Shortworks

The fifteen stories in Shortworks range from the darkly comic to the quietly devastating, but they share a consistent sensibility: an attention to what people can't quite say, what they almost do, and what they leave behind. A philosophy professor uses Galileo's preserved finger to make a room full of students lean forward in their chairs. A caretaker watches a cemetery literally forget its dead each winter and remember them in spring. A man drives past a childhood friend holding a cardboard sign and can't make himself stop. Gym trainers, influencers, muscle-bound narcissists, and a middle school guidance counselor on a date with an actual warlord all move through a world that is slightly tilted-funny in ways that hurt.

The collection covers a wide emotional range: the residue of Vietnam on the men who came home, the slow collapse of a gambling father's household, a woman in a chipmunk costume who is still, technically, acting. But even the heaviest stories carry wit, and even the funniest carry weight. What holds them together is the conviction that ordinary life-a parking lot driving lesson, a first date in a Russian bakery, fifty years of marriage-contains more drama, more grace, and more grief than it usually gets credit for.