There’s something disturbing about the suburbs. In his tragicomic stories on the status quo, John Cheever, the so-called “Checkhov of the suburbs,” probed postwar America for its undercurrents of stifled discontent. Lust, envy, and general malaise pervade Shady Hill, the upstate setting of his 1958 collection of tales.

Haruki Murakami, Hannah Tinti, Robert Goolrick, Tao Lin, Harold Jaffe, Amanda Petrusich, Stephanie Kuehnert, Sarah Shun-lien Bunum