Short Stories

By now, you are probably familiar with novels in the form of linked stories (Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge), but few are as eerie or as mesmerizing as Frederick Reiken's DAY FOR NIGHT (Back Bay, $14.99). Each chapter is a haunting experiment in structure and voice, featuring characters who are grappling with a past mystery or trauma, whether personal (a parent lost to cancer) or historical (the murder of 500 Jewish men in Lithuania in 1941). And while every strand of the narrative connects to a larger whole, the deep reward of Reiken's novel is that each segment contains a universe within itself. - Elizabeth Sher

The five women featured in the nine stories of Susi Wyss's debut, THE CIVILIZED WORLD (Holt, $15), are from various cultures and countries linked by the commonalities of life: longing, fear, love, grief. As the stories progress, the women's lives intersect and the novelistic aspects of the book emerge. In "Names," Ophelia, the wife of an American Foreign Service Officer, writes down the names of Malawians she meets—a desperate attempt to manage the emotions around her infertility. Ophelia reappears in "Waiting for Solomon" as she tours Ethiopia with Janice while both women wait for child adoptions to be finalized. In the last story, "There Are No Accidents," Janice happens upon a beauty salon in Ghana run by her former employee, Adjoa, whose twin brother robbed Janice's house. Wyss's humane portrait of modern Africa and African women is carefully drawn and astutely, beautifully delivered. - Lacey Dunham