For those who've been sad and tried not to be, seventeen stories about the absurdity of searching for joy in a dying world.

A neighborhood of picturesque content-creation houses perched on too-green lawns in a California desert; a meandering stampede of unleashed dogs on the streets of San Francisco; a skein of snow geese alighting in a state park in Missouri; an uncanny fundraising auction at an upscale suburban-DC prep school. Inhabiting these worlds of disconnection and dislocation are the sad grownups a middle-aged queer couple arguing over whether to have children, a college professor dying from cancer, two recent high school graduates plotting a robbery, a sixty-year-old counselor at a boys' summer camp sheltering herself from the realities of life-all connected more closely to the landscapes around them than to other people, searching fervently for liberation, understanding, and even happiness, wherever and however they might be found.

A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities.

Miranda Schmidt's lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation.

Frightened that the grippe will steal away the life of her beloved cousin Marija, the only family she has in New York, Karolina steps out into the cold and unforgiving city streets to buy chamomile flowers, a tried-and-true remedy from her old life in Lithuania. Meanwhile, her children struggle to navigate through Russian-occupied Europe to reach the port of Hamburg and sail to America for a desperately sought reunion.

Set in 1901, Paul Jaskunas's multi-generational immigrant saga-in-miniature nimbly blends historical realism with a more feverish, dreamlike aesthetic to create a unique and arresting portrait of one family fervently hoping that America will make good on its promise.

Guy Sutter Jr. thought he knew his parents. But as he flips through a seemingly innocuous Rolodex discovered among his late father's effects, he finds that the yellowing, typewritten cards recount moments of play, odd joy, sexual awakening, jealousy, and fear that comprise both a secret history and a startling new window into Guy's own childhood. Whether floating a boat down a city street, staging a nap-in, or sabotaging a friend's Vietnam War draft exam, these unforeseen revelations- these happenings-become, for Guy and for the reader, an elusive and tantalizing set of clues pointing towards the most intimate revelations of all.

When fledgling writer Niya is expected to read the eulogy at her father's funeral, she does not, cannot. In her grief, she seeks to reconcile the world she thought she knew with the history that now emerges-her parents' declining marriage, her father's mysterious medical troubles, her place in the family dynamic. All the while, Niya grapples with the editorial deaths she sees in her own written work.

In prose at once masterful and magical, Morgan Christie details the search for meaning in our closest relationships and underscores the surprising ways a sense of duty can lead to new depths of compassion and understanding.