More often than we might care to admit, we enter marriage or other committed relationships with more haste than reflection; we move forward without clearly thinking things through or fully imagining what a future with this partner might look like given what we know (or sense) about them and ourselves.

In her painfully honest, witty, and perceptive new novel, And So We Die, Having First Slept, Jennifer Spiegel acknowledges this reality without judgment, and without suggesting that such relationships are necessarily doomed. Instead, through the struggles of the married couple at the center of the novel, Spiegel makes the case that it’s never too late to confront the most difficult truths about our partners and ourselves, which offers at least the hope of transformation or redemption—something denial never does.

With poetic and often searing language, the stories in Fayeza Hasanat’s début collection, The Bird Catcher, illuminate the struggles of Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-American women—struggles that are often rooted in misogyny or other forms of prejudice. Throughout the stories run threads of resistance: a necessity of living with lasting, systemic oppression, and cause now and then for glimmers of hope.

The central characters in Thomas Benz’s thought-provoking, offbeat, and often hilarious story collection Home & Castle experience several varieties of alienation–from neighbors, from casual acquaintances, from co-workers, and sometimes from their own romantic partners. Not infrequently, this alienation derives at least in part from their own mistakes and disgruntlements. Yet in their resistance to this isolation, or to its consequences, the characters can’t help but earn our empathy–and, sometimes, even our cheers.

Timothy Gager’s captivating new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something About Elephants, immerses us in revelatory episodes or situations from a range of lives. All the stories, even the more surreal ones, capture truths about human experience, with all its darkness, absurdity, and moments of recognition.

A criminal act intensifies the conflict between two estranged and contrary sisters—one a butcher, the other a vegetarian cellist. A mime sublets half of a family’s duplex, then makes them the subject of perhaps the most astonishing trick of his career. A couple enters uncomfortable new terrain in their marriage when one of them believes their toddler has become a devourer of small objects.

This is just a sampling of the offbeat dramas that unfold in Jacob M. Appel’s entertaining and thought-provoking story collection Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana. Instead of running counter to reality, the quirkiness of the stories feels true to the strangeness, and the struggles, of lived experience.

One of the fiction-writing super powers I admire most is the ability to inhabit a wide range of characters and worlds, and to write about each of them with great empathy and understanding. In her story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough, Lynn Sloan shows a special gift in this regard. She immerses us in the lives of everyone from a deceived and disillusioned widow, to an anxious soldier pulled into a possibly criminal scheme, to a worried mother of an aspiring prizefighter. As Sloan explores the inner and outer and conflicts that these characters face, she does so with deep feeling and insight.