Laura Valeri’s The Dead Still Here, a collection of short stories, is at once provocative and lucid, and offers various angles of characters looking for a relationship to hold. Set in Cuba mostly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the stories in Dariel Suarez’ A Kind of Solitude explore the themes of isolation and perseverance.  Adrian Todd Zuniga’s Collision Theory takes readers on an unpredictable journey in which a man is forced to confront difficult truths: girlfriends leave, mothers fall ill, and attempts to deny pain will ultimately fail.