As hearing tests and various attempts at treatment consume her life, the narrator seems removed from time, set apart from it.

How many horses are too many horses? Suddenly, I'm thinking about horses more than I ever have.

How to escape? The collection’s ending offers a clue. The thing that saves her, the thing that gives her wings, is opening her eyes.

Kravetz’s gift is his ability to transcend the rawness of that ache and to suss out the nascent embers of an alternative New England.

Where is the balance between wallowing in the past and reverent remembrance? How do we keep the present alive without abandoning who we’ve become?

Again and again, de Kerangal invokes the imagined threat of the forbidden country.

Does our trauma guide us towards the darkness, or could our trauma act as a sort of beacon, inviting the darkness in?

Ulrich’s stories poke and prod at the world, creatively and intelligently, and refuse to flinch or turn away from what it offers up.

Above all, Someone Who Isn’t Me yearns to sound a pure, clear note. The note is life, “as if our bodies are expensive stereos and life was a song that lasted only as long as we could hear it.”

This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. Sender’s collection screams, “Pay attention. Why is love so hard?”

To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once.

So many author interviews start with “welcome to the pages of Driftwood.” New readers will feel the warmth of that welcome.