Someone Else's Age Crisis

Sorrow and joy, hopelessness and hope alternate in Masha Traub’s novels, novellas, and short stories. She debuted brilliantly in 2007 with the deeply sincere novel “Get Ready, We’re Leaving.” Since then, there have been many more books—hilariously funny and painfully sad. Based on some of them—“The Diary of a First-Grader’s Mother” and “The Little House in the South”—feature films were made.

The collection “The Crisis of a Stranger’s Age” includes stories about life and death, about miracles and about relatives who never became close, and about strangers who became family. In this touching, honest prose, there’s room for irony, subtle observations, and those very details of everyday life where you recognize your own story. Every character in this collection experiences one crisis or another. Each deals with it in their own way: someone takes a vow of silence; others believe they’re fighting their own death in an arm-wrestling duel. This book contains not only observations of modern life, but also stories that could be taken for mystical.

“Grandma used to say, ‘I’ll sort this trouble out with beans’” when she wanted to calm me down. In the village where I grew up, people guessed the future with beans. And if that’s mysticism, then it’s very kind.