This gracefully written, heartfelt novel examines the risks and rewards of facing doubts and desires concerning the direction of one’s life, and of trying to act according to these feelings. It also considers the power of close friendships, and how these relationships can sustain us in ways that familial, or marital, bonds might not be able to.

In the acknowledgments section of this beautifully crafted, revelatory collection, Tara Lynn Masih mentions her realization, while putting the book together, that many of the stories are connected by the theme of disappearance. Indeed, the collection explores literal and metaphorical disappearances, and how these lead characters to transformative discoveries about themselves and, in some cases, about the spiritual world.

This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.

Through a powerful combination of prose, poetry, and visual art, The Benefits of Eating White Folks explores an enslaved woman’s determination to survive and persist amid a series of traumas that threaten to break her. And it connects her trials to issues of racial injustice that continue to afflict our country. The result is an unforgettable book, one that holds an unforgiving mirror up to American racism, past and present, showing its ineradicable toll.

Spanning three generations and the interconnected lives of multiple characters, The Door-Man is an inventive and revelatory novel. At the heart of it are two possibly unbridgeable gaps: between the central character’s fragmented understanding of his family’s history and the truth, and between an ancestral cycle of tragedy and a potentially hopeful future.

Imagine that you gain access to a device that allows you to revisit, via video, every moment of your life, good and bad, transformative and mundane. A device that allows you to return to past experiences with living or dead loved ones: both treasured encounters and those so painful it might be best to erase them from your mind. Would such technology be a gift or something more damaging than rewarding?

This question lies at the heart of Michael Paul Kozlowsky’s engrossing and inventive novel, in which the main character, Sean Whittlesea, wins such a device in an unsettling corporate competition. (More on that soon.) The technology brings Sean back to some of his happiest moments, such as when he met his beloved wife, Gwen. But it also draws him closer to darker moments, the worst of these being Gwen’s murder, which he witnessed but forgot: seemingly the result of retrograde amnesia, due to a blow to the head he received during the incident. Understandably, Sean dreads returning to the scene of the crime, even though this promises to reveal exactly what happened, and who was responsible for Gwen’s death.