One sun only

Bordas (The Material) probes her privileged characters' existential dread in this masterful collection. The narrator of "One Sun Only" spends a night scrutinizing his children's drawings for "signs of trauma" over his father's recent death. "Most Die Young" follows a French hypochondriac (one week it's Parkinson's, the next it's "tongue fungus") whose boyfriend jokingly suggests she travel to Malaysia and become the "god" of a local tribe "who value fear more than we do courage." Death is a reocurring presence throughout the volume: in "The Presentation on Egypt," a mother conceals her husband's suicide from their nine-year-old daughter, telling her instead that he died from a heart attack. The narrator of "Chicago on the Seine," a U.S. embassy worker in France, uses gallows humor to describe his job, which sometimes involves repatriating a corpse ("What I'd noticed was that death abroad was more common on package tours. Contrary to popular belief, the group didn't lift you up"). In the collection's standout, "Colorín, Colorado," an established author is unsettled by a student's claim that her stories have "no beginning or end, really, only middle," a critique that doubles as a wry commentary on Bordas's own work. Distinguished by the author's sly wit and complex understanding of the human condition, these stories leave a mark. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)

A dozen stories brimming with life, each as unpredictable as a chain of thoughts. Bordas' stories don't defy summary so much as they chortle at it. In the title piece, a father tracks his son's mental health through drawings during a season of grief; in "The Lottery in Almería," a Spain-based writer of language-learning books trying to punch up sample dialogue about flirting buys last-minute lottery tickets (non-spoiler alert: he doesn't win). "The State of Nature" features an ophthalmologist who sleeps through a burglary, then ambivalently goes--with an "apartment therapist"--to a weekend "thieves' market" where stolen items sometimes surface. "Beyond" chronicles a young adolescent's trip to the weight-loss camp he calls "Beyond Fat," and along the way features a tender scene of juggling. None of these stories has a conventional plot or a tumbler-clicking closure. What they do have is sparkling dialogue, a crackling and often lacerating wit, a buzzy, raucous energy. To call these "slice of life" stories would shortchange them: Bordas is a master vivisectionist of inner life, andher slices, of living flesh instantly mounted on a slide, pulse and pullulate under the scope; there's just so much there of how minds work, how voices sound, how conversations loop and sputter. Stories can veer, in the space of a paragraph, from Picasso's many middle names to Bill Murray's net worth, from astronaut envy or the color code of hurricane maps to dialogue with a stranger's corpse in the Paris morgue ("'There's been an accident,' I said. 'You died'"). There's nothing here that feels finessed or artificed. Bordas' characters don't feel real because the author has ingeniously lined up precisely the right details to convey an essence, to convey a message; they feel real because no matter what these characters see or do, what contingencies or oddities or incoherences loom into view, they respond in authentically idiosyncratic ways. An utterly delightful collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.