Mary M. Slechta’s brilliant new collection, Mulberry Street Stories (winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize), unfolds a puzzle box of treasures, pulling the reader in as if the book were an engrossing, fractured novel, visiting and revisiting characters from different viewpoints, offering up an intimate, inventive, sometimes hilarious, often heart-wrenching view of all of their secrets. The book starts as the story of a street and a neighborhood and then expands its perspective dramatically, without ever losing its focus on its particular people in their particular place. Characters (living, dead, and somewhere in between) appear, reappear, and disappear. Very human families love each other, fight, try to take care of their young and old, mourn their dead, and lose their possessions and sometimes their memories. They are, or become, or are pursued by, gods (maybe), ghosts, zombies, and vampires. Their children fall or leap off the edge of the world.