BITTER BRONX, Jerome Charyn's new collection, is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with the author's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row.

Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed --- because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged, mocked, or worse. With her job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls’ magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. Then, when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself falling down a rabbit hole and into an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. There Plum agrees to a series of challenges that force her to deal with her past, her doubts, and the real costs of becoming “beautiful.”

See the girl. Leah Wilde is 24, a runaway on a black motorbike, hunting for answers while changing her identity with each new Central European town. See the man, Izsák, having come of age in extraordinary suffering and tragedy in 19th-century Budapest; witness to horror, love, death, and the wrath of a true monster. See the monster, a beautiful, seemingly young woman who stalks the American West, seeking the young and the strong to feed upon, desperate to return to Europe where her coven calls.

The stories in Austin Bunn’s collection explore the existential question: What happens at “the end” and what lies beyond it? In “How to Win an Unwinnable War,” a summer class on nuclear war for gifted teenagers turns a struggling family upside down. A young couple’s idyllic beach honeymoon is interrupted by terrorism in the lush, haunting “Getting There and Away.” When an immersive videogame begins turning off in the heartbreaking “Griefer,” an obsessive player falls in love with a mysterious player in the final hours of a world.

From the age of five, all Jamie Brickhouse wanted was to be at a party with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and all Mama Jean wanted was to keep him at that age, her Jamie doll forever. A Texan Elizabeth Taylor with the split personality of Auntie Mame and Mama Rose, always camera-ready and flamboyantly outspoken, Mama Jean haunted him his whole life, no matter how far away he went or how deep in booze he swam.

The tattooed plus sign on Finnegan's hand marks him as a Positive. At any time, the zombie virus could explode in his body, turning him from a rational human into a ravenous monster. If he reaches his 21st birthday without an incident, he'll be cleared. Until then, he must go to a special facility for positives. But when the military caravan transporting him is attacked, Finn becomes separated. To make it to safety, he must embark on a perilous cross-country journey across an America transformed.

Seventeen-year-old Max has a terminally ill grandmother and is having trouble handling it. That, plus his OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes, makes him a high risk patient. He can't turn off the mental rituals he needs to perform every 15 minutes that keep him calm. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found, and Dr. Eric Parrish goes looking for him. Next, a member of Eric’s own staff turns on him in a trumped-up charge of sexual harassment. Is this chaos all random? Or is someone systematically trying to destroy Eric's life?

Caitlin lives alone with her mother in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while waiting to be picked up after school, she visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery depths, she accesses a shimmering universe beyond her own. When she befriends an old man at the tanks one day, who seems as enamored of the fish as she, Caitlin cracks open a dark family secret and propels her once-blissful relationship with her mother toward a precipice of terrifying consequence.

After Henry's girlfriend, Val, leaves him and transfers to another school, his grief begins to manifest itself in bizarre and horrifying ways. After weeks of sleepless nights and sick delusions, Henry decides to run away and find Val. Once on the George Washington Bridge, however, a powerful hallucination knocks him out cold. When he awakens, he finds out that he has been kidnapped by two strangers who claim to be future versions of himself.

Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to 11-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive.