The young men in Zigzagger, Manuel Muñoz’s first collection of stories, emerge from California’s Central Valley as if they are a new species, evolved from their specific circumstances of being new Americans, Mexican American, and gay. It is as if they find no others ahead of them who have walked the earth as they walk it. Though these young men are the descendants of their parents, they move out from their boyhoods, their homes, their towns and into the larger world as distinct beings.

The title of Vestal McIntyre's debut short story collection, You Are Not the One, is a vague invocation of the rejected, unpicked, and overlooked characters in its pages. One wonders, were it not for the success of Adam Haslett's similarly titled You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), would these eight stories be named simply, Octo. The one masterful story in the book, “Octo” tells the story of Jamie, a troubled thirteen-year-old boy whose beloved pet octopus has outgrown its tank and the rest of the family’s tolerance for its strangeness.

In Louise Wareham’s first novel, Since You Ask, 24-year-old Betsy Scott, a British transplant to New York City’s wealthy Upper East Side, narrates the story of her life so far. She is a year out of college, deferring admission to her medical school of choice, and an inpatient at Fairley, the psychiatric hospital where she landed after a cocaine- and heroin-related breakdown. She speaks to us with the familiar cool of girls who have been in psychiatric wards and who go on to write books: “If I kill myself here,” she tells us, “I am going to walk into the pool with rocks in my pockets.”