Collection marks the dangers in life’s twists and turns

Black’s characters often struggle to find connection, to tease out the truth in a world that insists on convention. In “The Laziest Form of Revelation,’’ the narrator reflects on a doomed affair with a painter: “[H]e taught me one thing I’ll never forget: We all desire the cut of truth.’’

The author’s unflinching candor allows her to mine extraordinary revelations from seemingly mundane moments. In “Good in a Crisis’’ a high school English teacher questions her calling: “Against her better wishes, she’d become an enforcer of the picayune. Her students must have perceived her failure; with the wisdom of children, they sensed that she had chosen the easy path in life, and they resented her for it.’’ This realization drives her to seek out her own favorite teacher from high school, a man who teaches her as much about desire as he once did about poetry.

Black’s agile narrators have a knack for bringing both the past and future to bear on the present moment. In the story “Double-blind,’’ for instance, her heroine observes, “If I look closely enough, all the chords of our four years together were struck that first night: Ben’s eccentricity, his warmth, his need for me to prove my love. As were my desire to please him, my skepticism, my ultimate inability to see things the way he did. All the notes of our undoing were there, alongside the notes of our joy.’’