Each of the nineteen sharply faceted stories comprising In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories, edited by Brice Particelli, differently takes up the theme of being misunderstood. In this state — disregarded, disrespected, dissed — you’re not the person you’ve been mistaken for, but you’re not quite yourself either. You’re in the between.

Anchoring the collection are powerful stories by marquee contributors: Rion Amilcar Scott, Alice Hoffman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Roxane Gay, Akhil Sharma. One standout is Scott’s “Juba,” in which a Black man is repeatedly mistaken for a local hustler whose name gives the story its title. These misapprehensions have consequences: the narrator is detained by police, he misses a job interview, and clearing up the misapprehension only worsens his situation. “One officer slid me a cup of coffee after it was established that I wasn’t Juba. He told me to watch my back because Juba is still out there.” Continually mistaken for someone else, the story’s narrator never gets the basic and routine consideration that would secure him a place in the world and recognize him as distinct from anyone and everyone else.

Altogether these stories present a range of lives lived “in the between” — Black lives, trans lives, immigrant lives, the lives of women and girls, of veterans, of ballerinas, of vanishing species, of stars and planets. Ryka Aoki’s “To the New World” introduces readers to Millie, a trans Asian woman who, like the narrator of “Juba,” contends with misrecognition. In her former existence as Victor Wong, “a nondescript Asian boy,” Millie asserts that “he was an afterthought. A non-thought.” The problem “wasn’t so much being hated — it was being invisible.” But as a woman, Millie becomes magnet for attention: “Cars would stop. Doors would open. People would smile — even flirt sometimes.” Millie insists that she knows “about objectification” and she’s aware of being fetishized — but for her, it feels like a step up. She asks, “After a life of being ignored, was it wrong to like people for being nice to you?”

Millie befriends Sierra, who is “tall and solid as a mountain … one of those dykes who didn’t just want to take back the night — she wanted to grab and throttle it.” Things go swimmingly until Millie surprises Sierra with the fact that she is trans. “Sierra was still just as friendly as ever, but Millie could sense the difference. Sierra started treating Millie less like possible dating material and more like a younger brother-sister.” Other people’s trajectories tend to threaten Sierra’s sense of herself. When a lover transitions, Sierra comes undone. “Of course,” she tells Millie,

I made sure that everyone knew that James had been Rebecca, and that she — I mean he — I mean I — was still a dyke. I didn’t want people thinking I went straight. No way am I going to be straight. … It’s okay if she wants to go be a guy or something, but don’t push that on me.

When they manage to escape others’ projections, the characters in these stories find solace and even transcendence. In Mister Loki’s “A Place Like Home,” told in the form of a comic, the trans narrator is comforted by the sheer variousness of sexuality in nature, or at least what they can find of it at the local zoo. Escape from toxic projections can also be an escapade, full of levity if not delight. Joy Baglio’s “Ron,” for instance, follows the exploits of a woman who only dates men named “Ron.” Guys named Ron are, apparently, her type: their superficial commonality seems to say something deep about who she is. When she arranges a meeting for her Rons, the result is so perfectly absurd that the story actually starts to seem as if it is taking place in an alternate reality, in which a romantic “type” becomes a fate — in this case, an endless stream of reasonable guys, all quite different, and all named Ron.

Sensuality provides another outlet. A live wire connecting external reality and the innermost self, sensations are personal, private, and individual — yet they are also firmly rooted in the world. Take, for instance, the enjoyment of home cooking. Characters in these stories experience relief from the pain of in-betweenness whenever the foods of home are on the table. Ryoki’s Millie has just such an experience with a humble pork bun, a food that reminds her of a loving grandmother. In “The Art of Translation” by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a young immigrant suffers a racist attack that leaves him hating the body he’s in. His mother’s cooking is a balm:

the smell of it — reminded me that having a body wasn’t always a bad thing. The odor of her sopas and caldillos and guisados. The garlic, the onion, the cumin, the cilantro, the roasted chiles. Sometimes, the odors that came out of my mother’s kitchen made me want to live.

Mingling pleasure and memory, home cooking lifts these characters out of the miseries of not belonging and being misunderstood; it brings them back to themselves.

The collection closes with Brian Hurt’s brief and striking “Moonless,” in which an astronomer creates whole worlds in his basement. Each world exists in a solar system with two stars. The binary stars share a gravitational field; each stabilizes the other. Miniature astronomers peer up at the scientist through their miniature telescopes, demanding to know who he is and what he wants. Was he a god?

I’m just a man, I’d say to them. But … the more they studied me, the more they watched, they more they became unconvinced … Not because I had power over life and death, destruction and creation — which I did. But because there was only one of me… What is a god if not alone?

The lonely narrator’s confession suggests that something is lost when we eliminate in-between experiences, when we adhere too forcefully to one side — of a conflict, of a story — to the exclusion of another. To live in the between is to be multiple, at least temporarily; to be alone means never getting the chance to experience this state, with all its highs and lows.

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Brice Particelli teaches writing at UC Berkeley and is a 2022 Creative Writing Fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts. His nonfiction has been published in Harper’s, Guernica, Salmagundi, and The Smart Set, among others; and he is co-editor of America Street:A Multicultural Anthology of Stories (Persea Books, 2019). He is working on a narrative nonfiction book focused on (mis)education movements in the United States.

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Diane Josefowicz is editor of reviews at Necessary Fiction and the author of Ready, Set, Oh, a novel published earlier this year by Flexible Press.