Varied in subject but tethered by their interest in prospecting the border between self and other, Robin Romm’s short stories relay the inner lives of contemporary women: the young mother who wonders if her marriage has become complacent while fantasizing about her ineffectual contractor, the expecting single mom who begins an affair with a man whose girlfriend is pregnant by the same donor’s sperm while trying to figure out how she will afford motherhood, both financially and emotionally. In the book’s eponymous story, a college student sells her “Ivy League” eggs to a celebrity, and — though she first ridicules the elitist marketing and overt capitalism of the reproductive economy — her roommate encourages her to see this act as not one defined by commerce but by “radical empathy,” “the longing for children elemental, like the desire for sight.” 

A testament to her keen vision, Romm’s critique of “radical empathy” salvages authentic meaning from the self-serving banalities of therapy speak. We have children because we want them; we foist life on them, though we don’t understand our own lives, hoping their existence will provide a cipher to ours. And yet — it is radical, isn’t it, to love the future so much that we manifest new beings from nothing but our aging bodies that we imagine the next generation’s memories and collapse time into a perpetual present? Romm’s stories perch on the ledge of the moment, vibrant as photographs where “we’re all of us smeary with movement, with what is about to occur.” 

In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.”

Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.

Romulus was the founder of Rome; and those tossed outside the city-gate are not Romulus’s children but the cast-offs living in hovels, the Rumphulus. However, this isn’t ancient Rome, but rather the nature preserve of a contemporary American suburb. The outcasts don’t understand why they’ve been relegated to the
woods. Nor do they know if they will ever summon the courage to cross the roads that act as a physical and psychological barrier to their reentry into conventional society. Daily they negotiate the harsh conditions of the wild and the dangerous presence of one another while they contemplate their exiles. That is until society
comes for one of them.

The Rumphulus have grown their beards long, and when they can no longer stand life they howl like wolves; only they are not wolves but the stranded city outcasts who howl in pain.