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A union organizer returns to her hometown and her high school sweetheart, only to discover unexpected peril. A middle-aged man walks to meet his wife at work one day and loses her forever. A young writer's stage fright destroys her work and her marriage but offers her a new life. In Blue Money, Susan Hubbard creates a world in which the most ordinary things can be magical, and the most ordinary people can be extraordinary.

"Selling the House" is the enchanting story of Marianne, a young housewife whose life is altered forever by a mysterious stranger. He suddenly appears on her doorstep one morning, offers to buy her home, quotes poetry, and just as suddenly disappears. Marianne soon discovers, however, that the stranger wants more than her house—he wants her. Although she does not accept the man's proposition, Marianne has been changed by it. His words echo throughout her life. "If she sometimes had trouble sleeping, if she spent more time reading poetry or staring out the window . . . well, those were small aberrations in an otherwise quite satisfactory life."

Strangers appear and disappear in Blue Money. Shoes charm and cure. A soiled shirt conjures conscience, and a clean one promises new identity. Hubbard brilliantly weaves these fantastic elements into the fabric of her fiction.

Women's relationships with men—whether they be fathers, lovers, or strangers—are a prominent theme of Hubbard's collection. "What Friends Are For" captures this theme at its most humorous and bizarre in the strange mishaps of two young girls trying to rid their lives of the stepfathers they despise. When their plan fails miserably, the girls are forced to accept the unwanted men, but not without finding brief comfort in the humor of their failure. "Then I start laughing too--a laugh I've never laughed before, like some exotic bird, high and shrill and free—and now [we're] laughing so hard that the voices outside fade away entirely."

Praised by Ploughshares as "an assured storyteller and a complex narrative stylist," Hubbard excels at writing spare yet powerfully evocative prose. Haunting in its suspense and subtle grace, Blue Money celebrates Hubbard's marvelous ability to explore the power of imagination.

Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood, in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. In the title story, two women in 1850s Virginia marry brothers who promptly uproot them to follow the Oregon Trail west, until an unexpected shift of allegiance separates the sisters forever. Elsewhere in the book, a young boy’s kidnapping ignites tensions in a sorority house; frontier figure Cynthia Ann Parker struggles upon her return to her birth community from the Comanche people with whom she’s lived a full life; and in a metafictional twist, a gothic tale resonates in the present. In the novella, “A Thousand Stings,” three sisters come of age in the 1960s over a long summer of small-town scandal and universal stakes. These are just some of the lives, shaped by migrations, yearning, and the long shadows of myth, that Holladay creates. She crafts them with subtle humor, a stunning sense of place, and an unerring eye for character.

The vast, unsettling landscape of the American Southwest is as much a character in Ryan Harty's debut collection, Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, as the men and women who inhabit its award-winning stories. In eight vivid tales of real life in the west, Harty reminds us that life's greatest challenge may be to find the fine balance between desire and obligation.

A high school football player must make a choice between family and friends when his older brother commits an act of senseless violence. A middle-aged man must fly to Las Vegas to settle his dead sister's estate, only to discover that he must first confront his guilt over his sister's death. A young teacher tries to help a homeless girl, but, as their lives intertwine, he begins to understand that his generosity is motivated by his own relenting sense of lonliness. Well-intentioned but ultimately human, the characters in these stories often fall short of achieving grace. But the possibility of redemption, like the Sonoran Desert at the edge of Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona's suburban landscapes, is never far off. Harty's characters are as complicated as the people we know, and his vision of life in the west is as hopeful as it is strikingly real.

Anita Endrezze has deep memories. Her father was a Yaqui Indian. Her mother traced her heritage to Slovenia, Germany, Romania, and Italy. And her stories seem to bubble up from this ancestral cauldron. Butterfly Moon is a collection of short stories based on folk tales from around the world. But its stories are set in the contemporary, everyday world. Or are they?

Endrezze tells these stories in a distinctive and poetic voice. Fantasy often intrudes into reality. Alternate “realities” and shifting perspectives lead us to question our own perceptions. Endrezze is especially interested in how humans hide feelings or repress thoughts by developing shadow selves. In “Raven’s Moon,” she introduces the shadow concept with a Black Moon, the “unseen reflection of the known.” (Of course the story is about a witch couple who seem very much in love.) The title character in “The Wife Who Lived on Wind” is an ogress who lives in a world somewhat similar to our own, but only somewhat. “The Vampire and the Moth Woman” reveals shape-shifters living among us. 

Not surprisingly, Trickster appears in these tales. As in Native American stories, Trickster might be a fox or a coyote or a raven or a human—or something in between. “White Butterflies” and “Where the Bones Are” both deal with devastating diseases that swept through Yaqui country in the 1530s. Underneath their surfaces are old Yaqui folktales that feature the greatest Trickster of all: Death (and his little brother Fate).

Enjoyably disturbing, these stories linger—deep in our memory.