The women populating these stories fall anywhere along the gender and sexuality spectrums. They are also mothers, wives, partners, and girls who are in that awkward coming-of-age space that is a quiet horror of its own.

Are each of us destined, sooner or later, to live and work on the rugged slopes of our own accumulated refuse? It certainly feels that way inside the reality of Bradley Bazzle’s debut novel, Trash Mountain, which finds teenager Ben Shippers locked in a personal struggle with a pile of garbage that is both his obdurate foe and his only hope of a better life.

In addition to the detailed life of Ma Bo’le during the occupation, the novel is framed by introductory and concluding chapters that take place in the 1980s, long after the author’s death.

As I read this novel during the fall of 2018, the nation collectively returned to the summer of ’82. Everyone, it seemed, was glued to coverage of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh’s testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee and their recollections of that summer.

The war has continued for so long now that an entire generation has never known a time that we didn’t have soldiers in the Middle East. It’s depressing and easy to forget—two reasons (but not the only reasons) that Glori Simmons’s latest story collection, Carry You, is so important.

Laura Leigh Morris’s tales from the fictional town of Brickton, West Virginia give readers a bird’s-eye view into a world that feels at times economically and socially left behind.

What you have here is a collection of loosely connected stories set in northern Arkansas, full of characters motivated, to a large degree, by their own unscrupulousness. They are hardscrabble, morally questionable, and sometimes even violent people. They are also supremely entertaining.

With his 220-page story of Saul Indian Horse, Wagamese delivers a near-perfect analogy to the history of the First Nation peoples of Canada.