Credit...John Gall

The Shortlist

Story Collections That Ask: ‘How Did I Get Here?’

From farmworkers in California’s Central Valley to vacationers in Jamaica and Connecticut, these protagonists find themselves in lives they don’t quite recognize.

Dionne Irving’s electric collection, THE ISLANDS: Stories (259 pp., Catapult, paperback, $16.95), investigates the alienations that come with displacement, tracing the movements of Jamaican immigrants and their descendants across the United States, Panama and Europe. What does it mean to be a part of the Black diaspora — born of a shared history of colonialism, racism and slavery — while also feeling dislocated from the Jamaican culture you still carry with you? In an ars poetica for the entire collection, the Queens-born Jamaican protagonist of “Some People” thinks after a P.T.A. dinner party: “She will recreate herself until she figures out who she is, asking herself again and again, How did I get here?” The answers for each protagonist sweep generations, migrations and continents.

These stories linger in the malaise of foreignness as the characters try to form bonds across the boundaries of race, class and culture, only to conclude, in several cases, that such relationships are impossible. In “The Cape,” a woman’s husband loses part of his foot in an accident, and in his new state she suddenly “noticed everything that was wrong,” finding that their life together has been conditional all along. In “All-Inclusive,” a Black woman living in Los Angeles goes back to her ancestral home of Jamaica with a white Jamaican poet, whose connection to colonialism is inescapable.

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But the best stories in the book reach beyond the discontent to grant the protagonists a meaningful, if unexpected, sense of belonging — even if it doesn’t last. “Florida Lives” details the dissolution of a marriage, at the end of which the narrator finds solace in a white couple she’s looked down on for much of the story, finally discarding her judgment: “They understood starting over, and sadness, and frustration.” In “Canal,” the protagonist returns to Panama City from Toronto for the first time since the death of her brother, in the 1964 riots calling for the Panama Canal’s independence from the United States. Feeling the burden of being one of the last survivors of that historical tragedy in which American soldiers killed 22 Panamanians, she finds a kind of home at her brother’s grave. The collection teaches us what kinds of respites can be found in diaspora — fleeting, begrudging, but real nonetheless.

Set among Mexican American communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the well-crafted stories in Manuel Muñoz’s THE CONSEQUENCES: Stories (181 pp., Graywolf, paperback, $16) are highly attuned to the many manifestations of suffering, and to the redemptive power of relating that suffering to another person, trying to honor what has been lost. Woven deep into the fabric of these communities are the race relations resulting from immigration and agricultural labor. Many of Muñoz’s characters are engaged in difficult fieldwork, picking fruit and tying vines, punctuated by the back-and-forth of deportations and border crossings.

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A common thread throughout the collection is the choice between kindness and cruelty, whether through violence or disregard. The first story, “Anyone Can Do It,” follows two young mothers on their first day picking peaches to pay the rent in lieu of their missing husbands. When one’s car is stolen, her young son pantomimes the slow receding of this lifeline, a symbol of so much that has been drained from their lives. In “The Reason Is Because,” a teenage mother spends an evening at a carnival with a nice boy who treats her with care. When she arrives home, the father of her child is so jealous he dangles the baby over a balcony, threatening her not to see another boy again. “That Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of Town” is about a group of day laborers reminiscing about a love triangle between a foreman, the wife he abuses and the fieldworker who showed her and her children concern and affection. Telling the story, the group marvels in equal measure over its brutality and its sweetness — a rare thing in these stories, something magical, to be cherished. The narrator of “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” routinely travels south to pick up her husband on the morning after “the men in the green uniforms arrive at the rows of whatever crops are in season — grapes or peaches or plums — and round up the men into vans.” Meeting a newcomer to these bus trips, the narrator considers leaving her to fend for herself, but instead uses her experience to help this lost young woman who reminds her of her childhood. This collection pushes the reader to appreciate life’s small moments of unexpected tenderness with fresh eyes.

The 12 stories in Louise Marburg’s heartfelt collection YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION: Stories (167 pp., EastOver Press, paperback, $20) explore the disappointment of lives that end up more lackluster than we’ve dreamed for ourselves, of relationships that don’t materialize the way we hoped, family members estranged and isolated. Often involving traumatic childhoods and drunken, callous mothers, these narratives are concerned with how to move forward. Marburg’s characters find themselves in lives they don’t quite recognize, searching for signposts that can lead them forward or tell them who they are. As the title story ends, a driver drops off Amelia at her brother’s house after he’s had a heart attack. “Is this where you want to be or what?” he asks. To which she responds, “No, it’s not. … But here I am anyway.”

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There is humor in the way the characters are constantly out of step with those around them, in their understatements and overstatements, their confusions and the chidings of those who try to bring them back into the realm of the accepted. The first story, “Alouette,” follows a 37-year-old teacher who so longs for a child that she lies to a fertility doctor about her age, then lies to a woman in the waiting room about being pregnant. Eventually, she visits a fortuneteller called Clair Voyant while everyone around her tries to bring her back to reality. When she finally accepts that she may not ever be a mother, we feel her loss, the world drained of wonder.

These characters are as quirky as they are full of heart. The last story, “Next of Kin,” is a hilarious romp through a dead man’s apartment where the narrator — the daughter of the dead man’s ex-girlfriend — tries to seduce a rare-book dealer without realizing he’s gay. When that is finally revealed, the narrator determines that his friendship might be just as fulfilling as the romance she had wanted. “Dance, Rockette” has all the power of a Lorrie Moore story: A husband and wife attend a dinner party near their rental cottage in Connecticut, all the while dogged by their own desires and regrets over the people they could have been. When they commit a crime together, the wife feels “a ghost of a thrill” at the water as still as glass, untouched by other people. Even in the thralls of defeat, these stories traffic in hope.


Brenda Peynado is the author, most recently, of “The Rock Eaters.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Story Collections. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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