The subtle rules and rituals of relationships are unveiled in these quietly penetrating stories.

Young’s yarns capture ordinary Americans in moments of stress and resolution that change their attitudes toward marriage, love, and life. Tales include the following: A man takes boxing lessons and deploys them against his wife’s lover; a Harvard graduate student engages in a game of mutual exhibitionism with a neighbor through a window, which falters when he encounters her in a bookstore; a dad becomes fascinated with a 13-year-old neighbor girl’s lesbian affair with a classmate; a young woman arriving in San Francisco meets the playboy scion of a famous painter on a nude beach and accompanies him back to his yacht; a formerly homeless woman picks up a currently homeless man on the beach in Venice, California; a Mexican American English professor in Los Angeles is drawn to a splendidly manly actor brimming with alt-right conspiracy theories; and a four-story cycle tracks a young man growing up in the 1960s from a high school romance to young adulthood as he withers under a failing marriage and an agonizing job as a door-to-door cookware salesman under the shadow of the Vietnam War. Young’s protagonists are adrift and dissatisfied, full of ruminations about their lives and larger political and racial tensions, and they’re usually pretty horny and avid for sex as a transformative or at least edifying experience. His spare, clear prose is raptly observant of mundane moments (“He wanted to know more about her—but having already said goodbye twice, no doubt starting up once more would strike the girl as odd, or aggressive”). But in lyrical passages, he conveys a sense of something grander underlying the everyday (“She laid out the bedroll, opened the wine, and watched as the light from the sunset curved and spread throughout the valley, like the hand of a god”). Young’s characters are steeped in confusion, but the collection is lit with a painful awareness and yearning that make them fascinating.

A richly textured, engrossing collection of tales about people discovering who and why they love.

A veteran author explores contemporary American culture and politics in this genre-bending anthology.

As the founder of the creative writing program at Arizona State University and author of multiple compilations of short stories and plays, Young is known for artistic experimentation. Here, he offers readers a commentary on contemporary politics and culture through multiple genres. The book begins with five essays, which include two memoiristic vignettes that center on two of the author’s five brothers. His youngest sibling, Gordon, is the only post–baby boomer of the bunch. Not only is there a 10-year generational difference between Gordon and the author, he notes, but there are also social and cultural differences in their approaches to life. Another essay centers on the failed publication Trips, a magazine published by the Banana Republic clothing chain. Dedicating itself to “re-vision[ing] our world,” the publication claimed to offer “authentic” stories that eschewed traditional travel writing to tout travel as “a great teacher” about the human condition. The fact that the magazine was discontinued after a single issue, Young writes insightfully, is related to its failed approach toward authenticity. Just as Banana Republic’s clothing boasts names of fictious organizations, such as the “Ivory Coast Safari Club,” American consumers, despite declarations otherwise, “don’t want ‘authentic’ immersion in a foreign culture,” Young asserts. The book’s second section, a collection of 15 poems, is similarly perceptive on topics that range from the value of cooperation to teenage Instagram culture. “Pandemic,” a poem centered on responses to Covid-19, satirically targets those who refused to wear a mask and submit to “the tyranny of evidence.”

As strong as the book’s first half is, its second half falls flat. The third section offers readers a sampling of five short plays, most of which are based on conversations between a carefully selected demographic selection of Americans that borders on stereotype. One play, for instance, features a group of Black and Hispanic young men on an outdoor basketball court in Los Angeles who seek to “enlighten” a 50-year-old white player wearing a Hoosiers T-shirt. Although there’s potential for constructive interracial discourse in this scene, the interchange is stilted with political tropes and, cringingly, a biracial character’s use of the “hard R” in his pronunciation of a racial epithet. The book’s final section (“The Big Lie”) deploys similarly forced, unnatural dialogue in its characters’ conversations about Donald Trump. In a book that’s fewer than 175 pages in length, the plays suffer from excessive brevity and a lack of character development. What detracts from the anthology’s fictional writings, though, enhances its poetry; one of the book’s most powerful pieces is a two-line poem (“Boycott”) on Chinese foreign policy: “Hong Kong is gone. / Save Taiwan.” The book could have used an introductory or concluding chapter to ease readers into the rationale behind its eclectic approach as well as introduce themes that connect the sections. The abrupt transitions between genres without editorial commentary makes for a disjointed read that takes away from the book’s often insightful musings.

An uneven but sometimes-perceptive take on modern America.

An Irish girl must confront her fear of dogs in Young’s illustrated children’s holiday story.

Abby doesn’t mind Halloween, but she doesn’t want to go trick-or-treating because some people let their dogs out on their porches. However, Olivia, her identical twin, doesn’t mind this. While Olivia and the girls’ mother are out on Halloween night, they find someone giving away a litter of puppies. They come home with a small white West Highland terrier they’ve named Boo, and Abby panics and hides in her room. That night, she even has nightmares. But one day, she’s left alone with Boo and has to feed him. This makes her remember a traumatic event when she was younger: an encounter with a dog that growled in her face. But when she successfully feeds Boo without incident, it changes everything. The bundle of fur becomes her trusted friend and helps her to get over her fears. This meandering tale has some poetic turns of phrase, and Abby’s voice feels very adult in tone, as though she’s recalling events of her childhood. The unusual sentence structure can be challenging at times, which may stymie newly independent readers: “I was chill with Halloween, just not barking four-legged creatures behind doors, some even on front steps unchained.” There are several asides that add flavor to the story but feel somewhat digressive, as when Abby notes that dogs order their day “around eating and going for a walk (not unlike my grandpa).” Quiroz’s highly textured full-color paintings realistically capture the family saga, revealing Boo’s exuberance and Abby’s melancholy. A final image of the pair snuggling is a pleasant snapshot of family joy and calm.

A quirky tale that’s best suited for reading aloud.

Close-knit communities get roiled by dubious loves in this pair of novellas.

Young’s two tales explore families, school groups, and small towns beset by buried secrets and unspoken desires. Joseph and Mary: A Family Romance centers on the Wilson family, a Scottsdale, Arizona, clan of adult siblings who have failed to thrive. Peter, the narrator, is a 28-year-old artist who has returned from San Francisco after he suffered an eye injury. His younger brother, Matthew, is an alcoholic poet given to spouting Shakespeare at opportune moments; his older sister, Mary, is a stripper; and Joseph, the eldest, has come home for Thanksgiving after being kicked out of the priesthood. The family reunion is full of unspoken tensions, especially between Mary and Joseph over a murky incident in high school that no one wants to talk about, one that’s bound up in his possible gay sexuality and her exhibitionism. Rec Park: A Small-Town Romance takes place in the idyllic coastal town of El Camino, California, where college professor and swim coach Dick Starling becomes infatuated with 17-year-old S.K., a Filipina immigrant. Dick, who has a Filipina wife and stepdaughter, becomes a nervous swain, awkwardly seeking encounters with S.K. at church or her sister M.K.’s swim practice. He’s buoyed whenever S.K. throws a stray “Hello” his way but very aware of how ruinous a relationship with her could be. She seems friendly but aloof—until a crisis erupts when she discovers that she doesn’t have legal immigrant status and starts mulling a plan to protect herself from deportation by getting pregnant with an American citizen’s baby. Young’s luminous stories probe deep issues of how families work, who belongs to them, and what boundaries define them. He embeds them in atmospheric settings, with Arizona’s golden-hued Pima reservation and El Camino’s quaint but claustrophobic townscape becoming influential characters. The author’s limpid, evocative prose reveals his players’ hearts by perceiving the world through their eyes: “Even after all those months of coaching,” Dick loved “to watch the girls—his daughter, M.K., the bunch—move through the pale blue water, at different lengths, intervals, their sleek, small power on display. It looked like an electric grid.”

Two richly textured, captivating tales of inappropriate romance.

A collection of two-act plays probes damaged lives.

Sometimes people’s past traumas, even when known and accounted for, can destroy them in the present. In Tattoos, teenager Wylie shocks his ex-military father, Wyman, by joining the Army and proposing to his girlfriend, whom he met only two weeks ago. Not knowing what else to do, Wyman allows the new wife, 16-year-old Julie, to move into the house while Wylie is away at boot camp. It quickly becomes clear that the real romantic tension may be between Wyman and his teenage daughter-in-law—and that Wylie may have engineered it. In School Play, Ted, a middle-aged college English instructor, has some concerns about essay content written by a Kenyan student named Charles. “Most times the kids in my classes write stuff about things like the sports trophies they won as middle schoolers,” Ted tells his superior. “Charles mentions people’s hands getting cut off with machetes.” Despite Ted’s fears, the two enter into an odd sort of mentorship, one that comes to involve an alluring high school–aged actor. Tyrannos is a modern take on Greek tragedy involving a Donald Trump–like American president plagued by scandals—including a potentially career-ending rumor that his wife is actually his sister. Young creates captivating premises, at least in the first two plays, and his dialogue is sharp and engaging. But his characters rarely act or speak in the ways that normal humans would. They are all hyperliterate, whether they should be or not, dropping references to the theater and Freud and asking dramatic questions rather than obvious ones. Here, Wyman and Julie chat after their (illegal) indiscretion: “WYMAN Well, I’m not blaming you...anyway, it wasn’t your whole body.…I mean I think Freud was trying to answer that question: Why do we feel bad? I mean, I don’t feel bad about wanting to play golf, usually. His answer: mum and dad. ‘Our beds are crowded,’ he said. JULIE Did you love her? Wylie’s mom.” The first two plays bring up serious issues—in both cases, the predatory behavior of men, among others—without earnestly addressing them. The third play is tedious Trump-era moralizing. None of the three manage to quite achieve the lofty aims that the author sets for himself.

A trio of intriguing but uneven dramas.