Described as “prose snapshots,” each of the stories in this evocative, wide-ranging collection captures significant or telling moments, encounters, or observations in 50 words or fewer. Together, they add up to something far greater than the sum of their parts, creating a rich, layered portrait of the human experience.

In this inventive and affecting novel, the barriers between the real world and the worlds of the imagination, magic, and folklore become porous at best and sometimes dissolve altogether. As disorienting as these breaks with reality are for the couple at the center of the story, Adrian Dussett and Ben Hughes, they ultimately prove revelatory, pushing Adrian and Ben to confront personal difficulties that have troubled them for years and created a divide in their relationship.

With page-turner plots that take us to dark places, on both sides of the law, Chris McGinley’s rural-noir story collection, Coal Black, is a deeply satisfying read. What makes the book even more captivating is how deeply rooted each story is in the book’s setting: the hills of eastern Kentucky, a place of both natural beauty and human struggle, and to certain of McGinley’s characters, a place where figures from local folklore and legends can sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.

In many coming-of-age novels, parents are absent, literally or figuratively. But one of the many distinctions of Elizabeth Earley’s dazzling and incisive new novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, is the interconnectedness of the two central characters: fourteen-year-old Marko and his mother, Kalina. Despite this close connection, Kalina remains a mystery to Marko, a frustration that leads him to make transformative discoveries about her, himself, and a grandfather he’s never met.

In her reflective and lyrical début novel, As a River, Sion Dayson explores the hazards of secrets. Whether kept or revealed, they can exact a profound toll: on those who carry them and on those who either remain in the dark or are made to confront new–and potentially life-changing–truths. With deep feeling, Dayson traces these consequences across lives and generations, portraying how those affected cope–sometimes by strengthening old bonds or forming new ones.

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers is, to quote writer Mia Alvar, “an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor.”

At age 2, Grace moved with her family from the Philippines to a suburb of Boston, where she became adrift between two worlds. On the one hand, she was made to feel “other” in her predominantly white neighborhood and school; on the other hand, she lost touch with her native language and culture, discovering what happens when “assimilation brings erasure.” In time, Grace confronted additional, traumatizing difficulties: the realization that her family’s residency status was “illegal,” making deportation an ever-present risk; sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and in later years, the discovery that she has a gene that makes carriers susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. Consequently, she had to decide whether, as a preventive measure, to have her breasts and ovaries removed.

In her affecting and fiercely honest memoir, Grace breaks the silence that long surrounded these traumas, discovering what Kirkus Reviews describes as “the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.”

In interviews with the East Coast Asian American Student Union, Fiction Advocate, and The Rumpus, Grace has answered a wide range of questions about The Body Papers, discussing how the book came about, how she connected the various threads of her story, and the care she took in integrating information about living family members. Here, she responds to questions about the process of writing and revising The Body Papers, among other topics. (Full disclosure: Grace, a dear friend, has offered invaluable advice to me as I’ve written and revised my own novels.)