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.

How do we attain and hold onto happiness? Although this question has been the implied or overt subject of countless self-help books, it has no neat or simple answers. The stories in Virginia Pye’s compelling new collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, acknowledge this reality in fresh and perceptive ways. And they allow us to witness transformational moments in the lives of characters who are seeking out happiness or life satisfaction, or struggling with its elusiveness.

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.

The most enthralling competitions involve equally talented opponents who have something to prove, ideally a something that runs deeper than the game at hand. In his gripping novel Second Story Man, Charles Salzberg immerses us in this very sort of rivalry, delivering far more than just thrills.