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.)