Partners and Strangers

Dark, enigmatic, and sometimes comic, the stories in Partners and Strangers unite intimate anxieties with public dangers. Its characters embody grief, deviance, and the repressed: In “Yoav Feinsten’s Last Year at Home,” a teenager’s pain over his father’s death becomes unpredictably intertwined with an obsession with a cable man. In “A Home for an Eggplant,” the specter of a Craigslist killer provides a backdrop for a couple’s struggle with fertility. In “The Best Delivery Service,” the nar...