"It was the realization that what he'd thought he'd known about her was not the truth. She'd had a secret life, running right next to his, fast, black, lethal."

Roxana Robinson's latest collection of short stories is not for the faint of heart. With powerful, gripping meditations on such weighty subjects as premature death, extramarital affairs, and unrelenting depression, this is not a book that can be read straight through in one sitting. Instead, each of the thirteen offerings should be read slowly so that its meaning can marinate, breathe on its own, and then pass purposefully through the core of its reader --- every carefully chosen word quietly taking shape at its own pace and each reflective moment tragically beautiful and bittersweet in its own way.

Unlike many anthologies that often contain stories of assorted merit, Robinson's most recent collection is solid from start to finish. Her characters are introspective, imperfect, and endearingly human -- each imbued with a personality-specific combination of selfishness and gracious frailty, and each at the mercy of life's haphazard unfolding. Similarly, her interconnected musings on love, betrayal, loss, and fear are so shocking in their blunt sincerity and so blazing in their dead-on depiction of true-to-life events, that even the most jaded of readers are sure to feel a tightening of the chest at certain moments within each story.

Robinson's true talent, of course, lies in her ability to capture the eternal and the inexplicable in one tightly woven punch of a sentence. In simple and straightforward language, she holds nothing back in describing the true grit of what is and what might be, and as a result, she not only grabs our attention at the onset of each story but maintains it through to the end as well, in a gentle yet vice-like grip that attacks our consciousness and gnaws away at our thoughts long after the last page is turned. What we are left with is a book that must be read again and again, written by a writer worthy of tremendous praise and hopefully another book contract in the near future.

Although all of the stories in this collection are worthwhile reads, there are a few that stand out above the rest. "Intersection" is a multilayered meditation on depression and the different methods people often take to temper its effects. "The Treatment" is a harrowing depiction of a woman who suddenly is confronted with her own mortality after being diagnosed with a grave illness. The short yet commanding story is a macabre rumination on what it feels like to suffer alone with only your hopes, fears, and other people's judgments to keep you company. In "Assez," a husband's betrayal (an extramarital affair) is at the crux of a story about a couple and their attempt to save their marriage by spending the summer in France with two old friends. Much like the calm before a storm, the two manage to delicately find their way back to each other before their return to reality and, inevitably, to a life apart.

Robinson, who is also the author of three novels, two previous short story collections and a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, is supremely adept at unpacking the intricacies of her characters' relationships and their reactions to sudden shifts of balance or unfortunate twists of fate. Much like Raymond Carver or Alice Munro, she has encapsulated the essence of each story in a series of brilliant and illuminating moments and, in turn, has deftly captured the bitter beauty of life in all its perfect strangeness.