The Only Sound Is the Wind

Sotolongo debuts with a potent collection centered on characters of Cuban heritage and their desires for connection and self-transformation. In the title story, a lonely single woman responds to a mail-order ad for a clone of herself. By the time the clone arrives, she’s started dating a man, and the clone’s presence complicates her budding romance. “Sad Bird” follows a young woman whose relationship with her girlfriend is on the rocks. To soothe her pain, she begins a ritual of burying the birds that fatally slam into her windows, and develops a friendship with her neighbor, an older man, who helps her dig the graves. “The Moth” pulls off a pitch-perfect riff on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which Mari, a disillusioned Miami library aide, turns into a beautiful moth and soars back to her hometown of Havana. Sotolongo counters the oddball and fantastical conceits with plainspoken prose, as when she conveys the frustration felt by Mari before her transformation (“All through work it was the same: the disgust, the self-loathing, and... such longing”). Theses stories mix the strange and the mundane to intoxicating effect. (Oct.)