Lancelotta chronicles life’s dissatisfactions in this short fiction collection.

A pregnant teen and her boyfriend hit the road with a bag of stolen cash to build a life for themselves and their imminent child, unaware of how migratory and lonely that life will be for all three of them. A married mother with a teenage daughter gets caught up in the memories of her own youth, particularly of her brother’s terminal disease and the peculiar pressures it put on her and her friends. A woman caring for her rapidly declining husband can’t help but resent her parents, wealthy octogenarians in perfect health. A baker reflects on her relationship with a much older man who remains devastated by the maiming of his piano-playing son. In these 15 stories, the author explores the many ways that life can go off course, whether from small miscalculations made long ago or small acts of cruelty committed in the present. “Those birthdays,” rues one narrator, caught up in the cycling years of her life; “by the thirty-fifth the slide had started, merrily relentless; the march and tick of indifference even though my hair was still shiny my legs still long my mouth still warm and wet” (“A Little Mercy”). Lancelotta's sentences read like poetry, as here in the opener about the pregnant teenage couple: “The traffic light at the intersection flashes yellow and the spindly pines stab black at the resting sky and where they are is the beating heart of everything waiting for them. They believe this. They are too young not to” (“You Are Here”).These stories masterfully evoke life’s inevitable slippage, the way a personal history is composed of moments that either burn brightly in one’s memory or disappear entirely. Standout pieces include “The Anniversary Trip” and “Ambivalence,” but every story here deserves to be read slowly and carefully, with time allotted to recover in between.

A dazzling collection of stories covering rough emotional terrain.

Debut from Lancelotta (stories: Here in the World, 2000) takes a gruesomely fascinating glimpse into the bruised psyche of a Baltimore woman burned out by a rough-going love affair.

At 30, jewelry-shop employee Martha is unambitious professionally and sexually; she wants nothing of her realtor lover Edward but his desirous presence. The two meet in bars, then return to Martha’s charmless inner-city apartment to indulge in nightly shenanigans only hinted at in oblique descriptions. Martha has rejected the conventional path expected of her by her timorous mother, somnambulant father, and good-girl younger sister Carly: she refuses to be a wife, mother, and possessor of a suburban home. Yet her last-ditch affair with Edward has “scraped [her] raw,” and she flees in emotional self-survival to begin a stark new life, opening up a jewelry store in a small town on the Gulf Coast. Lancelotta skillfully moves back and forth in time, mingling Martha’s Baltimore memories—visiting a carnival with her father, staggering home on countless nights following sex with one high-school loser after another, enduring grievous scenes with her jealously resentful sister (who meets and falls for Edward)—with an account of her pristine new existence living next door to a 22-year-old widow and her razor-witted mother-in-law. Martha is a character who beautifully succeeds in 3-D by virtue of operating in opposition to everything around her: her mother’s secretive past, her sister’s conflicted jealousy, the inability of the men she sleeps with to recognize her intuitive intelligence. “You do not want what you've been taught to want,” Martha recognizes with fatal satisfaction, and this is both a blessing and a curse. Lancelotta nails the spirit-sinking landscapes of Baltimore and a no-name southern town with a scintillating precision of detail.

Literary feminist readers will relish the smart, taut writing and terrifically tactile first-person narration.