Literary MagNet

n her ingeniously structured debut collection, (University of Nebraska Press, September 2020), Megan Cummins intersperses stories about the book’s protagonist, Marie, with pieces the character herself has written. Marie’s attempt to reckon with both her autoimmune disease and the death of her father, who struggled with addiction, flickers throughout the fictions she writes; in many of them characters face the disconnect between their lives and the lives they imagined for themselves. (“But I was always falling in love with a future that required more heart than I had,” says one character.) Cummins’s resulting collection, which is by turns humorous and poignant, depicts how guilt and regret