"Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress: Stories is a master class in analyzing the unspoken...This collection delights in the layers of human interaction, and what might lie beneath them."
—Gwen E. Kirby, The New York Times
"Varela’s witty, observant prose lifts each of these stories, even if the premises are decidedly grounded in real world and contemporary concerns. There’s a wisdom and lightness to Varela’s work that nudges us toward the conclusion that our divisions, while there may be many, can be mended."
—Leland Cheuk, The Boston Globe
"The People Who Report More Stress blends humor and social commentary with the thing that drives the best fiction: an honest and vulnerable exploration of messy human relationships. Fans of Varela’s first novel, as well as newcomers to his work, will find a lot to love in this collection."
—Laura Sackton, BookPage
"Varela's stories are provocative and witty; while eliciting chuckles they also dispense uncomfortable truths that everyone thinks about but won't address out loud."
—Andrienne Cruz, Booklist
"A searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality. [. . .] Varela provides invaluable insight on the ways stress impacts the characters’ lives, and how they persevere. Readers will be floored."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"The prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm . . . the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Alejandro Varela's book perfectly captures the stories of the frustration of people who see the inequities in society fully knowing that there isn't much they can do to sway the needle forward."
—Mirtle Peña-Calderon, People en Español
“Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, came out just last year and was a finalist for the National Book Award—so you know he’s got chops. His second book is “a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.” I already love Varela’s sense of humor and way of approaching the world, and I’m sure I will love these too.”
—ET, Literary Hub
"No one writes fiction that is incisive, socially conscious, and funny as well as Varela, and I'm happy to read anything he publishes."
—David Vogel, BuzzFeed
"Varela has written a collection that is mordant, tender, and hilariously self-critical. These stories navigate the myriad creases between lust and longing, love and proprietorship, without resorting to sanctimony. This is an incredible feat of wry sincerity."
—Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive
"The stories in The People Who Report More Stress are sharply observant and tenderly irreverent. Varela beautifully captures the anxieties of both structural limitation and possibility itself, examining how people choose from among the many lives they might lead, and how frequently even as they move away from their origins, characters encounter familiar obstacles that demand they carry the weight of history. This is a smart and gorgeous collection."
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
"Alejandro Varela is one of my favorite short story writers, and has been for years. Time after time, the mix of curiosity, humor and care in these stories reminds me of the parts of my life no one else writing currently describes. An iconoclast of tenderness, a compass in the storm this life always is."
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"Alejandro Varela’s The People Who Report More Stress effortlessly walks the line between humor and grief to create a portrait of modern queer life that is at once absurd and deeply sincere. These stories capture the small, lonely moments of everyday life, the rejections and misunderstandings and longings that make up great fiction. Varela can do anything.”
—Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide
"In The People Who Report More Stress, Alejandro Varela cracks the veneer of gay domesticity to reveal the intricacies of anxiety and lust, bewilderment and promise, shelter and placelessness in everyday urban life. In linked stories driven by frenzied interior monologue and roving analytical glee, Varela pivots from the rules of bathroom cruising to the legacies of colonialism in international relations, the hustle of selling bootleg designer clothes to the racial hierarchies of Brooklyn gentrification. Moving deftly between satire and hyperrealism, comic excess and mundane pathos, The People Who Report More Stress dissects the minutiae of relationships to self, city, space, and sensibility so we don’t numbly succumb to the 'structured order of things.'"
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
“Brilliant, layered, funny, and so insightful about the way communities, like hearts, are made and unmade. Alejandro Varela is a marvel.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
2023-01-25
Anxiety from daily encounters with racism and homophobia plague the transracial gay couple at the heart of this debut story collection.
Varela’s second book, after The Town of Babylon (2022), experiments with form and point of view—employing first-, second-, and third-person in various stories—but returns again and again to the New York City lives of Eduardo, a public health expert of Salvadorian and Colombian heritage, and his White husband, a coder named Gus. The Eduardos and Guses encountered throughout the collection are not from a singular timeline or moment in their histories, however. “Grand Openings” offers a litany of different life paths for the pair, including polyamory, separation, untimely deaths, and differing relationships with their children. Individual stories offer more subtle variations—naming a child Julio versus Jules, a marriage ended by opening the relationship versus a marriage ended by Eduardo’s frustrated retreat from a discriminatory world, a basil plant thriving or dying. The imagery may appear pedestrian (except in the standout “All the Bullets Were Made in My Country,” which includes the story of the mythic L’Ampara), but the prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm. The stories are not constructed with equal precision, though, so the endings of some feel haphazard, and there are occasional instances of overly obvious moralizing. Nevertheless, the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft.
An unbalanced but still rewarding collection that paints a vivid picture of navigating a hostile world together and alone.
