In her novel and her stories, Nora Lange is a chronicler of all that is strange and secret about people, mining that strangeness for comedy and pathos.

Helle Helle’s they is equally attuned to mundanity and mortality, which are, perhaps, the same thing. It is a novel suffused with a daily grace, documenting the cozy details of mother and daughter’s life, the small pleasures of cheese toast and comfy clothes, and the way dread thrums alongside dailiness, each giving the other a different cast.

Not long ago, I found myself near Edinburgh, in a church dating back to the twelfth century. I kept thinking of that church, cold and quiet, as I read Josephine Rowe’s Little World, a compact, sacred marvel of a book about a child “maybe-saint” in Australia.

“In general, the world seems like a system of allusions and signs, like Baudelaire’s forest of symbols but with treeless areas,” says Natalia, one of the protagonists of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel The Dance and the Fire, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. The world is, for Natalia, “a Morse code of objects and people that is only partly legible; a book chewed to shreds by a furious dog.”

In one of the stories in Thrilled to Death, a newly published selection of stories from her singular career, Lynne Tillman describes Clint Eastwood as “a tall, lean man, who seemed he would never fall, like the Twin Towers.” It’s a very Lynne Tillman joke: only funny because it’s sad.

It is a story that would be unbelievable if it were not true: a pilot who worked on aeronautical oxygen regulation for high-altitude flying invented the first reliable, mass-produced ventilator because he recognized a commonality between the wings of a plane and the alveoli in our lungs. A man of the air, in every sense.