“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.

In his opening story, “Come as You Are,” the author introduces readers to an early-’90s teen named Toby who finds rock idol Kurt Cobain hiding in the back of his car. They end up jamming together and eating pizza with Toby’s dad, who promptly asks Cobain about his thoughts regarding Mormonism—much to the discomfort of Toby, who lied about the musician’s interest. Beneath the slapstick setup is the tension between secular culture and the tenets of Mormonism; the author develops this idea further in the story “Light Departure,” which depicts a Mormon at the end of his mission who must come to terms with an African immigrant who comes out to him as gay. In “The Water Between Us,” a young father flounders to find his footing and provide for his family in “the way we’d been taught and raised at church and at home,” while in the moving story “The Righteous Road,” two teenagers waver between activism and faith before ultimately choosing different paths. Stories like “Adam and Lilith. And Eve” and “Barry Dodson: The God Journals” demonstrate Shoemaker’s knack for satire, spinning cosmically absurd setups into one deeply funny joke after another. (“It’s nice,” the first woman in all of creation says, evaluating the Garden of Eden like it was any suburban home. “But all the green’s, like, a little overwhelming. Don’t you think?”) Some stories, notably “Parley Young: One Mormon Life,” about a church elder who abuses his power, feel rushed, striving to tackle many ideas within a short amount of space, but the author’s clever eye for detail and the prickly humor in the voices he brings to life consistently draw the reader back in. In stories like “In That Classroom” and the titular entry, he shows his range, focusing on specific, emotionally charged, and well-observed moments that crescendo to powerful revelations that are sure to connect with all readers, Mormon or otherwise.

When a baby is born, the child and family exist in the moment together. No cellphones ring and no pictures are taken—the family is fully unplugged and present with each other. As friends gather, they spend time together unplugged as well. The narrative continues, observing that unplugged babies learn words they hear around them and have adventures by interacting with the physical world. Bedtime is unplugged for better dreams: “Unplugged moon and stars above. / Unplugged time with you is love.” Hutton’s repetition of unplugged emphasizes the digital-free environment, especially for the young lap learners who will hear it over and over in rereads. The rhythms scan well throughout, with stanzas that limit the vocabulary used to keep the text and rhymes concise. Brown’s gentle digital illustrations have a watercolor feel and use red or blue outlines rather than black to give the shapes soft edges. Several babies are introduced throughout, giving a sense of universality across diverse families. Brown also cleverly acknowledges that technology is present—just not in the child’s life. On the front and back cover, as the central families take the subway, cellphone users are around them; when friends visit, one parent keeps a phone face-down on her knee. The device is there, not centered but ignored.

In this anthology of 11 tales ranging from 5 to 15 pages each, Franz explores the lives of ordinary people who reside in and around Biloxi. They struggle with personal weaknesses, unresolved tragedies, and the persistent sense of longing that comes from the fact that Biloxi is home to the world’s “longest man-made beach,” with all that this implies about a greater, more natural world somewhere beyond the town limits. In “Tchoutacabouffa (Life on a River),” for instance, a woman named Ashley Rose Jackson has tensely and carefully planned an escape for herself and her two daughters from their abusive father. She promises them that their new life will be better. “We’re going to a real ocean,” she tells them. “They’ve got a boardwalk and everything.” Likewise, in “A Good Home,” set during the Covid-19 pandemic, Emily and Ryan live in a shabby two-bedroom house off Interstate 10. Ryan’s a recovering addict in a methadone treatment program, and he’s floored when Emily tells him she’s pregnant. As they make their grim plans, Emily recalls an old dream: “The panes trembled in their white wooden grid from a big rig out on I-10, which she’d heard could take you all the way to the Pacific Ocean. To cold, clean water, a real ocean, a real beach.” All of these stories are markedly, sometimes startlingly spare, which underscores Franz’s deft ability to convey whole lives and worlds with minimal, very controlled brushstrokes. In “Broadwater,” the older brother of a young man named Tyler, who vanished 11 years ago, spends the whole story reflecting on the events that led to his brother’s murder, now a cold case. (“Hard to believe,” he thinks at one point, “my little brother would be thirty years old today.”) Rather than providing readers with an expected sense of closure, Franz ends the tale with the brother reflecting, “My best guess, life’s a one-shot deal. Gone is gone.” This clipped, almost brutal tone runs throughout most of these stories and makes them truly memorable.