After she’s caught in a compromising situation, California teacher Jane is unceremoniously fired. She then applies for the “types of jobs that [won’t] check a record.” Fortunately, she finds one—a couple (including a popular writer of airport novels) takes her on as nanny to their 10-month-olds Franny and Zooey. Then, Jane gets a reply to another application; porn actor Lola hires her to communicate with her fans, engaging in generally salacious cyberchats as “Lola” to persuade clients to pay for premium content. That’s something Jane can do during Franny and Zooey’s naptime. While these unfiltered online conversations are relatively new territory for Jane, she’s an unexpected natural at sexting. Certainly, she doesn’t want the twins’ mothers knowing what she does during some of her nannying hours, but she soon comes to the frightening realization that someone may have caught on to her surreptitious side-gig. Kicherer deftly satirizes modern pornography and porn addiction—Jane easily handles multiple chats using generic responses that don’t dissipate the mesmerized clients’ sexual energy. Jane finds the activity “curious,” but it gradually turns into a routine, and she doesn’t really consider the implications of the X-rated written content until later. The author’s concise and often irreverent prose pulls no punches—the cyberchats engage in topics that will make some readers blush and others cringe. At the same time, the story deftly contrasts these pornographic conversations with Jane caring for two infant twins who are oblivious to all that she’s typing on her laptop. A darker aspect of the porn job slowly and effectively creeps in; interacting with faceless usernames may seem harmless, but there’s a chance one of these individuals knows too much. The ending, which suits the overall tone, won’t likely be forgotten.

In 1970, Grace Hoeman and Arlene Blum led six women on the first all-women’s summit of Denali. Randall’s record of this climb is a study in showing rather than telling, spanning the grueling, weekslong trek and the question of how the “audacious, boundary-breaking climb” became largely forgotten. Despite its quiet place in history, the group’s journey to the highest peak in North America defied the expectations of what women could withstand, physically and psychologically, in a climbing environment so hostile that it, more often than not, turns climbers back, and sometimes claims their lives. With clear appreciation for and understanding of the technical skill their achievement required, the author laces together the group members’ individual backgrounds, relationships, motivations, and brushes with catastrophe that threatened the mission before it even began. Instead of dedicating long passages to redeeming the oft-discounted strength and endurance of women or musing about the appeal of such a goal, the author mines archives, private journals, and her own interviews to construct a story full of almost achingly vivid details and mounting friction between complicated, heroic women undertaking great risk in a notoriously exacting environment. Randall’s account is a bit lopsided, leaning heavily on the perspectives of only half the group, but even so, it illustrates how personal idiosyncrasies, shaky group dynamics, savage winter weather, and the high stakes of success weighed on the group’s decisions and tolerance for risk along the way. The prejudices, intimidation, and exclusion of the male-dominated sphere of mountaineering affected, angered, and motivated each of the Denali Damsels differently, but readers will be left in awe of the women’s enthrallment to the sport, their determination, and the bittersweet spirit of their life-changing experience.

Each month, Mami and Tía Ana gather much-needed items and send them to relatives living in Cuba. William’s usually on the sidelines during the packing extravaganza, but one day, Mami gives him an important job: to check whether anyone in the family has extra zapatos (shoes) for his cousin Leo. Armed with the outline of Leo’s footprint on a piece of paper, William starts his mission, learning more about Leo with each stop. First, he heads over to Tía Rosa and Tía Olga’s downstairs apartment, but Tía Olga’s shoes are too big for Leo, and Tía Rosa’s high heels aren’t suitable, either. William goes to his abuelos’ apartment next. Alas, Abuela has only extra pantuflas (slippers), and Abuelo wears special shoes due to his bout with polio at a young age, so no luck there. Where will William find shoes for Cousin Leo, who loves baseball, has freckles, and enjoys drawing, just like William? In her picture-book debut, Deedy draws upon childhood memories to weave a touching testament to family bonds grounded in immigrant experiences. Though more perceptive readers may wonder why it takes William so long to finally hit upon a somewhat obvious solution, his eventual decision closes this tale on a lovely note. Gal’s effervescent illustrations boast solid pencil and ink linework and gorgeous blends of watercolors, to rich results.

“Nothing ever happens if you don’t say yes, even if…it seems like a bad idea at the time,” writes Vilanch at the end of a meandering catalog of onscreen disasters, some so improbable that it’s amazing they made it past the cutting-room floor. Take a sitcom with Charo, the cuchi-cuchi Spanish “force of nature” who played a mean flamenco guitar (taught to her by none other than Andrés Segovia) and who put her brilliance under a bushel: “The biggest thing about Charo is her brain, topped only by her good nature,” Vilanch confides. Even so, someone cooked up the notion that she should be married to a Marine sergeant and create bilingual/bicultural havoc at every turn. It didn’t fly, but the writers did cook up a variety show for Charo that, though a ratings hit, was a one-off. Other flops pepper his pages, most of them in the variety vein, and not all of them his fault: He reckons that the film version of Mommie Dearest “holds pride of place in the bad idea hall of fame.” Still, Vilanch owns up to many stinkers of his own (he promises a follow-up volume on the good ideas). There’s nice dish along the way on the likes of Paul Lynde (“effeminate, bitchy, slightly mincy, he was more like the guncle no one talked about”), Betty White (“as sexually charged a personality as you’ve ever seen”), and his own ’70s-era cohort of TV folks before and behind the camera (“Everybody, or almost everybody of a certain generation—Osmonds excepted—was somewhat baked some of the time.”). His central question remains, too: “Why was there a Star Wars holiday special, you might ask.”

In this melancholic assemblage of more than two dozen short stories, the author examines the austere conditions of human life in the American West and the backwoods of Pennsylvania; the formidable and unforgiving nature of the terrain serves as an analogue for the human soul. In the titular story, aging oil-rig hands Otie and J.L. discover that the company they work for has been suddenly sold, resulting in a massive windfall for its crass owner. Left without any apparent options, the pair chooses to die by suicide in a macabre pantomime of a lovers’ pact. The scene is powerfully captured by the author: “Otis and J.L. were flat on the floor, embracing, motionless, blue and cold. Tacked to a pecan tree was a white paper plate. On the plate was scrawled a note, a message that spoke of gratitude.” In one brief story, “The Reincarnation of Ned Piketon,” an unnamed fisherman yanks a decaying human hand from the water, adorned by one ring with the name Ned etched onto it. He knows only one Ned from his own life, a “human weed” who cooks meth, and unsentimentally decides to continue his fishing, using the hand as bait. This peculiar combination of the gruesomely saturnine and comic is a signature feature of this sad but absorbing collection. In the latter third of the book, many of the stories revolve around the character Will, a young boy in rural Pennsylvania; sometimes these tales strike falsely sentimental notes. For example, in “Through the Trees,” Will, alienated from his family, draws a picture of himself as an “expressionless boy” outside the house in a heavy-handed act of symbolism that apparently still needs additional commentary: “All alone, in the deep cold snow, up above his knees.” Fortunately, this cloying imagery is not characteristic of Burtch’s writing, which, more often than not, admirably avoids treacle.