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.

This collection of forgotten short stories by the beloved writer of A Wrinkle in Time offers a fuller view of her mastery.

The discovery of unpublished work by a now departed writer is always a treat. When that writer is Madeleine L’Engle, it is undeniably cause for celebration. The Moment of Tenderness collects 18 short stories found among L’Engle’s papers by her granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Dating primarily from the 1940s and ’50s, all but one were written before A Wrinkle in Time made L’Engle a household name.

The stories cover myriad genres, with only a couple falling into the category of speculative fiction that we’ve come to associate L’Engle with (and oddly, these are among the least successful stories in the collection). The early stories in the book center on childhood and adolescence, and Voiklis surmises in her introduction that these—and indeed, many of the stories—are autobiographical in nature. They beautifully capture the sense of loneliness and yearning that is common to smart, somewhat isolated children. “The Mountains Shall Stand Forever” and “Summer Camp” both provide subtly chilling portraits of the cruelty children can adopt in order to run with the pack. Similarly, there is a Shirley Jackson-esque discomfort in “The Foreigners” and “The Fact of the Matter,” two of the numerous stories set in an insular rural Vermont community and narrated by a central character named Madeleine.

Before turning to fiction writing, L’Engle tried her hand at acting, and that experience informs stories about young, single women trying to make it in theater in New York City. These, like some of the Vermont stories, offer sharp slices of the midcentury American zeitgeist, when certain possibilities for women were just beginning to open up. L’Engle here enters the territory of such masters of the form as Alice Munro, John O’Hara and John Cheever. 

Some of the stories are so affecting—in particular, the elegiac title story, the aforementioned “The Foreigners” and the somewhat shocking “That Which Is Left”—that it is surprising they did not find publication in L’Engle’s lifetime. Voiklis points out that her grandmother did recycle some of this material later as episodes in novels or incidents in memoirs, a fact that provides a glimpse into the writer’s process. “You have to write the book that wants to be written,” L’Engle once said.

Due to the timelessness of her Newbery Award-winning A Wrinkle in Time, many people may think of L’Engle as a children’s author or a science fiction writer, or both. The engaging stories in The Moment of Tenderness collectively offer a different, fuller view of this talented master. 

Beth Piatote strings together stories like the intricate strands of a handmade necklace. The Beadworkers gathers those strings together into an illustrious whole. Piatote, who is Nez Perce and an associate professor of Native American studies, has previously written both scholarly and creative works. She brings her expertise to the page with this collection, where individual pieces often defy genre labels.

The Beadworkers begins with a poem and a pair of short stories, “Feast” I, II and III. The collection concludes with a short, poetic play, “Antikone,” a reimaginging of the Greek tragedy “Antigone.” Piatote’s creativity shows up throughout the book, such as in “wIndin!” in which the protagonist creates a board game as political art. “Katydid” traces the experiences of two women: One moved to Oregon for a fresh start, while the other was adopted and longs to travel to Oklahoma to visit her birth father’s tribe. Piatote writes, “Hippies love to glorify the tribe, which is both amusing and irritating to me. If you’re going to go tribal, you can’t just take the good—the sharing, the ceremonies, the aunties, the rez cred—you got to go the whole way. You got to walk through the minefields. You got to take the pettiness, the jealousy, the physical abuse, the diabetes, the bigoted uncle, the family that hates your family since the missionaries arrived. If you’re a woman, you got to accept that your body is prime real estate, and if you don’t reproduce for the tribe, you’ve joined the occupation.”

The collected pieces of The Beadworkers explore place and identity in vibrant scenes. Throughout, Piatote reveals Native American life in contexts modern, historic and mythical.

Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando are driving out of Manhattan after a terrorist attack. What sounds like the opening of an urban myth is actually the zany plotline of “Escape from New York,” one of 19 tales in Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories, Grand Union. These masterful tales impress, engage and occasionally infuriate as Smith brings her dazzling wit and acute sensitivity to bear. These stories are ready to grapple with the complex times we live in.

If anything serves this collection best, it’s the humor that runs through the stories like a lazy river. All genres are Smith’s to play with, from fables to science fiction to a realistic conversation between two friends. Even the few weaker efforts still brim with ideas and intelligence. No subjects are off-limits, from an older trans woman shopping for shapewear in “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” to a young mother remembering her sexual escapades in college in “Sentimental Education.” Smith uses the third-person plural to fine effect in one of the collection’s best, the parable “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” which explores global politics without ever mentioning a politician or country by name.

Smith has explored the complexities of families and friendships in an urban setting over the course of five award-winning novels. Those themes are reflected in the delightful “Words and Music,” in which the surviving sister of an elderly pair of siblings sits in a Harlem apartment, reminiscing about the music that shaped her life, and in “For the King,” in which two old friends catch up over a decadent Parisian meal. Grand Union is bookended by two stories of mothers and daughters—one a vignette, the other a ghost story, both with a depth that far outweighs their brevity, something that can be truthfully said for each of these stories. 

A young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl he discovers in a Northern European peat bog. A young woman unwittingly becomes the human host of a Joshua tree, while her boyfriend struggles to understand this startling change in their budding relationship. During a nostalgic visit to a tornado auction, an old man impulsively buys and rears one last tornado as he reviews his life choices. A woman strikes a bargain to breastfeed the devil to protect her unborn son.

These are just a few of the brilliantly inventive premises of Karen Russell’s wonderful new collection of short stories. However, Orange World and Other Stories is so much more than fresh plots. Russell ties these seemingly disparate tales together with a pervading theme of alienation: from the past, from family, from nature. Furthermore, despite their surreal nature, Russell grounds each story in human experience, both poignant and hilarious in turn. In “Orange World,” a mother is desperate to protect her infant son after the pain of repeated miscarriage. In “Bog Girl: A Romance,” another mother makes the same remarks about her son’s new, albeit dead, girlfriend that mothers around the world have made. Underlying all of this is the exquisite beauty of Russell’s sentences, which will repeatedly surprise readers with their imagery and masterful language.

Having received her MFA from Columbia, Russell has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Winner of numerous awards and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Russell is already the bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Without a doubt, Orange World and Other Stories is destined for a similar fate. For lovers of excellent writing, this book should not be missed.

If you are in search of a story collection that feels as transformative and satisfying as a novel, then look no further than Erin McGraw’s Joy. The 53 stories that make up this book are very short, each one barely lasting more than a couple of pages, narrated by 53 different characters who share a glimpse into their state of mind.

However, what the stories lack in length, they more than make up in their profundity and emotion. In fact, it is exactly their shortness that makes the reader use their imagination to fill in the gaps and draw conclusions that may or may not be the same for all. A wide variety of characters—ranging from a pet sitter to a wedding gown saleswoman to a dental office assistant to an anxious first-time mom to a first-time murderer—provide a fantastic variety of voices, as well as different perspectives of life’s biggest pursuit: happiness. Some have it, some don’t, and yet they all have a good story to tell, each tale both mundane and profound.

What makes Joy truly special is how easily McGraw gets in your head. The stories resonate long after they end, each time making the reader wonder, “Would I have handled it differently?”

A terrific pick for a book club, Joy is bound to impress.

Come in contact with enough people, and inadvertently or otherwise, you’re bound to disappoint a few of them. Variations on the theme of disappointment link the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s first collection of new work since 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes. It’s hard to imagine a more graceful depiction of lives filled with quiet desperation. As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers.

And what beautifully drawn characters they are: an artist who accepts an offer from wealthy admirers to paint at their island retreat, only to discover that the island isn’t the paradise it seems; elderly actors from Hollywood’s golden age who gather in New York to grouse about a tell-all memoir written by the “putative grandson” of a famous director; a middle-aged woman who recalls three aunts she knew in her youth and her fraught relationship with her mother; and a recent college graduate who steals $10,000 from his unethical CEO father. This last character is featured in a story that also includes a researcher studying the origins of language and begins with the famously ironic boast—“I have the best words”—from the current White House occupant.

Eisenberg’s ability to dramatize family strife through small details has never been more acute, as when an aunt’s purchase of a baby doll for her niece intensifies the mother’s jealousy. And Eisenberg’s writing is glorious throughout, such as her description of a woman wearing “a little vintage sundress, the color of excellent butter.” A story about a teenager seeking a cure for episodes of confusion feels unfocused, but the other five are among the most astute works of short fiction this year. You may not like all the characters, but the book doesn’t disappoint.