small children, a university student who has recently taken to wearing the hijab, and a young man who, like the others, has dreams bigger than his means.

Lalami aims to fill a reader’s senses. Throughout the book there is the aroma of the mint tea served at every meal, the joyful cries of children playing soccer, the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer. Chief among them, though, is the pull of her characters’ hope. As determined as her characters, Lalami sets out to prove the strength of the human spirit.