Faithful’s strongest selection is its title story, which seems to aspire to Alice Munro territory, leaping across swaths of time and lighting upon hinges in the trajectory of a strange, unmoored existence.

Daniel Karasik’s “Witness” explores, with haunting eloquence, various states of isolation, the basic human need for communication, and the value of art in the face of violence … A story of longing in a world peopled with thugs, “Witness,” with its poetic reverberations, will stick with me for a long time.

A man lies on his deathbed and begins to speak—not to his wife, who sits by his side, but to his memory of the woman with whom he had an affair. It is his wife’s response, and her voice—calm, measured, reflective—that makes “Mine” the story it is. Thickly imagined and expertly executed, this is the sort of writing that reminds us of the possibility of redemption and the very hard work of being human.