FICTION

THE NATURE OF LONGING by Alyce Miller. (University of Georgia: $19.95; 229 pp.) Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Alyce Miller’s debut collection, “The Nature of Longing,” seems to be concerned with sex, race and belonging. In the best of these pieces, characters fall victim to their own desperate need for human connection and get themselves into terrible situations for which there is no good solution. Miller’s novella, “Dead Women” is an odd, pleasantly sticky story of an American woman who floats through France and Spain trying unsuccessfully to break out of her own emotional isolation. “Even then I knew it would never work, but I came at him full force anyway, wrapping my arms and legs fiercely around him. . . . Marcos whispered, ‘Je t’aime,’ against my ear, I knew he was lying. But I’d come all this way, hadn’t I, backtracking no less, to find him.”

In her weaker stories, Miller has a propensity to simplify emotional issues. “Color Struck,” for example concerns an African American mother trying to accept her albino baby, and handle an awkward situation with her brother and his white girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with this setting, but somehow Miller reduces it to, well, black and white.

Overall, “The Nature of Longing” is a tough, smart collection of stories, many of which could easily be expanded into a novel. It will be interesting to see the shape of Miller’s future work.