Transportation: Stories by Nancy Rommelmann

Author and journalist Nancy Rommelmann is known for her unflinching documentarian gaze, usually focused on subjects like serial killers and Munchausen moms, con-men and homeless teens. But the stories in Transportation have an elevated, untethered quality—they are transported, and transporting. The storytelling surges at times toward sci-fi; at others, toward an unadorned magical realism. The first story in the collection, “The White Coyote,” is an intense, black-humored study of shame that takes place in a Catholic grade school gymnasium. The title story, “Transportation,” documents the metaphysical journey of two grieving parents who must literally circumnavigate the globe, on separate paths, in order to heal.