Small Cruelties

It's death by a thousand cuts—ten new stories from acclaimed writer Joanna Acevedo are collected in Small Cruelties, showing us uncertain futures, rushed intimacies, broken promises, fading youth, and insurmountable losses. In Acevedo's debut story collection, Unsaid Things, the narrators recognized their flaws and their reluctance to stand up for what they believed in. With Small Cruelties, Acevedo introduces us to young people around the country who aren't thinking about the American Dream—tax cuts, cheap mortgages, or access to healthcare. These kinds of stressors are a luxury for the truly desperate. The characters in Small Cruelties are looking for a more basic solution. At the core is their drive to see the world and what it has to offer, for connection, community, compassion. In this search there are moments of surreal and tender lightness—a watermelon buckled into the passenger seat of a car, vigilante couples therapy built as an experiment by trespassing graduate students using blackout curtains and crystal meth. Maybe these characters have commitment issues, and maybe they have boundary issues, and maybe they're pulling everyone into the storm they inevitably create. But throughout, Acevedo refuses to sensationalize, to titillate, to reduce these variations of the human experience to cliché. Instead, readers will find far more to relate to than to judge.