Forging an entire short fiction collection around a single theme—and delivering one truly original tale after another—is trickier than it sounds. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of repetition and rhythm, making each tale read like the last one, just with the serial numbers filed off. Jane Campbell’s first book, which she’s publishing in her 80th year, maintains a thorough sense of originality while delivering a stunning range of works on the inner lives of older women. The stories in Cat Brushing cross genres and boundaries, daring the reader to meditate on previously unexplored (or at the very least, rarely explored) perspectives on aging, sexuality, violence and beyond.

In “Susan and Miffy,” a woman develops an unlikely sensual connection with her beautiful caregiver, challenging both of their notions about attraction. In “Lockdown Fantasms,” extreme pandemic isolation leads to a new program that sends government-sponsored spirits into the homes of the “over-seventies” to keep them company. In “Lamia,” a woman returns to the site of an old fling in an effort to recapture something in her own dangerous nature. In “Kindness,” a retired woman in a beachside retirement complex makes a choice that will change not one life, but three. And in the title story, a woman living with her son and his new wife explores the anxieties and uncertainties of existence while grooming her beloved pet. 

The baker’s dozen of tales that make up Cat Brushing are all delivered through lean, incisive, witty prose that calls to mind the calculated directness of Ernest Hemingway and the furious expressiveness of Joyce Carol Oates. Campbell’s sentences are solid, imposing, often free of adornment in terms of punctuation, and each one seems carefully crafted to get to the core of a certain emotional truth. Whether she’s writing a first-person or third-person narrative, Campbell’s wisdom, passion and honesty come through, imbuing the collection with an elegant, often lyrical power. 

Within these women’s stories of loss, desire, pain and memory, we discover the feeling of holding onto something primal even as the world seems determined to forget that side of us. To capture such complexity in one story is powerful, but for Campbell to do so 13 times makes Cat Brushing one of the most compelling fiction collections you’ll find this year.

Every writer has to start somewhere. Maggie Shipstead’s bestselling 2021 novel, Great Circle, earned a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, but the road to such success is often long. In Shipstead’s case, as she explains in the acknowledgments of You Have a Friend in 10A, her path began with stories written while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. 

This collection of 10 works of short fiction, all previously published, gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America’s finest authors. Most impressive is the book’s range of perspectives, from the chilling “La Moretta,” in which a couple on their European honeymoon slowly realizes their marriage may have been a mistake, to “Souterrain,” a tale of a dying Parisian man and his housekeeper’s son, who believes the man to be his father.

In a few pieces, it’s clear that Shipstead was still discovering what her words could do, but the best are exceptional portraits of characters unaware of the effects of their actions. Highlights include “The Cowboy Tango,” in which a Montana man who runs a ranch for tourists becomes smitten with the teenage girl he hired as a wrangler and joins “in the silent chorus of the unloved” when she falls for his divorced nephew; and the story “Acknowledgments” (not to be confused with the author’s own acknowledgments), in which a pompous author uses hilariously Nabokovian sentences like “Let us skip that Rabelaisian era known as adolescence and hop jauntily to my twenty-fifth year.”

In one story, a character reflects that “even a life lived properly, lived better than she was living, could bring so much grief.” The finest stories in You Have a Friend in 10A show that perpetual grief may not necessarily lead to great lives, but it can produce scintillating fiction.

If it were possible to sum up Jess Walter’s The Angel of Rome and Other Stories in a word, it would be humane. In the 12 wide-ranging, consistently empathetic stories that compose his second collection, he creates a memorable assortment of characters who bump up against life’s inevitable obstacles, large and small, then stumble through or surmount them.

The collection’s titular novella embodies all these qualities. Its protagonist, Jack Rigel, is an unhappy 21-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, who improbably receives a scholarship from the local Knights of Columbus to study Latin in Rome in 1993. After he arrives, he inadvertently encounters an Italian actress he’s idolized and an American TV star whose career is on a downward trajectory, setting his life on an unexpected new course. The story of Jack’s coming-of-age is both wistful and often comic.

Walter makes use of his hometown of Spokane, Washington, as the setting for several of these stories, among them “Mr. Voice,” selected for Best American Short Stories 2015. The eponymous character, who’s a ubiquitous presence on local radio whose “rumble narrated our daily life,” turns out to be more than a set of well-tuned vocal cords. In “To the Corner,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 2014, an aging widower contemplates the end of his life as he watches the young boys hanging out across the street from his house, never imagining the role they might play in giving him a reason to live.

The collection’s concluding story, “The Way the World Ends,” is representative of Walter’s light touch and ability to expose his characters’ flaws with a combination of candor and sympathy. Two climate scientists interviewing for the same position at Mississippi State University spend an alcohol-drenched evening with their faculty hosts, bemoaning the rapidly approaching demise of the planet. Jeremiah Ellis, a Black student manning the desk at the university guest house where they’re carrying on their revels and who’s recently come out of the closet, overhears their grim musings. His reaction in the bright light of the morning is both chastening and a reminder of the persistence of hope.

The tales in The Angel of Rome aren’t easily categorized, but each one, in its own way, provides a refreshingly honest glimpse into what it means to be alive.

Although each of the 12 linked tales in Morgan Talty’s debut collection captures a particular moment, relationship or experience, together they give Night of the Living Rez the heft, movement and complexity of a novel.

All of the stories are narrated in the first person by David, a Penobscot man living on a reservation in Maine. About half the stories occur during David’s childhood and adolescence; in the other half, he’s a young man in his 20s, passing the time drinking and smoking with his friend Fellis, struggling with the effects of opioid addiction and longing for a place to belong in a confusing world.

There is so much beauty in these stories, but also heaviness, including sexual assault, inherited trauma and violence toward Indigenous people. Talty writes truthfully and openly about the challenges faced by David and his family but never reduces any of them to their pain. David and the people around him—his mother, his stepdad, his sister and Fellis—are real and flawed. They try their best and make mistakes; they get in fights and let one another down. They also look out for one another, express their affection through food and laughter, tell stories and share ceremonies. Funny and direct, David is a brilliant observer of these ordinary yet specific lives. He’s the perfect guide to the constellation of relationships, history and culture that defines the reservation he calls home. 

What’s most remarkable about the collection is the way Talty carefully guides readers to the book’s climax. Each story reveals something new about David; small details from one story become life-changing events in another. In this way, the stories in Night of the Living Rez build on themselves the way a life builds: messily, unpredictably, with love and heartache and never quite in the way you expect.

Two-time Booker Prize-winning British author Hilary Mantel’s books pack a memorable punch, no matter what she writes. Fans have devoured her Wolf Hall trilogy, whose final book, The Mirror & the Light (2020), was 784 pages long. Her memoir was lengthy, too—400 pages for Giving Up the Ghost (2003). Now readers are in for a decidedly different yet equally rich treat: a brief collection of short stories (clocking in at 176 easily digestible pages) that she intriguingly describes as “autoscopic” rather than autobiographical. 

Learning to Talk consists of seven stories, arranged chronologically, in which Mantel reflects loosely on her English childhood and explores, as she writes in the preface, “the swampy territory that lies between history and myth.” She explains that the writing of these stories was a “strenuous” process that took years. For example, the first and final lines of “King Billy Is a Gentleman” arrived almost simultaneously, but she needed “twelve years to fill in the middle.” 

These are evocative, precisely drawn, ghost-ridden tales about impoverished, difficult times, yet they are also filled with a growing awareness that better things await. In the aforementioned “King Billy Is a Gentleman,” the narrator describes her gradual realization that her mother created a scandal by bringing in a lodger who became her mother’s lover. In the arresting “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” the narrator and her family take a day trip to Birmingham, where the narrator becomes hopelessly lost in a junkyard with another girl—just as Mantel wanders in the memories, myths and secrets that filled her childhood. In “Learning to Talk,” the narrator is beginning to find her voice while taking elocution lessons to learn to “talk proper.” Notably, the narrator says, “Surely it was not necessary to talk for a living? Wouldn’t it be possible to keep your mouth shut, and perhaps write things down?”

Why write such stories after publishing a memoir? In the final story, which shares its title with Mantel’s memoir, the author answers this question precisely: “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense of impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.”

Learning to Talk is an unusual and ultimately fascinating amalgam of fact and fiction as Mantel sorts through the puzzle pieces of her past. 

You know you’re in for a wild ride with the shockingly inventive collection Shit Cassandra Saw when one of the first stories is a piercing tale of women in New York acquiring supernatural powers that allow them to move through the city without fear of sexual assault. This is followed by a story that’s a one-star Yelp review written by Gary F., ostensibly about a Maryland restaurant called Jerry’s Crab Shack, but really about the man’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with his wife.

Other standout entries include a poignant look at a high school softball team that is reeling from a recent school shooting, and the tale of a woman who is having an affair and being judged by the priggish Colonial ghost who lives in her neighborhood.

So it goes, in dazzling story after story in this debut book from Gwen E. Kirby, a creative writing instructor and associate director at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South. Through humor, ferocity and sometimes a healthy dash of surrealism, Kirby meditates on the fears, joys and pains of being a woman throughout the centuries. Every story feels unique, yet they’re tied together by Kirby’s mind-bendingly confident writing and her clear fascination with strong yet vulnerable women.

And boy, does she know how to create a sense of place so strong you can feel and smell it. In “We Handle It,” for example, we meet teenage girls who are “at a summer music camp, our fingertips sore from strings, our backs sticky with sweat, and when we reach the lake we shed our summer dresses and leap from a boulder into the water, which is deep and clean. Around the lake are tall pines and the heavy hum of Southern bug life.”

Shit Cassandra Saw is pure pleasure with something for everyone, especially readers interested in thinking deeply about womanhood from every possible angle. Kirby’s characters are sometimes sinners and never saints, as complex as the real-life women we know and love.

Spanning the globe from a night market in Taiwan to New York City, Los Angeles and many places in between, Jean Chen Ho’s novel-in-stories weaves together the experiences of two young women, Fiona and Jane. We see their lives unfold together and apart, amid challenges with their parents, flirtations, relationships and financial concerns. Through it all, Fiona and Jane navigate the complexities of their friendship, allowing it to grow, change and reemerge with time.

Fiona and Jane is comprised of chapters that alternate between Jane’s first-person narration and Fiona’s third person. Jane describes growing up and navigating her sense of self, and she ruminates on the ways that her friendship with Fiona grounds and challenges her. Meanwhile, Fiona’s chapters feel more distant for their external narration. The decision to differentiate the two Taiwanese American women’s sections in this way becomes increasingly interesting and important as the story progresses. In fact, it becomes evident that this structure is essential to how the story must be told.

Time is a fascinating factor in the novel as well. The narrative unfurls in the present while moving the reader into snippets of backstory, filling in gaps at just the right moments. Ho also moves us through and across physical and cultural landscapes, revealing how a person can feel both resonance with and distance from one’s community and self.

Ultimately, though, Ho’s characters do the most compelling work. Fiona and Jane—both earnest, curious and heart-full—epitomize the realities of growing up in America as young women, as immigrants, as Asian Americans. Their arcs show how families complicate one’s life while also enriching it, how friends can become a found family, and how each choice can echo in and reflect a person’s whole life.

By the book’s end, readers will feel as though they carry some part of these women with them, as if Fiona and Jane are our friends, as if their stories might yet overlap with our own.

Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose bestselling works were beloved by readers around the globe, died too young, at 55, in June 2020. Before his death, he collected a slim volume of stories as a parting gift for his fans. Varying from two to 40 pages in length, the tales in The City of Mist are filled with classic Ruiz Zafón elements: absorbing, old-fashioned storytelling, atmospheric settings and characters who exist in the margins between reality and imagination.

Ruiz Zafón’s fiction, exemplified by the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet that began with The Shadow of the Wind, draws freely on the conventions of many genres—gothic, fantasy, historical romance, noir. The 11 pieces in The City of Mist follow this pattern, tapping into a sense of ethereal mystery and otherworldliness. Some characters will be familiar to avid readers of Ruiz Zafón’s oeuvre, and most of the stories are set in the fictional version of Barcelona that has long been his literary terrain.

The final, posthumous work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón dwells in the familiar, fantastical literary terrain that he claimed as his own.

Because Ruiz Zafón was a writer known for burly, sprawling narratives in a style hearkening back a century or two, it is interesting to see him working in miniature. The shortest stories here are mere whimsical episodes, and one senses that The City of Mist, which has the feel of a writer’s sketchbook, comprises nuggets the author intended for future exploration in novels. This fragmentary quality, however, in no way diminishes Ruiz Zafón’s storytelling charms, which are on full display especially in a number of the longer pieces. “The Prince of Parnassus,” the longest story and the one placed dead center in the volume, is an apocryphal tale within a tale about Cervantes, a journey to Rome to save a young woman and a Faustian bargain with a shadowy, devilish figure. “Men in Grey” cleverly makes use of noir tropes while following the exploits of a political assassin during the Spanish Civil War. In another story, the eccentric Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí takes a voyage to Manhattan to meet with an elusive millionaire in hopes of securing financing to complete his legendary cathedral. One can only imagine, and lament, where Ruiz Zafón might have taken these conceits had he lived longer.

Ruiz Zafón luxuriated in an old-school narrative style and was an indisputable master of the form. If he had one blind spot as a writer, it may have been in his portrayal of female characters. The women in these stories, young or old, are likely to be either virginal or fallen (sometimes, oddly, both), serving as mysterious objects of veneration or temptation but rarely as multifaceted human beings. This omission or oversight often leaves the reader yearning for a little more depth. Nonetheless, for the legion of fans of this mesmerizing storyteller, The City of Mistt will not disappoint.