The stories in Peter Orner’s vibrant new story collection, Maggie Brown & Others, tend to be about failed relationships, especially ones that stumble right out of the gate. A middle-aged lawyer pursues an awkward romance with his late friend’s wife; a first date at a séance (bad idea) goes awkwardly, then catastrophically, awry. Swirling around those small moments are deeper crises—divorce, death, childhood neuroses. Orner gets to all this heartache in a hurry: Many of the stories are just a couple of pages, marked by, in the words of one narrator, a “mournful impatience to get to the sad crux of any story.”

“A story about a successful relationship I think exists, probably,” Orner says. “It wouldn't be something that I would be interested in, though.”

Orner, the author of four previous works of fiction as well as Am I Alone Here? (2016), an essay collection paying tribute to his favorite writers, says the driving force behind Maggie Brown was less heartbreak than homesickness. Many of the stories were written or revised while he was in Namibia researching a nonfiction book, and the collection was an opportunity to revisit his native Chicago and his years in the Bay Area. (He currently lives in Vermont, near Dartmouth College, where he teaches creative writing.) “When you leave a place, it becomes more mythical in your imagination,” he says. “I spent 15 years in California without thinking that much about it. And then, suddenly, I was bereft, so these stories started to come.”

A typical Maggie Brown character is a well-meaning but melancholy soul whose neediness Orner can capture in a brush stroke of a sentence. (“I’d go and get my hair cut, I was so lonely for some fingers,” laments the narrator of “Above Santa Cruz.”) But the stories betray a deep affection for place, as in “Solly,” about a young man’s introduction to the world of Chicago newspaperdom, or “Ineffectual Tribute to Len,” in which a graduate student drives all night in a snowstorm from Iowa City to Chicago to connect one last time with a friend dying of AIDS.

The latter story had an especially long gestation period: Orner began it in 1997 and finished it last year. “I kept going back and trying to figure out what was there, so I wrote it cold again and again,” he says. “I didn't understand the weight of how this relationship is going to affect the narrator until I had a lot of years to worry over it.”

Orner’s style privileges brevity: Even the novella that caps Maggie Brown, Walt Kaplan Is Broke, is constructed out of short chapters. But Orner gets a bit cantankerous at the term “flash fiction,” as if a very short story were somehow a distinct form of fiction, with different duties and needs. “I know I often work in the very short form, really compressed—poetry has been really influential to me,” he says. “I want to get that level of intensity in prose that I get when I read poetry. If I go longer it’s because I lacked the skill to make it shorter.”

Still, talking about place or mood or length are imperfect ways to summarize Maggie Brown’s contents. Supershort stories abut longer ones; stories about relationships hitting the skids run up against Walt Kaplan Is Broke, which captures the closing years of a successful marriage. But for Orner, that lack of thematic coherence is a feature, not a bug, proof that a story collection evokes the messiness of existence better than a novel can.

“My teacher and great friend Andre Dubus once wrote in an essay that story collections are more like what life is like—disparate, sometimes random, sometimes unconnected,” he says. “He thought that a story collection was much more reflective of our lives. If I were talking about a novel or a nonfiction book, it’s easier. With a collection it's like asking somebody to talk about their entire life. Where do you start?”

Mark Athitakis is the author of The New Midwest and a regular contributor to Kirkus.