In her relatively brief career, Jhumpa Lahiri already has carved out a distinctive literary niche. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and author of a critically and commercially successful novel, The Namesake, her tales of Indians encountering contemporary American life have resonated with a wide swath of readers. Her latest collection, Unaccustomed Earth, will only burnish that estimable reputation. It's an emotionally astute, character-driven assortment of stories that carry forward and deepen the themes she's explored in her previous works.

Except for some fleeting glimpses, Lahiri has abandoned the Indian settings that formed the backdrop for several stories in Interpreter of Maladies. Most of her characters have settled into a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in affluent suburbs from Boston to Seattle. Allusions to the symbols of their success, Ivy League colleges and luxury automobiles chief among them, are sprinkled generously throughout these pages. Indeed, but for occasional references to Indian foods like luchis or dal, or a description of one character's closet full of saris, these stories might be those of any upwardly mobile Americans. If there's a unifying theme in Unaccustomed Earth, it's the way these immigrants have assimilated so quickly and effectively into American life.

The collection's title story tells of Ruma, a vaguely dissatisfied housewife who's raising a young son with little assistance from her husband, a hedge fund manager. When her widowed father comes to visit and quickly bonds with the young boy, she wrestles with the decision of whether to invite him to live with her family, discovering only after he departs that he's involved in a relationship with another woman. "A Choice of Accommodations" examines the simmering tensions in the marriage of Amit and Megan, as they return to Amit's New England boarding school to celebrate the wedding of a female friend from his school days. In "Only Goodness," Lahiri writes poignantly of Sudha, a woman trying to rescue her younger brother Rahul from his descent into a life of alcoholism, and her "fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other."

Part Two of Unaccustomed Earth consists of three linked stories, following the lives of Hema and her childhood friend Kaushik over more than 30 years. In "Once in a Lifetime," Kaushik's family comes back to America after several years in India when his mother develops breast cancer. They move into Hema's home, where they spend several awkard months. Five years later, Kaushik's father has entered into an arranged marriage with a woman some 20 years his junior and the mother of two children, and in "Year's End" Kaushik recounts his struggle to accept the new domestic arrangement. Finally, in "Going Ashore," Hema and Kaushik meet by chance in Rome. She's a Latin scholar on sabbatical and he's an accomplished photojournalist. Their encounter kindles an intense love affair, which ends when Kaushik leaves for a magazine position in Hong Kong. The story's climax, at a Thai resort on December 26, 2005, is haunting and almost unbearably sad.

Lahiri's prose style is graceful, elegant, understated. It's awkward to call these pieces "short stories"—the shortest is 24 pages—and, like Alice Munro, Lahiri is adept at handling chronology, ranging backward and forward in time, compressing lifetimes into a single artfully crafted paragraph. Relish this gorgeous collection and contemplate the prospect of the work she'll produce as she reaches her artistic maturity.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Whenever I meet a couple, I inevitably wind up asking, "How did the two of you meet?" I am rarely disappointed with the answers to my question. Stories about love are rarely boring, and tales of "how we met" unite couples, becoming part of their personal and shared histories, the stories of their lives. Apparently young adult author David Levithan is also no stranger to the magic of couples' beginnings. In his new short story collection for teenagers, How They Met and Other Stories, Levithan offers 18 stories about attraction, many of which focus on how people find each other—and love.

We meet a boy and girl who make an instant connection on an airplane, only to find out years later that a secret Cupid might have arranged their rendezvous. There's Gabriel, the reluctant babysitter who falls in love with the "Starbucks boy" when his precocious charge demands daily visits to the neighborhood coffee shop. There are the equally compelling stories of how one narrator's two sets of grandparents met—in very different circumstances. Given the age of Levithan's protagonists, it's not surprising that several of the stories—for better or for worse—center on the prom. In "The Good Witch," a boy's overly girly-girl prom date prompts him to come out to her—and to himself. In "Andrew Chang," an obligatory prom set-up turns into a serendipitous meeting. In "Skipping the Prom," one couple's romantic evening is tinged with sadness for the endings that are to come. High school and college romances are often transitory, and, like "Skipping the Prom," many of the stories here have a bittersweet quality. Lovers are left behind when the other grows up or moves on, hearts are broken—but the stories almost always hold out the promise of better, more lasting loves to come.

Many of these stories have their own genesis in Levithan's tradition of writing an annual Valentine's Day story, and some of them date back to his own high school years. Alternately squirmingly awkward, painfully funny, agonizingly sad, these stories are, above all, achingly true—as complex and endlessly fascinating as love itself.

Nominated for the National Book Award, Jim Shepard's stunning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is packed with a brilliantly diverse array of stories few writers would dare attempt to match. Covering a swath of time from ancient Greece ("My Aeschylus") to the Roman invasion of Britain ("Hadrian's Wall") to the present day, Shepard consistently demonstrates both a mastery of the form and a gift for synthesizing arcane research in a way that doesn't detract from his storytelling talents (just check out the acknowledgements for evidence of that fact).

Whether he's weaving grim tales of failed exhibitions to find the yeti in Tibet ("Ancestral Legacies") or Australia's inland sea ("The First South Central Australian Expedition"), recounting, with wry humor, the story of a doomed love affair between two Russian cosmonauts ("Eros 7") or sketching the tragic impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on one Russian family with deep ties to the nuclear industry ("The Zero Meter Diving Team"), Shepard never wavers in his focus on the painfully human qualities of his characters. The collection's most gripping story, Sans Farine, included in the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories is the harrowing tale of an executioner during the French Revolution, chilling in its stark detail and heart- stopping in its emotional power. Shepard is the co-editor of a collection of writers' favorite pieces, entitled You've Got to Read This. That's the same magical feeling you'll have when you finish this astonishing work.

An engaging debut
The strength of Canadian writer Neil Smith's collection, Bang Crunch, lies principally in the empathy he displays for an assortment of quirky characters, most of them living in his native Montreal.

Two stories–"Green Fluorescent Protein" and "Funny Weird or Funny Ha-Ha?"–feature Peggy, a sympathetic character who's a doctor and the alcoholic mother of a teenage son. Her husband has died of a cerebral hemorrhage while participating in a curling match, and she decides to put his ashes in a curling stone that she sometime consults for advice. One of the most charming stories is "B9ers," the tale of a support group for people with benign tumors who discover the root of their problem may be that they're too nice. In fragmentary sections, Scrapbook provides the all-too-timely account of the survivor of a college campus shooting who struggles to come to terms with his guilt over fleeing the scene of the incident. Smith also demonstrates a penchant for the occasional experimental story. "Bang Crunch," narrated in the second person and in a single paragraph, tells the bittersweet tale of Eepie Carpetrod, a victim of the imaginary Fred Hoyle syndrome (named for the creator of the Big Bang Theory), who ages one month each day and whose life then implodes at even greater speed. Her poignant advice: Act quickly, act graciously. While it may take some time to expose him to a non- Canadian audience, Smith is a young writer of ample talents that are well represented in this collection.

The space between
English-born, Australian resident Cate Kennedy's Dark Roots offers 17 stories that feature as their unifying theme the myriad ways in which communications between people break down and the corresponding struggle to revive them. Kennedy relies on terse, direct prose that's highlighted by her knack for focusing on small, but essential, details that bring the stories to life.

In "A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear" Kennedy employs the sudden deafness of a family dog as a metaphor for the lack of communication between husband and wife. A couple on their way to have their wedding rings enlarged ("Resize") discover in the process the source of their original attraction, while The Wheelbarrow Thief tells of a woman's struggle with the decision to reveal her pregnancy to her lover. But Kennedy isn't an unreservedly serious writer. Her story "The Testosterone Club" deftly sketches one woman's fiendishly clever revenge on her husband and his amorous mates. For O. Henry lovers, the stories "Habit" and "The Light of Coincidence" feature clever plot twists. Dark Roots ably displays the work of a subtle and accomplished writer who has much to say about the human condition.

Southern tales
Calling a short story writer a Southern writer inevitably conjures up images of giants like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. While Gerald Duff hasn't reached that eminence, his collection Fire Ants is a fine addition to the genre.

Like most Southern storytellers, Duff is noteworthy for his focus on some of the more distinctive personalities who inhabit the territory below the Mason-Dixon Line. In "The Angler's Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love," for example, a middle-aged oil worker kidnaps a teenager and transports her to a fishing cabin on the Texas Gulf Coast merely to watch her perform her cheerleading routine. "A Perfect Man" shifts the scene to Tennessee, where a mother desperate to free her son from jail after he's been wrongly arrested for robbing a convenience store turns to the only source she can think of to help her make bail her old lover. And in the collection's title story Duff offers the eerie tale of an aging woman who re-enacts the end of a failed love affair in grisly fashion.

Not content to limit himself to contemporary settings, Duff has an affinity for historical tales. "Maryland" tells the story of a slave who's willing to sacrifice his life to save the life of his military office master, while "Redemption" recounts a grim duel in mid-19th-century Texas. Readers from North and South alike will find much to engage them in this stimulating collection.

Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities. Nayman is adept at reversing the reader's expectations as her characters grapple with the weight of the burden history has placed upon them. In the first two stories, "The House on Kronenstrasse" and "The Porcelain Monkey," the protagonists make startling discoveries about their parents that transform the way each looks at the world. In "Dark Urgings of the Blood," the novella that makes up half the book, Nayman brings to bear her training as a clinical psychologist to tell the haunting story of a psychiatrist and her patient, unknowingly linked by tragic circumstances.

As befits their subject matter, these four stories are dark and often troubling. Nayman's talent lies in her ability to illumine the essential humanity at their core.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Pennsylvania.

There are good books and great books. And then there are books like Daniel Handler's Adverbs. Reading it feels like calling in sick when you don't feel sick so you can curl up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a fluffy blanket and watch the rain fall. It's a Bloody Mary for the hung-over heart. I have such a crush on this book.

You might know Handler better as his alter ego, children's book author Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events). He's written two other grown-up novels, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth. And now, as if that weren't enough, with his third adult book he proves himself a master of the love story. Adverbs is a collection of 16 interlinking stories built around the ways in which people love each other: soundly, obviously, naturally, often, etc. The book begins, as love often does, with the immediate, the obvious and the brief, moving quickly toward cold and complicated before winding up at barely and judgmentally.

Some of the stories are sadder than yours, and some are incandescently happy, and almost all of them are hilarious in places. The same characters or at least the same names show up in several stories at different ages, and key phrases or elements keep kaleidoscoping through the collection, giving the whole thing a disorienting, dizzy-in-love kind of feel. Is the Lila who's desperately ill in "Soundly" the same eye-rolling Lila who tears tickets at the theater in "Obviously"? Is Andrea at the bar also Andrea the ex-girlfriend and Andrea the cab driver? And just how many Joes and Hanks are in this book, anyway? You soon figure out it doesn't matter. It's not who loves, it's how they love that counts.

Trying to pinpoint the nature of love leads to some of the author's best observations. In "Frigidly," he writes, "When love appears it's a supernatural thing like the songs say, but eventually you have to get out of bed, even on the coldest of days, and pay the rent." That sums it up almost perfectly.

Becky Ohlsen writes infatuatedly from Portland, Oregon.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A San Antonio Express Best Book of the year

In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With its cast of living and dead characters, and its deft balance of the spiritual and the misanthropic, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

RELATED CONTENT

Read the title story in the New Yorker.