My Prisoner and Other Stories

Set largely in the Rust Belt of the 1990s and early 2000s, My Prisoner and Other Stories gives us protagonists who repeatedly confront helplessness in the face of others’ suffering. A teenage girl tries to help an elderly woman who has locked herself out of her house only to be shaken by the trauma and loneliness that the woman—a Holocaust survivor and recent widow—eventually shares with her. A schoolteacher writes letters to his cousin, who has schizophrenia and is serving a life sentence ...