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.

To what lengths should we go for a cause—or a person—we’re passionate about and can’t imagine losing? This question lies at the heart of Julia Stoops’ début novel Parts per Million, a suspenseful and harrowing exploration of high-stakes activism, sorely tested friendship, and uncertainly fated love.

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.

Christopher Irvin’s novel Ragged; or, The Loveliest Lies of All is a page tuner of a mystery/crime thriller, interwoven with a captivating story of family and community. The fact that all the characters are animals never distanced me from the drama; to the contrary, it provided a bracing reminder of the degree to which we’re driven by beastly instincts, which are never as far from the surface as we might wish to believe.

KL Pereira’s captivating new collection of short fiction, A Dream Between Two Rivers, carries the subtitle “Stories of Liminality.” True to that description, many of the stories explore experiences of being on the verge—or at the edge—of a new identity, reality, or understanding. This makes for dynamic storytelling, as does the fact that the collection isn’t tied down by any one stylistic convention.

Many of the stories draw on elements of myths, folklore, or fairytales, and like those types of tales, they take us into strange, often dark situations that, however surreal, echo the emotional and psychological struggles of lived human experience.

A woman is delivered to love—and, later, to grief—by the powers of the moon and the sea; a father who can speak for the dead, and a son who can speak for animals, find that they can’t communicate with each other; Death, in his adolescence, moves reluctantly toward adulthood and his powers of annihilation.

These are just a few of the characters and situations that figure into Kellie Wells’s fabulist story collection God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. Although this book is slim, its stories are as detail-dense and strange as an enchanted forest, and they are nothing that can or should be rushed through.