Anyone meticulously following the strings will be rewarded by the rich tapestry of character development Hasanat’s writing brings to each story.

We heard a story at the start of seventh grade, one we’d heard a hundred times before, that took place in the early 1980s, the year Krull came out, a movie we’d only seen on basic cable, the good parts spliced out.

The reader, like the dreamers who have awakened, is left wondering which life is a dream and which universe is real.

I would’ve taken a hamster, ferret, or cat, but there was only Grover. He was all I needed.

Stoltzfus writes with evident knowledge—of flora, fauna, sport, literature, and, most importantly, human relationships—and a painterly attention to detail that fuse these tales into an assemblage that is bound to delight, engage, and even instruct the reader.

This sort of bewildering aptness continues throughout the stories. Novakovich has an incredible gift for ending a story, alternately wrapping together loose threads, as in “Tumbleweed,” or propelling the reader out to wonder in silence for a moment, before being transported to an utterly different and new place, as he begins the next story.

The therapist carries her heart in a small paper sack. Like a lunch sack, crumpled and brown. Her heart is pulsing inside it.

Being a nanny was not going to be Manju Gupta’s full-time job forever. Her husband, Krishna, had only just graduated from law school and taken the bar exam.

“The height of the Bush administration was an absurd, fascinating, propaganda-filled, scary time in American history. As I was living through it I felt compelled to record the experience,” Stoops says of the time and setting of her novel.