I read an interview with Sarah Gerkensmeyer a few weeks ago at Fiction Writers Review, and went looking for her new collection of short stories, What You Are Now Enjoying (Autumn House Press) right away. This is fabulist domestic fiction, intimate and prismatic, comforting and scary all at once. The characters are complex: not all of them are exactly likable, but they are all deeply sympathetic figures.

It’s too reductive, perhaps, to call Gerkensmeyer’s work “domestic” as a genre—with all that the term implies—so I’ll add that for those who like the short stories of Karen Russell and George Saunders, What You Are Now Enjoying serves as a somewhat quieter, less rococo-esque counterpart.