cover image Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea

Sarah Pinsker. Small Beer, $17 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-61873-155-5

This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker’s best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling. In the opening story, an injured farmer adjusts to living with a cybernetic arm that thinks it is a stretch of road in Colorado. “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” tells the story of a woman piecing together her husband’s enigmatic past after a stroke leaves him speechless. “No Lonely Seafarer” pits a stablehand against a pair of sirens as he attempts to save his town from its restless sailors. In all of Pinsker’s tales, humans grapple with their relationships to technology, the supernatural, and one another. Some, such as Ms. Clay in “Wind Will Rove,” are trying to navigate the space between technology as preservation and technology as destruction. Others, such as Kima in “Remembery Day,” rely on technology to live their lives. The stories are enhanced by a diverse cast of LGBTQ and nonwhite characters. Pinsker’s captivating compendium reveals stories that are as delightful and surprising to pore through as they are introspective and elegiac. Agent: Kim-Mei Kirtland, Morhaim Literary. (Mar.)