These stories cover a wide array of experiences, locations, and characters, all in Provincetown, Massachusetts. One story about the Feast of Saint Bonaventure follows multiple, different characters throughout the evening, showing readers what the Feast means to each of them. Some characters have supernatural aspects; Luna, the “Queen of Land’s End,” is a trans woman who’s lived in Provincetown since the late 1800s who acts as kind of a guardian angel for locals, but also for the town itself. Without her, who would keep the tides in sync? Throughout, the various players are funny and vibrant, but sometimes they really do feel like fictional constructs than real people. They serve as representatives of a vibrant mix of communities, but the stories sometimes read more like parables than complex portraits. Provincetown is the real focus, and the tales are strongest when they talk directly about the locale; readers get to know its festivals, its summer routines, its struggles during the offseason, and they learn something about its past and how climate change encroaches on its future. López takes a great care to represent Provincetown in all its diversity; the majority of his attention is focused on cis gay men, but there are stories here about lesbians, trans and nonbinary people, and straight people, too; their cultural backgrounds are also varied, with special focus on the Latine community. In “Scenes From Commercial Street,” the narration discusses how white Provincetown still is: “Mexicans and Jamaicans haul garbage, mow lawns, and sand floors, but there is not a single person of color running an arts institution or major businesses.…Despite these realities, people of color are part of Ptown, and they find Commercial Street as intoxicating as everyone else.” This collection portrays that intoxication, and these realities, with passion and care.

Sepúlveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse, a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad, the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Schäfer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to the colony, where Schäfer and his accomplices dissolved family bonds and enforced obedience through forced labor, surveillance, confessions, and physical and sexual torture. Sepúlveda renders daily life with exacting, excruciating detail. Central to the account is the colony’s medical regime, mostly overseen by Dr. Strätling, a former Nazi doctor with a wooden leg. She drugged women and men, forced gynecological procedures, and carried out sexualized torture under the guise of treatment (“Dr. Strätling applied electricity to a part of my body I didn’t know existed”). Ilse recounts the relentless violations of her body and those of other women in a flat, clinical register that offers no relief. The narrative tracks the colony’s deep complicity with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and its shifting relationship to the outside world, including its role as a weapons manufacturer and a detention and torture site for the regime. The narrative ends with Schäfer’s arrest in 2005, when Ilse was 54. Only in the acknowledgments do readers fully grasp that this harrowing testimony is fictional, framed by the author as a memoir. As an artistic project, the book is devastating in its depiction of suffering, but its power raises ethical questions—the degree to which it draws on specific historical testimonies is unclear from the brief acknowledgments, risking a manipulation of readers’ trust and an appropriation of survivors’ authority. Comparisons with works such as Leila Guerriero’s The Call (2024), a rigorously reported portrait of torture survivor Silvia Labayru under Argentina’s military dictatorship, are unavoidable and unsettling.

In the pre-dawn moments of February 24, 2022, Oceanheart and her husband were “jolted awake” by the sound of explosions in their city of Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. A call to her mother confirmed the author’s “worst fears”: War had begun. “War feels like a relic of history or a plot in a movie,” Oceanheart writes, and she and her family struggle with their new reality. While she had previously spent her days studying for a master’s degree in psychology, identifying the best pediatricians for her daughters, and watching Downton Abbey, Oceanheart’s priorities abruptly shifted to fulfilling basic human needs—competing with neighbors for “scarce food supplies” and filling her bathtub with water for doing dishes and flushing the toilet. Initially, Oceanheart invited her mother and younger brother to shelter in their two-bedroom apartment to escape the worsening danger in their hometown of Bakhmut. Eventually, her father joined them, but the strain of wartime cohabitation provoked a painful rift between the families. Later, Oceanheart and her husband, Artur, make the difficult decision to move to the United States, where they can stay for two years under “humanitarian parole.” Although the author’s prose can feel overly formal at times, and the dialogue can be somewhat stilted, the memoir’s strength lies in its intimate domestic details. Rather than focusing on military movements or geopolitical explanations, Oceanheart captures small moments: entertaining children in the dark during nightly blackouts meant to avoid becoming bombing targets, and her daughters’ terror at firecrackers during their first Fourth of July celebration in North Carolina. Particularly affecting is her heartbreak at realizing that the war “had woven itself into the fabric of their childhood.”

“It hurts to say it, but we’re living in cruel and shallow times.” Thus, in a nutshell, this fluent catalogue of all the ways in which cruelty and shallowness have come to define our lives. Lewis, a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, allows that his book is about a little of everything; among its topics are consumerism, Elon Musk, the attack on the Capitol, Donald Trump, homelessness, idiocracy, and, well, “sex robot brothels.” All are of a piece in explaining why, he goes on to say, America “often feels more like a woodchipper for the soul than a safe place to call home.” Blame it on “this strange red giant called Texas,” where so many of these things get their start or at least accumulate force: Lewis finds plenty of good in its people, yet little but toxicity in its politics. It all adds up to a “world of sick systems and faded dreams,” governed by a president, “American Caligula,” for whom “big” is the ultimate superlative: “It’s what dullards confuse with greatness.” Committed to a vision in which we’re all just a bit “smaller sweeter slower lighter,” the author looks to a few instances in which a bit of hope comes glimmering through the darkness: a blue-collar version of Burning Man, the latter of which has become a corporatized plaything for the very wealthy; the inherent goodness of ordinary people, who are “often quietly bitter about the way American life is structured by dislocation, competition, and corporate compunctions, not to mention the unavoidable triad of race, class, and gender.” Lewis can turn a memorable phrase with apparent ease, and these disparate pieces cohere nicely in the end. And more than recite all the manifold ills of America, he offers at least something of a program of resistance: “Pivot from despair to action. Avoid violence but otherwise forget the high road.”

As this odd, slim work opens, an unnamed narrator is contemplating the biscuit he’s preparing to eat. He gazes at its appearance, runs over in his imagination its possible delights, anticipates its joys in indulgent detail: “I studied it in the way one might study a photograph of a stranger’s face—not for beauty, but for character,” the narrator thinks. “It had none of the uniformity of factory-born pastries, none of the glossy, symmetrical perfection that exists to lure you at a glance.” Rather, this biscuit is homemade and presumably one of a kind—something to be treasured before it’s consumed. The narrator spends a good number of pages cherishing it until his musings are interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing. It’s probably a telemarketer or some other such nuisance, but does the narrator dare to distract his attention from the biscuit? “If ever a baked good could exude an air of quiet satisfaction, this was it.” After finally eating the biscuit and finding it dry, the narrator contemplates what might have happened if he’d drizzled honey on it as a moisturizer—but that would present dangers of its own if the honey dripped too fast, he thinks. As the narrator moves on to the prospect of baking his own biscuit, he begins talking to himself: “I feared the void,” he says aloud. “But now…here I stand, with something vaguely biscuit-shaped in hand.” As the story progresses in its weird, nearly delusional level of rapt concentration, Davis works hard to invest his readers in the mini-drama of a good biscuit: the anticipation, the consumption, and the baking. He cannily uses dramatic language (“I could see it: that perfect version of myself pulling the tray from the oven”) in order to color a story of “a biscuit worthy of folklore.” As such, the storytelling is unquestionably passionate. Obviously, readers’ results will vary depending on how excited they are by pastry, since the biscuit is, in essence, the entire book.