We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now: Stories

Focusing on baseball fields and bars from New York to Los Angeles, promising newcomer Gallari presents nine fleeting tales of desultory youth. Several involve a pitcher on a downhill slide: the first story, “Throwing Stones,” introduces minor league Coney Island ballplayer Bellingham, who divines the outcome of his games by tossing beach pebbles. “A Beautiful Lie” finds an injured Duke University baseball pitcher meeting up with a former girlfriend from Long Island, who's become a radiant, accomplished traveler: “He wondered if his greatest achievement was to be a footnote to another's glory.” In “Negative Space,” the lonely street painter set up outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York finds ample subject matter in passing young women (“They're dynamic. Exciting. Something to be venerated”), whom he can occasionally coax into following him on a museum tour. The final selection, “Warwick Damon,” is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale about two writers on opposite ends of their respective careers; though sometimes familiar, Gallari's tales are earnestly conceived and tenderly wrought. (May)