Each story takes you to a different place and time; from a British cartographer's circa 1930 exploration of the Arabian desert to a futuristic take on global warming, these exterior worlds are as fantastically fashioned as the characters themselves.

Fort Hood, Texas, is the largest military installation in the free world—340 square miles, as Siobhan Fallon notes in her fascinating You Know When the Men Are Gone. Fort Hood also functions as a small town; everyone in these eight interconnected tales knows everyone else's business—or tries to.

Most readers know Ann Packer from her best-selling debut novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Her stunning linked-story collection,' ' Swim Back to Me' ' (Knopf), is even better, richer, more insightful. Packer can break your heart—and she can mend it, too. Easing readers in with recognizable characters facing familiar situations—an adolescent boy agonizes over an unrequited crush, a newlywed worries when her husband is late coming home—she then injects a detail that makes us see the situations in a whole new light. If Packer's characters' crises are ordinary, what's unusual is the poignant way they attempt to right themselves after crushing hits. The multilayered novella that anchors the book, "Walk for Mankind," centers on a middle-aged man looking back to when he was 13, remembering the girl who betrayed him—and his own petty, impotent act of retaliation. In the story "Dwell Time," a wife discovers her husband's shattering secret habit and wonders, "What if she could be blasé, indifferent?... Would that spoil it for him? Enough to keep him from doing it again?" The final story, "Things Said or Done," is narrated by the girl from the novella, now also middle-aged. Her recollection of their adolescent years differs wildly from the events described by the man she wounded so long ago, a fact that seems—like so much in this fine work—surprising and absolutely true.

The women in this engrossing collection grapple with the contemporary dynamics of race and gender—and age-old emotions like envy and regret.

Dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe the marriages in this brilliant, brutally raw debut collection.

Audacious, thrilling, and astute, the stories in this collection—written over the course of nearly half a century—showcase the genius of the late, great Southern writer.

In the eight fierce stories in her second collection, Alone with You, Marisa Silver explores the impact of collateral damage, whether sustained in war or in life.

Cathleen Medwick reviews How to Escape from a Leper Colony, Tiphanie Yanique's haunting and vibrant debut fiction collection set in the Caribbean.

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Learn more about the book and the author.

Elaina Richardson reviews Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones, a collection of eight stories, all set in a down-on-its-luck town in Kentucky, about trapped people doing the best they can.

Cathleen Medwick reviews Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom, the author's new collection of short fiction about real-life passion--greedy, misguided, rueful, hopeful, generous to a fault.

In five separate narratives, each told from the perspective of a child from a different African country, Akpan highlights the tenacity and perseverance of his young protagonists

Francine Prose reviews Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, a collection of 10 powerful short stories.

Vince Passaro reviews The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, stories by the respected short-story writer which are able to convert everyday experience into light comic drama.

Elaina Richardson reviews Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro, a collection of five related stories involving misfits and a love for music.

The masterful tales in Yiyun Li's second collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, illuminate the conflict between traditional and modern-day China.

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is a wildly ambitious novel about the music business, media technology and culture.

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