WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST by Hanna Bervoets

paperwork”) contends with the whims of her recently widowed retired-businessman father; when a restlessness leads him to move to his native Italy and adopt a wounded mule, both parent and child must acknowledge the losses they’ve endured— namely, of someone to care for. The theme of parental mortality continues in “The Heirloom,” which finds 29-year-old Regan the unenthusiastic inheritor of her mother’s sustainability ranch; after she repurposes it into a site for city men to drive bulldozers and crush cars, she battles her own “pent-up rage to split a metal machine wide open,” reeling from her mother’s death and the unpredictability of loss. In “Wife Days,” the semi-unhappily married Farrah swims endless laps, courts male attention, and engages in detached, animalistic sex with her husband, all while warding against the “craziness” that came, as her mother warned, “when the currency of beauty faded.” The novella-length “Indigo Run”—set at Stillwood, a pain-riddled Southern estate that’s housed generations of the old Glass family—probes the burdens its women carry from one generation to the next: loss, motherhood, ancestral burdens. Bergman’s stories are so atmospherically and emotionally rich that they serve as portals into distinct interior worlds, often concluding on a quiet, destabilizing note that calls into question the narrative’s apparent straightforwardness. As a whole (and though “Indigo Run” is unevenly paced), this collection is distinct and vivid, each story burrowing inside the reader’s brain to leave an indelible mark.

As singular as it is atmospheric.

WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST

Bervoets, Hanna Mariner Books (144 pp.) $22.00 | May 24, 2022 978-0-358-62236-9

Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IRL.

Up until 16 months ago, Kayleigh was a content moderator at Hexa, a company