An adolescent girl encounters some sketchy characters in and around her apartment building.

"That afternoon, after I cursed the old guy, the rain finally got to me the way it sometimes did and I got all depressed and cried all the way home. I unlocked the metal gate and walked into the dark hallway of my green apartment building. My neighbor was standing there in the hallway drinking a beer like it was his living room."

A group of children transfix themselves with the mania of creative destruction.

"'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things."

Two girls--one white, one black--meet as troubled children and then at various points in their different lives.

"So for the moment it didn't matter that we looked like salt and pepper standing there and that's what the other kids called us sometimes. We were eight years old and got F's all the time. Me because I couldn't remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn't read at all and didn't even listen to the teacher. She wasn't good at anything except jacks, at which she was a killer: pow scoop pow scoop pow scoop."

The intensities and disappointments of a friendship between two girls on the cusp of adolescence.

"Me and Gin like to play preacher and supplicant, Gin is always the preacher and I am always the supplicant. Gin saying You a fearful sinner, young lady, and me heaving my shoulders, begging Please."

A teenage girl observes her parents' work in a "dying parlor."

"It doesn’t take a genius to figure out dying people like to have a kid around to remind them of happier times. A teenager though, that’s something they’ll skip for their last two hours on earth. No one looks back on their life and says, remind me again of what it was like to be fifteen. Yeah, those were the days."

A high school band teacher engages in a psychological battle with an earnest yet musically-challenged student.

"Mr. Helmholtz started to shout after Plummer, to bring him back and tell him bluntly that he didn’t have the remotest chance of getting out of C Band ever; that he would never be able to understand that the mission of a band wasn’t simply to make noises, but to make special kinds of noises. But Plummer was off and away."

A potential pickpocket is set straight by an old woman's kindness.

"Sweat popped out on the boy’s face and he began to struggle. Mrs. Jones stopped, jerked him around in front of her, put a half-nelson about his neck, and continued to drag him up the street."

From the classic collection Dubliners, two truant schoolboys encounter an unsettling old man.

"A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again."

A father prepares a grotesque dinner for his family, with hints of unhappiness and ruminations on masculinity.

"Father tossed icy fishchunks into the microwave and they wobbled in the hot hum. Father sat back in his chair to swig golden brandy from his gut-flecked glass. Father peered down his great glistering nose at us. His nose gleamed like pocked gunmetal in the fishoil night and we sat on the floor in a row, each little child with his legs twisted into a knot."

A young man Japanese man visits his estranged, domineering father.

"Still, it was not their physical features that made it difficult for Tengo to identify with his father but their psychological makeup. His father showed no sign at all of what might be called intellectual curiosity. True, having been born in poverty he had not had a decent education. Tengo felt a degree of pity for his father’s circumstances. But a basic desire to obtain knowledge—which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural urge in people—was lacking in the man."

A Jewish family moves from Florida to Tennessee, and a prodigal son returns.

"My father decided he would cook a genuine Jewish brisket for the in-laws’ first Tennessee meal. They were coming up from West Palm Beach and he thought the brisket would make for the perfect pastiche of Jewish and Southern tradition, to the extent that either could be embodied in a slab of beef."

Childhood acquaintances, meeting again in adolescence.

"In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere."

New fiction from the author of 2010's Mr. Peanut.

"All of Patricia’s family pictures are still inside. Her clothes are still in the drawers. Her Garfield posters are still up on the walls. Everything."