To Dance the Beginning of the World: Stories

Erudite and funny, nostalgic and fanciful, these stories unlock the secret longings and unlooked-for victories that make up everyday life. Whether he finds himself in the stands at Yankee Stadium on Bat Day, or, as in "Aunt Daisy's Secret Sauce for Hamburgers," caught off guard by the myriad ways in which a recipe and its misspellings are a window into the woman who wrote it years before, or gently exploring how loss and love get intertwined for a "Bee Girl," Hayward writes with a sure sense of his characters and the complex, imperfect worlds they inhabit. Talent and passionate complexity have created an elegant and unforgettable collection of stories that are assured in depictions of characters and distinctive in voice.