Steven Millhauser is our patron saint of elsewhere. He is the bard of an Arcadia we long for (but also dread), a sorcerer who can materialize phantoms in our backyards, where they’ve been standing all along, just there, behind the bushes.

Three of the glories in Voices in the Night—Millhauser’s set of magic spells, masquerading as a collection of 16 new short stories—go by the names “Elsewhere,” “Arcadia ” and “Phantoms.” They belong to a fugal set of variations on a theme running through about half the tales, a pattern as variously realized as it is stringently upheld. In this handful of accounts, the storytelling takes the shape of objective reportage. The narrator presents a chronicle of unusual occurrences—or traumatic psychological conditions—going on in a familiar place, a town just like ours, a vicinity we recognize, someplace we gravitate to, as home.

In “Elsewhere,” there are random and terrifying outbreaks of reality’s collapse. The phenomenon starts small—in the dark corners of rooms—but soon evolves into a shift of consciousness, a general unease shared by the entire neighborhood, rising at last into a moment of such transcendent wonder that it ought, by rights, to be apocalyptic. But Millhauser’s genius (it’s not too strong a word) is a determination to keep us firmly in the poetic region that refuses resolution of any kind, especially of the religious kind (which makes a potent cameo in the title story).

“Phantoms” is the best thing the author has ever written. Its journalistic record of ghostly sightings—together with proposed “Explanations” and “Analyses”—never rises above the emotional level of a mezzo piano. It is on account of this restraint that the tale’s impact reaches its heights of spookiness and heartbreak. Who are these phantoms? Why do they withdraw from us, even at the moment of their visitation? There can be no answers.

The remaining stories in the book also work as a set of variations. In each case, Millhauser transforms himself into a sublime “parrot” of a given literary voice—fairy tale, Indian myth, baseball radio announcer, American tall tale, etc. The well-trodden scenario and conventional language of each story become the ironic foundations for its stunning strangeness.

Look to your heart when reading Millhauser! Just like the baseball hit by McCluskey in “Home Run,” you can kiss that baby goodbye.

This radiant collection of short stories features a set of flawed yet sympathetic women in a whole mess of compromising positions.

Nina starts an affair with a man she meets while out running. Josie struggles to extract herself from a sizzling online relationship that fizzles when she meets Billy in real life. Gwen doesn’t lie, exactly, but if her folks want to believe Boris is her boyfriend and not just a roommate, who is she to burst their bubble? And Maya—who appears in several quietly delicious installments—slouches her way toward a mature relationship with some serious detours along the way.

Many of the women in these beautifully wrought stories are single, but they are anything but carefree or mellow. Just as we do in real life, they self-sabotage in ways huge and small, making choices based solely on their heart with no input from their head. First-time author Katherine Heiny takes great care to make her characters relatable even in their imperfections. She paints sweetly resonant moments that also can be very funny:

“For months and months Josie thought about Billy when she should have been wondering what to make for supper—or what to say at Kit’s parent-teacher conference or where Mickey’s lunch card was or if she left the oven on—and now here she is with Billy, and all she can think about is whether she used the last of the onions the night before. (She’s pretty sure she did.)”

Single, Carefree, Mellow is named for a story in which Maya ponders leaving her boyfriend of five years, then decides there is “such a thing as too much loss.” It’s a poignant moment that sums up this smart exploration of love and betrayal, and that fine line between happiness and pain.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, February 2015

Kelly Link tends to inspire a range of comparisons to other authors—usually, some blend of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami—but, in fact, nobody writes stories like hers. Link’s fantastical worlds feel utterly real, partly because they’re intensely matter-of-fact. Her characters are sassy, moody and cool, and they never, ever make any big deal out of the fact that there are monsters, aliens, vampires or ghosts hanging around, or that they might stumble into a pocket universe or some alternate dimension. Mostly they’re concerned with cute guys and flirting and drinks, plus occasionally needing to save the world.

If that sounds light, it’s not meant to. Link, who has written three previous short-story collections and co-edited several anthologies with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, is often hilarious, but her stories still break your heart. The best thing to compare her writing to might be “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” with its perfect combo of dark wit, sex and tragedy. Get in Trouble contains nine stories, which include maybe two happy endings, maybe zero, depending on how you look at them. She’s never been one to wrap things up in tidy fashion.

The tales here range from fairy tales to space opera. Sometimes you’re halfway through before you even know what kind of world you’re in, but that’s OK, because Link guides you so carefully that you’d follow her anywhere. There’s an amateur cyberstalker at a superhero convention who, naturally, gets more than she bargained for (“Secret Identity”). There’s a girl whose job as a caretaker of summer houses is not what it seems (“The Summer People”), a rich far-future playboy who falls for the wrong person (“Valley of the Girls”), a woman driven to distraction by her shadow (“Light”).

As different as these stories are, they all in some way play with expectations. There are surprises on every page. Nothing is what it seems; everything is much more. In short, Kelly Link is magic.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Edith Pearlman has been publishing award-winning stories since the late 1970s, but became more widely known in 2012, when her story collection Binocular Vision won both the PEN/Malamud and National Book Critics Circle awards and was a finalist for numerous others. Her new collection, Honeydew, gathers tales from the last 15 years, each one a closely observed look at the ordinary graces and sorrows of everyday life.

Most of the stories in Honeydew take place in Goldolphin, a fictional suburb of Boston peopled with professors, beauticians and shopkeepers. In “Dream Children,” an au pair finds frightening paintings of her charges hidden around the house and discovers that the images are created with the same intent that keeps her secretly brewing herbal potions for the children’s continued good health. The title story (included in The Best American Short Stories 2012) encompasses infidelity, pregnancy and an anorexic teenager who imagines herself as an insect, yet, by the story’s close, a new baby is born, weight is cautiously regained and relationships have shifted into more harmonious circumstances. At least for the time being.

Many of Pearlman’s most memorable characters are observers and listeners. In linked stories (“Puck,” “Assisted Living”), Rennie, the proprietor of the antique store Forget-Me-Not, keeps as close an eye on her customers as she does the teapots and Victorian jewelry in her shop. In one of the collection’s most vivid stories, “Wait and See,” Lyle is born with pentachromatic vision, a condition that allows him to see depths and variations of color that most humans aren’t privy to—and which proves to be both a blessing and a curse.

Like Lyle’s vision, Pearlman’s prose shimmers, and the stories are filled with beguiling details of color, taste and smell. Pearlman knows—and seems to care about—each of her characters, even the most irritating, and no matter their age, gender or race, they are drawn incisively and with empathy. Though the collection lacks the range of Binocular Vision, Honeydew is a solid group of stories by a very great writer indeed.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her first collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise (2012), Megan Mayhew Bergman focused on the relationships between humans and animals. In her new collection, Almost Famous Women, Bergman focuses on the lives of real women who have been marginalized (or mythologized) in history. They include Violet and Daisy Hilton, conjoined twins at odds in life but not in body; Marion “Joe” Carstairs, a womanizing power boat racer; Allegra Byron, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont; and many other women whose stories are as captivating as they are obscure.

Bergman’s focus is on gender, regardless of time, race, sexuality or nationality, and she celebrates complexity rather than apologizing for it—after all, great women aren’t necessarily good. Her prose is as startling in its variance and complexity as the lives of the women it describes. Their once overlooked stories are not to be missed.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the title story of J. Robert Lennon’s new collection of short fiction—a book 15 years in the making—a man stumbles, surreally, into a kind of dream job on a tropical island, only to sense that something’s not quite right.

Indeed, nothing is ever quite right in the 14 stories that populate See You in Paradise, whether it’s the subtle exhilaration that comes with a very realistic tragedy or the slow unwinding of a family thanks to an inter-dimensional portal in the backyard. The stories range from the relatable to the bizarre, the comic to the horrific, and yet they’re all unified in the creation of a strange American landscape that’s at once alien and all too real, a landscape with the power to transform us in remarkable, unexpected ways.

In tales like “Zombie Dan” and “The Wraith,” Lennon deftly weaves the supernatural into scenes of domestic discord and sexual dysfunction. The realistic elements of those stories are so sensitively and vividly portrayed that you could substitute a zombie for an old friend from college and get much the same emotional impact, which somehow makes the supernatural tint that much darker and more effective. “Portal,” which opens the collection, leaves such a lasting aura of strangeness that, as you move into less supernatural (but no less weird) stories like “Hibachi” and “Ecstasy,” they seem haunted by their own darkly funny magic. Even if it’s not there, you sense it. There are spells at work in all of these pages, and just like the characters that populate them, by the time you’ve turned the last page, you’re not the same.

The greatest trick of See You in Paradise, though, is Lennon’s ability to deliver bitingly surreal fiction that also makes you believe, with each passing page, that you’ve been where these characters are. When life is at its strangest, you laugh and cry and shriek unexpectedly, you become the monster under your own bed, you take leaps of faith and insanity that pay off in terrifyingly big ways, and somehow all of that wound up in this book. It’s not just a sampling of more than a decade of work by one of fiction’s most satisfyingly inventive voices. It’s a harsh, hilarious, unnerving portrayal of a world just strange enough to not be our own . . . but only just.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Elephant Beach used to sparkle. Before the boardwalks rotted and the hotels and mansions along the bay boarded up their windows, there were ballrooms, parties, dancing. Now, the town smells of cigarettes. The streets are filled with drugs. Haunting screams accompany moonlight as traumatized veterans relive pieces of Vietnam in their sleep.

Katie loves the beach and the town where she grew up, but she is also different. She paces herself, controls her emotions and drives her friends around town when they’re drunk. And her friends are as diverse as they come. Among them are a girl everyone wants to be friends with, a Hispanic track star and a one-legged drunk who, in more ways than one, has been marred by the war.

In an interwoven collection of short stories, we meet characters who struggle—with death, inequality, heartbreak—but somehow manage to take what they’re given, make the best of it and dream of better days ahead.

If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, a debut short story collection by playwright Judy Chicurel, examines the everyday struggles of everyday people in 1970s America. It is a provocative story of unlikely friendships, unmatched compassion and learning to accept downtrodden people for who they are. With prose as clear as glass and words that carry even the most complicated of images, Chicurel reveals her characters’ best moments, their worst moments and moments of which they may only dream. The book reminds us that sometimes, something as simple as a beachfront view is enough to make something beautiful. And other times, the best things are in front of us without our knowing it.

Stephanie Kirkland is a full-time writer and editor living in Alabama, where she manages publications for her alma mater, The University of Alabama’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Spoiled Brats is ridiculous in the very best way. It’s a short story collection that avoids the usual pitfalls because the stories work well together and don’t lose steam as they go along. A common theme (spoiled rich kids, mostly) keeps these stories cohesive, and author Simon Rich holds our interest with a unifying style—each chapter is very funny, and they’re all based on a different outlandish premise.

There’s the hamster that narrates a story of starvation and struggle from inside a private school classroom; the text-addicted girl who travels all the way to Saturn just to obsess about her boyfriend; the Brooklynite who’s accidentally brined and pickled, only to be awakened 100 years later to streets crawling with hipsters. The situations are fantastic, but in Rich’s hands they’re still human, realistic and down-to-earth. He remembers what many humor writers forget, which is that story is the key that keeps us reading. His silly characters are treated seriously, even the ridiculous ones (even the hamster), and the book is better for it.

Spoiled Brats mocks its protagonists without being mean; we find ourselves sympathizing and relating with these characters even as we laugh at them. Straight-up cynicism feels a little cruel, but Rich stays away from that, and his stories make the same old tropes feel fresh and funny and new again.

That’s important, because even though the book is technically focused on young rich kids, it’s also a treatise on the self-centered, self-absorbed culture that we all indulge in, at least sometimes. Rich gives us perspective on our ourselves in a way that feels safe because we’re seeing it through the prism of humor and out-of-this-world scenarios.

Spoiled Brats is undeniably funny, but its real genius is that, like the best comedy, it encourages introspection as well.

Carrie Rollwagen is the owner of Church Street Coffee & Books in Birmingham, Alabama.

Southern writer Tony Earley’s excellently written and highly readable Mr. Tall consists of six stories and a short novella. The stories have all been published separately in prestigious publications such as The New Yorker, The Southern Review and the Washington Post Magazine, and most take place in a fictional locale in rural Tennessee. The characters are a mix of country folks and city people, except for the novella, which contains a mix of real people and mythical characters. Mostly, the stories are about how men and women meet and how they live out their lives together.

The first story, “Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands,” follows a couple who met working together on a small-town newspaper that they eventually come to own. He was fresh out of journalism school and she had learned from years on the job. She started calling him “college boy,” first as a term of derision, but later as one of endearment. When first on the job, he mooned around her till one day she said, “ ‘College Boy, what the hell’ and reached up under her tank top and unhooked her bra.” This line is typical of the no-frills approach the story takes as it describes what happens to their lives, their love, and their sex life as they grow old and their daughter moves away.

In “Just Married,” Hardy and Evelyn have actually been married for 48 years. Evelyn is ill, and Hardy, who fought in WWII, is suffering from PTSD, though the term is not used. Hardy recalls the way he couldn’t hold down a job or sleep inside a house when he returned from the war, and Evelyn “loved him back into the shape of himself.” This beautiful line is typical of Earley’s prose, which is creatively wrought and perceptive—this is a collection not to be missed. 

“We all forget things,” says a character in one of the four engaging novellas Mary Gordon collects in The Liar’s Wife. “We must.” Yet despite this sage observation, it is really the act of remembering past associations that serves as a common thread in this beautifullyrendered book. Gordon writes about young, intelligent women and men in the throes of self-discovery at formative junctures in their lives. Each story also has a European connection, which, though sometimes incidental to the main intent of the story, seems to accentuate how innately different the American psyche can be from the old-world one our forebears left behind.

Gordon writes about young, intelligent women and men in the throes of self-discovery at formative junctures in their lives.

The title novella is a story of forced reflection. Jocelyn, a well-heeled, 70-something retired scientist, has her well-ordered life disrupted when the first husband she married and divorced in her 20s appears at her doorstep. Now dying of cancer and heading back to his native Ireland, Johnny is an itinerant musician and inveterate charmer who took his bride to Dublin all those years ago—a place whose foreignness unnerved her and which she quickly fled when Johnny’s mendacious nature became apparent. Now, all these decades later, this liar’s reappearance revives unacknowledged regrets.

“Fine Arts” follows Theresa, a brilliant if sheltered graduate student, to Lucca, Italy, where she is escaping an ill-advised affair with her advisor and searching for the spark of inspiration to ignite her dissertation. In the small Tuscan city, she meets an elderly art collector and, for perhaps the first time in her life, upturns the cart of her narrowly prescribed life.

As their titles would suggest, “Simone Weil in New York” and “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” hinge on imagined American episodes in the lives of two of great midcentury European intellectuals. But the central characters in these stories are not Weil and Mann, but two “ordinary” people they encounter. The Weil story finds Genevieve, a young French mother, living in Manhattan as her American husband fights in the South Pacific. One day, Genevieve bumps into the enigmatic Weil, who had been her teacher in France, on the Upper West Side. She invites the awkward woman back into her life, battling the discomfort and awe she has always felt around this at once spiritual and abrasive woman.

The Mann story recounts the experience of a smart, if callow teenager’s brief brush with the German novelist, who comes to the boy’s high school to rally support against the Nazi threat. Looking back from many years’ distance, the now old man considers how Mann, as abrasive in his way as Weil was in hers, nonetheless forever changed the perceptions of his younger self.

Partly for commercial reasons—too long for a magazine, too short for a full-fledged book—the novella is an underutilized form, but Gordon shows a great affinity for its necessary constraints. In each 60-or-so-page story she manages to compress a trove of details, giving readers wholly fleshed worlds to savor and contemplate.

Chestnut Street in Dublin, Ireland, is shaped like a horseshoe, with a “big bit of grass in the middle beside some chestnut trees,” and “thirty small houses in a semicircle.” These houses are inhabited by scores of fascinating human beings, however ordinary, who figure in these stories by Maeve Binchy, written between novels. Now, after her death in 2012 at 72, they are finally being published. Most use old-fashioned O. Henry endings to resolve problems or clarify situations in unexpected ways—illuminating the lives of the people involved and, incidentally, warming the hearts of readers.

Even though they share the world of Chestnut Street, each family lives a life of its own, occasionally bouncing off one another as neighbors. In my favorite story, “Ivy,” a lonely, old-fashioned girl who wishes people would write letters instead of email, wins a computer. On a local bulletin board she asks for someone to give her computer lessons in exchange for cooking lessons. “By far the best” offer comes from a 12-year-old boy named Sandy, who lives with his grandfather. The outcome is short and sweet and cuts off a story you would prefer to hear more of, but that is how it is with these little gems: The ending is the point, not anything that comes before.

Though many of these little slices of life are too short for nuance, they are all undemanding and delightful. The more you read, the more you want to read, which makes the fact that Chestnut Street is Binchy’s final collection as poignant an ending as any in her oeuvre.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The characters in the compelling stories novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano collects in The Other Language are displaced—both geographically and in matters of the heart. Mostly women, but a few men as well, they are educated, well-heeled and discontent, adrift in an ever-contracting world that has clouded the notion of home.

The title story—one of the finest—begins with an enticing Alice Munro-like premise: A 12-year-old Italian girl and her family vacation in a small Greek village in the wake of her mother’s mystery-shrouded death. There she substitutes one English brother for another as her object of affection, carrying the complicated memory through the years until adult truths clarify the meaning of the events. Another richly layered story, “The Presence of Men,” is built on a clash of cultures as a Roman woman, scarred by divorce, seeks refuge in a village in a remote corner of Italy. The inroads she makes into local acceptance are jarred when her Hollywood agent brother and his movie star client show up and upset the delicate balance. In “An Indian Soirée,” reminiscent of the atmospheric, incisive stories of the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a couple has come to the subcontinent for an extended sojourn, and in one the space of one morning their marriage falls apart.

A number of stories are set in Africa, where Marciano has lived. “The Club,” with the indomitable Mrs. D’Costa at its center, quietly explores class and race in post-colonial Kenya. “Big Island, Small Island” reunites two lost souls who realize it is impossible, indeed useless, to try to recreate the past. And “Quantum Theory,” set in Africa and New York, offers a bittersweet meditation on the significant difference between falling in love and being in love.

Many of these nine well-crafted and entertaining stories are built on chance encounters, and in Marciano’s assured hands the reader accepts the intervention of fate without question. These are stories about finding love in a fragile world, but even more, about all of the connections—past and present—that shape us and anchor us in place.

In a reversal of the normal career arc, Tom Barbash has waited 10 years after the publication of his first novel to produce a short story collection. The 13 stories of Stay Up with Me are both contemporary and timeless, and reveal Barbash as a writer of abundant talent when it comes to short fiction.

From the opener, “The Break,” where the ultimate helicopter mother attempts to manipulate her son’s dating life, a preoccupation with relationships between parents and children is a persistent theme. In “Howling at the Moon,” the narrator reflects from the distance of early adulthood on his place in a blended family in the aftermath of a fatal accident he caused as a child. “January” portrays a tension-filled relationship between the adolescent narrator and his mother’s boyfriend as the former’s father lies dying of cancer. And in “The Women,” a story that’s something of its mirror image, a young man struggles to accept his father’s active dating life in the wake of his mother’s death.  

In a recent interview with The Rumpus, Barbash conceded, “I’m suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.” That reticence is evident in these stories, as his characters are more likely to stumble toward self-knowledge than firmly grasp it. The protagonist of  “Somebody’s Son,” who’s involved in purchasing rural real estate at distressed prices, is told by an elderly seller after he’s closed a transaction, “You’re not who you think you are. Give it time. I know. You’ll find your peace.” In “Balloon Night,” Timkin, whose wife has left him, applauds himself for maintaining the deception that they’re still together at a Thanksgiving Eve party high above the Upper West Side street where the Macy’s Parade balloons are being inflated.

Not all of these stories deal with such emotionally fraught material. “Letters from the Academy” is a wry epistolary tale that features the increasingly frantic letters of Maximilian Gross, head of the Tennis Academy, to the father of his protégé Lee, as the young man slips away from him. When Lee abandons the school to become Pete Sampras’ practice partner, Maximilian dismisses the legendary tennis star as the “washed-up balding husband of a second-rate Hollywood starlet.”

Tom Barbash put aside his work as a reporter to write fiction. It’s fitting, then, to think of the precisely observed stories that compose this collection as news bulletins from the front lines of our fragile and complicated emotional lives.