Debutiful

When I emerge from a masterfully linked short story collection, it feels as if I’m beholding a complex origami figure after having ambled around, Alice-like, in its chambers and passageways: each turn, each fold intentional, yet delightfully surprising in how it informs the world of the collection, the final creation at once weightless and alive. Short stories operate on economy, with silences and gestures as meaningful as dialogue and action. I relish how in a linked collection, each story offers itself up to me as a single facet, a vibrant plane in a whole that depends for its dimensionality on memory and a sense of accumulation. That brief frisson as unanticipated connections cohere keeps me coming back for second and third readings in the hope of a deeper understanding, like unfolding and refolding an intricately transformed square of paper.

The nine books below are each unique not only in the stories they tell, but the terrain that takes shape by the last page. Some collections are lightly linked, more interested in their worlds rather than the lifetimes of characters. Others build toward a novelistic arc, even as each story speaks on its own terms. Each one comes from a singular sensibility.