Elizabeth McCracken has published three novels and a memoir, but to many readers, short stories are her home ground. The tales in her third collection, The Souvenir Museum, often catch characters out of sorts, having arrived at a strange destination. “All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis,” thinks Jenny, a character in “Mistress Mickle All at Sea.” Jenny, who plays a villain in a kids’ TV show, is alone on a ferry to England after visiting her brother. In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might be merely meditative, even dull, but a McCracken story is never boring, and this one offers plenty of surprises.

Four linked stories follow a couple, Sadie and Jack, through their long relationship. In the book’s opening story, “The Irish Wedding,” young Sadie and Jack arrive in Ireland for the wedding of Jack’s older sister to a Dutch man. In this wedding tale, both strange and recognizable, we get a portrait not just of the young couple and all they don’t know about each other, but also of Jack’s quirky, possessive family. In the collection’s final story, Sadie and Jack are finally getting married 20 years later. On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, they simmer and fight, but they remember their love when family tragedy strikes.

A new collection from McCracken is always welcome. Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties. Comedy lurks in even the smallest, sharpest observations, such as in “Proof,” when an older couple’s comfortable shoes are described as looking “like baked potatoes.”

You can’t have a conversation about literary fiction of the past 50 years without mentioning Haruki Murakami, and First Person Singular reminds us why.

As one of the standard-bearers of contemporary magical realism, Murakami has traveled deep into the hearts and minds of both his characters and his readers. In First Person Singular, he offers eight new stories, all told in first person—hence the title—as perhaps memoir, perhaps fiction. For example, “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” finds a baseball-loving writer named Haruki Murakami musing on his favorite team and the ties that bind us together. Murakami is always blurring lines, and here it’s left up to the reader to decide what’s real. By distorting reality, the author creates a special closeness to his audience, and he acknowledges this relationship with intelligence and grace.

Murakami’s most significant (and perhaps only) shortcoming is his frequent fumbling of sexuality, which renders some of his work, to put it lightly, cringe-y. Sex is present in all of his books, whether it be tragic, as in Norwegian Wood, occult and Oedipal, as in Kafka on the Shore, or even as the basis for an entire collection, as in Men Without Women. But in First Person Singular, sexuality takes on a new meaning. Murakami is surely aware of this frequent criticism of his work, and here he toys with readers’ expectations. The story “Carnaval” is the best example of this. Its opening line, “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest,” introduces a dated, male voice, but Murakami then subverts expectations to tell a story that's deeper than any one person's perspective. At the heart of this story are truly moving observations about friendship and the connection between people and art.

While in the past, Murakami wrote about Watanabe of Norwegian Wood sleeping with random women, and K of Sputnik Sweetheart imposing himself on a lesbian woman, the older Murakami seems more intelligent and compassionate. With this collection, Murakami leverages his position as an aging man in a rapidly changing world to set an example for others: Your perspective should never stay the same, and your writing must grow until it can’t fit its container.

Often the most powerful elements of fiction are the emotional truths mined from the most difficult experiences. Whether a story is grounded in the most mundane of daily occurrences or rooted in something much more uncanny, it will always feel true in the hands of a storyteller who understands the often unsettling rhythms of the mind and heart.

Milk Blood Heat, the debut collection of fiction from Dantiel W. Moniz, is thoroughly tethered to this kind of emotional truth. Throughout 11 short stories—all set in Florida, all focusing on transformative experiences in the lives of women—Moniz weaves tales that are as profound as they are unnerving, as moving as they are surprising.

Each of the stories in this collection is anchored by Moniz’s gorgeous, precise prose, whether she’s portraying a pair of best friends shaken by tragedy in the title story, a woman seeing spectral images of her lost baby in “Feast” or a girl coming to terms with the power of generational connection in “An Almanac of Bones.” Though they share certain geographic and thematic connections, the tales are quite diverse in their perspectives and casts. What unites them, and what keeps us turning the pages through scenes of tragedy and self-­discovery, rebellion and reconciliation, trauma and agency, is the singular voice guiding each character. In nearly every paragraph, Moniz unfurls some new observation that nestles down in your brain and sits, steeping like tea leaves, until each story has formed a cohesive, powerful emotional experience. It’s a magical sensation that reveals astonishing talent.

Milk Blood Heat is a slim but mighty volume of short fiction, one that announces Moniz as a transfixing voice capable of limning often staggering emotional truths.

Neil Gaiman is generally categorized as a writer of fantasy or speculative fiction, but as the 52 selections in The Neil Gaiman Reader confirm, the beloved storyteller’s gifts defy neat classification. This doorstop-size volume will surely be welcomed by Gaiman’s legion of fans, but its greater purpose may be to introduce his work to those who are not yet acolytes. Spanning his career from 1984 to 2018, these stories, novellas and excerpts from novels are presented in chronological order and offer a broad overview of his talent for fiction.

When it came time to select the stories included here, Gaiman delegated the job to his fans, who voted for their favorites online. The novel excerpts, on the other hand, were chosen by the author and his editor and include extracts from some of his most popular works, including American Gods, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere. For die-hard fans who have already read his entire opus, Gaiman throws in one previously unpublished story, “Monkey and the Lady,” a whimsically philosophical fable. The end product is a hefty volume that warrants dipping into rather than devouring cover-to-cover, an approach that Gaiman himself encourages in his preface.

There is something here for nearly every taste. While the heart of a Gaiman story always contains an element of the fantastical, there is also always something rudimentarily human at its core. This quality, along with his superior narrative skills, may be what most separates Gaiman from less polished writers in the fantasy genre. A story such as “Chivalry,” wherein a pensioner buys the Holy Grail at a thrift shop for 30 pence and is then visited by an excruciatingly polite and valorous Sir Galahad, is at turns hilarious and surprisingly touching. “The Goldfish and Other Stories” brilliantly captures the vagaries and absurdities of the film business while being about so much more: quickly fading history, unexpected friendship and the cultural mythology that can be created despite documented proof to the contrary. The devastating loss of memory to senility propels “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” which is also a backdoor homage to Gaiman’s masterful literary progenitor. “Snow, Glass, Apples” may leave you rethinking every fairy tale you have taken at face value since childhood.

The Neil Gaiman Reader is filled with far too many riches to explore here. In his foreword, Marlon James writes that the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges, the great fabulist, hovers over these stories, but really, Gaiman’s influences are more numerous and far-flung. Indeed, this volume provides evidence that Gaiman has transcended those influences to become the influencer himself, creating fictional landscapes that inspire and move us as much as they entertain.

Kelli Jo Ford’s first book, composed of interlocking stories set in Oklahoma and North Texas, is like a wildfire that slowly approaches a home and then whips through an entire region. Crooked Hallelujah opens in 1974 and introduces four generations of Cherokee women: Granny, Lula, Justine and Reney. The women are as intertwined as they are distinct, adhering to their own codes and overshadowing the men in their lives.

Granny, the matriarch of the clan, shares a bedroom with her daughter, Lula, a devoted follower of a Holy Roller-like church. Lula’s rebellious 15-year-old daughter, Justine, resists her mother’s religious affiliation. After Justine is raped, she gives birth to blue-eyed Reney. Gradually, Granny cedes center stage to Lula and Justine, who try to make a life amid the poverty of their town.

Several powerful pieces stand out in this novel-in-stories. In one, grown-up Reney, now married, works at a Dairy Queen while trying to attend school. She also manages the small cattle ranch on which she and her husband live. One day, Reney’s beloved mule goes missing, and her search leads to a devastating act of violence. In another chaotic piece, Justine is packing up to leave Texas and return to Oklahoma, but a wildfire lights the horizon, forcing a change in her plans. In a stirring, believable hospital scene, in which Lula has suffered a massive stroke, relatives sing their church songs while Justine tries to comfort and come to terms with her mother.

Crooked Hallelujah is an imperfect work. Some tales, such as that of a lesbian couple menaced in their trailer home, seem out of place, and readers may find the timeline difficult to follow. But Ford’s voice rises above the tumult, sharing the stories of women whose lives have been injured and upended but who will never be silent.