In a first collection, National Book Award finalist Krauss (Great House) uses superbly controlled language to investigate how we become who we are. Having cheated death, elderly scholar Brodman feels his understanding of the world slipping away and ends up on the roof with his newborn grandson, while florist's assistant Noa faces the exigencies of her parents' divorce, the wedding she's supplying, and nearby California wildfires. Elsewhere, a woman recalls a teenage friend, heedless of the risks she took because "she was already broken, or she wasn't going to break." In one striking story, a woman who inherits the apartment of a father she barely visited learns that it's used by her father's old friend whenever he's in town: "I will get used to stepping over the stranger on my way to the kitchen because that is the way one lives." VERDICT Small gems, large ideas; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/6/20.]

This triumphant first collection from Krauss (Forest Dark) crisscrosses the globe in 10 ambitious stories written over two decades that wrestle with sexuality, desire, and human connection. In one of the greatest stories, "Seeing Ershadi," a dancer believes she spies the star of the Iranian film Taste of Cherry while in Japan for a performance, and believes she must save the actor from the suicide he commits in the film. After a friend tells her of her own unique encounter with the actor years earlier, the dancer faces the depth of her fanatic and obsessive state. Another highlight, "Future Emergencies," is set shortly after 9/11 and remains timely as its female protagonist navigates a New York City where gas masks are distributed for free and local governments warn of vague threats. "I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake," another standout, concerns a woman visiting her dead father's apartment in Tel Aviv, only to find a stranger living in a back room, and the collection's title story breaks a woman's interactions with several men into four parts to ruminate on gender norms and expectations. Krauss's style is marked by a willingness to digress into seemingly superfluous details, yet the minutiae helps the author conjure a series of realistic environments, allowing each story feel lived in. This is a spectacular book. (Nov.)

What defines a life well-lived? What does it take for a chance encounter that turns into a friendship developed over the course of one summer to make its presence felt decades on? Krauss (Forest Dark, 2017) winningly explores these and other weighty issues in a home run of a short story collection. The characters frequently struggle under the burden of familial guilt compounded by geography. In "The Husband," a U.S.-based psychiatrist confronts her feelings of hopelessness and jealousy as her aged mother finds new love in Israel. In "I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake," a daughter makes peace with her father's death and peeks into a vision of his life beyond one that she had made room for. Jewish themes flow through many stories, most strikingly in "In the Garden," where a horticulture apprentice finds out that "Latin America's greatest landscape architect" was a Nazi agent. Above all, these stories pay homage to strong women. As female characters mature, they find resilience in the power they wield despite societal constraints. Like the narrator in "Seeing Ershadi," all of Krauss' women characters women eventually realize that their triumphs are due to "strengths we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths."

Stories about women and men and the daily urgencies inherent to living more or less in the present. The latest collection of stories from Krauss is a wonder, with the author's signature straddling of the tragic and the absurd, her particularly Jewish frame of reference, and the extraordinary range of her narrative voice. One story traces the erotic awakenings of three young women; the next follows an older man named Brodman as he emerges from surgery to find his brand-new grandson about to undergo his bris. These stories are remarkable enough, but deep in the book, Krauss departs, ever so subtly, from a strict allegiance to realism. In the unsettlingly prescient "Future Emergencies," New York City residents are urged to wear the gas masks being distributed at designated centers. Nobody knows why, but the evening news is also providing instructions on how to safely seal windows and doors. "Amour" is set in a near future where whatever has happened to the world--war? devastating climate change?--goes unstated, but the main characters find themselves, as a result, in a refugee camp. And yet in both stories, the futuristic or, as it is sometimes called, "speculative" aspects are quietly located in the background. At the forefront of each is the relationship between a couple. In the end, perhaps that's what makes these tales so moving and so disconcerting. Brodman, out of surgery, realizes that "his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he'd had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years." A tremendous collection from an immensely talented writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.