In MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS, Peter Orner chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points. Whether it's a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar, or a family's memories of the painful mystery surrounding a forgotten uncle's demise, Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. These stories are anchored by a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a 40-year marriage, but an entire era in a working-class New England city.

In THE PORPOISE, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise, he finds himself traveling backwards over 2,000 years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion.

Toward the beginning of PLACES AND NAMES, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. It turns out that they had shadowed each other for some time, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy. The rest of Ackerman's memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp and what he hoped to find there.

In "Bog Girl," a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl who he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the Great Depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. And in the title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant's safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these and five other stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void --- yet within it, Karen Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life.

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on "Pericles," one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

Soldier, son, lover, husband, breadwinner and churchgoer, Henry Maxwell has spent his whole life trying to live with honor. A native Pittsburgher and engineer, he's always believed in logic, sacrifice and hard work. Now, 75 and retired, he feels the world has passed him by. It's 1998, the American century is ending, and nothing is simple anymore. His children are distant, their unhappiness a mystery. Only his wife Emily and dog Rufus stand by him. Once so confident, as Henry's strength and memory desert him, he weighs his dreams against his regrets and is left with questions he can't answer: Is he a good man? Has he done right by the people he loves? And with time running out, what, realistically, can he hope for?

These 15 exquisitely honed stories reveal Amy Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice, the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.

In THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, award-winning poet Ross Gay offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. His first nonfiction book is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two Black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a Black man, the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture, or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world --- his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.

SEPARATE is a myth-shattering narrative of one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases of the 19th century, Plessy v. Ferguson. The 1896 ruling embraced racial segregation, and its reverberations are still felt today. Drawing on letters, diaries and archival collections, Steve Luxenberg reveals the origins of racial separation and its pernicious grip on American life. He tells the story through the lives of the people caught up in the case: Louis Martinet, who led the resisters from the mixed-race community of French New Orleans; Albion Tourgée, a bestselling author and the country’s best-known white advocate for civil rights; Justice Henry Billings Brown, whose majority ruling sanctioned separation; and Justice John Harlan, whose singular dissent cemented his reputation as a steadfast voice for justice.