THE CONSEQUENCES

From three-time O. Henry winner Muñoz, a new and often luminous collection, his third.

Many of the stories gathered here are set in the 1980s and '90s and feature people living in severely straitened and threatened circumstances: the families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California's Central Valley who are routinely rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, repatriated, and then return, again and again; gay men in an age of AIDS and widespread homophobia; trapped and housebound teens. In "The Reason Is Because," we meet a high school girl forced by pregnancy to drop out of school. She lives with her mother and her newborn in near isolation, and the only hope for change anyone seems able even to imagine is a marriage to the swaggering, not-very-bright, and mostly uninterested father. In "Anyone Can Do It," the wife of a fruit picker who (though American-born) has been hauled away with his co-workers by La Migra is swindled out of her chief asset by a neighbor she'd thought an ally. Another standout is the moving title story, in which Mark, a water-company clerk, falls in love with Teddy, a sweet-tempered, beautiful young man who's been hustling in LA, and is surprised when Teddy seems not only willing, but eager to leave the glitz of the city to settle with him in Fresno. Eventually it's revealed that Teddy is dying of AIDS. Mark kicks him out and then—tortured—drives all the way to the small Texas town where Teddy was born and where, it turns out, he has just died. Perhaps best of all is the closer, "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Here we meet a rule-following Texas teen who bristles at the strictures of home and the narrowness of her prospects but sees little way around them. Her bolder or just more desperate younger brother keeps running off, looking for a wider world that might accept him. Her task is to find him and bring him home—until, that is, her brother manages to get far enough away to provide escape velocity for her, too.

Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.