King of the Gypsies isn’t just a story collection; it is a poignant reminder that complexity and virtue are only ever borne out of hardship.

In Becky Adnot-Haynes’s first collection of stories, The Year of Perfect Happiness, happiness is—not surprisingly—a state more imagined than experienced. Adnot-Haynes is a close observer of relationships and the human capacity for deception, especially self-deception, but happily, she’s no cynic.

It is not enough to read these stories once, which is why it will take its place on my desk next to its predecessor. I look forward to savoring these little gems again and again, long into the future, one at a time, slowly and with deliberation.

So, how does an author take this inherently rational activity and render a portrait of an unbalanced mind? That’s what Carmiel Banasky attempts—among other things—in her sparkling debut novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop.

Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales is set almost entirely in a region called the Mid-South, an in-between place appropriately filled with characters neither here nor there—not successful and not abject failures, not happy and not sad, not black and not white. Biracial men whose skin color serves as a kind of extreme social camouflage narrate most of the stories.

In this tenacious novel of rural Welsh life, death inevitably accompanies life. Without this dire, strained coupling, the characters in The Dig might have all they need, but this not how this novel, or our world, function.