New: Antonya Nelson's Nothing Right

The title of Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson’s new collection, pretty much sums it up: Her characters stumble through “adultery and other intimate betrayals, the power struggles that constitute family life, the terror of sickness and death, and the temporary oblivion of alcohol.” She is, Adam Kirsch writes in The New York Times Book Review, “chiefly drawn to the damage that results when strong women foolishly put their trust in weak men.” The stories are small, domestic, and unsentimental, but Nelson “never chafes against the limitations of her chosen form, the realistic, well-made story,” Kirsch writes. “It’s the ideal medium for a writer who isn’t afraid to remind us of the familiar, who values insight over epiphany.”