Dan Keane talks with J. Robert Lennon about his new book, Familiar, as well as oversharing, life online, and the perils of writing from the gut.

In her thoughtful, entertaining new collection, Signs and Wonders, Alix Ohlin lures readers into what seem like lulls, and then, there it is: a car crash. A coma. A missing child. A man licking a woman’s leg.

J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand is a collection of 100 linked short short stories–linked by their location, a small upstate New York town that resembles Lennon’s hometown of Ithaca, and by their narrator, described as “unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed.”