How We Know Our Time Travelers

Felicelli’s shimmering fantastical collection (after the novel Chimerica) explores environmental devastation, desire, and memory. In the title story, the narrator meets a younger version of her husband, who’s time-traveled from 30 years in the past, arriving with takeout from a long-shuttered Mexican restaurant. A part of her knows these events are impossible, but she desperately wants to believe her husband has “come to carry me away from my present to return to the past, to start over, to live life over, but better.” The humorous “Keeping Score” follows a couple’s attempt to improve their relationship with an app that tracks their good and bad deeds by awarding and docking points (“You baked a cake [+5] and frosted it in buttercream [+10]... your partner failed to do the dishes [-1]”). Soon, however, the app makes them competitive, and their loving gestures devolve into a game of tit for tat. In “The Glitch,” a woman who lost her wife and children in a wildfire lives a cloistered existence with holograms of her dead family, who repeat the same scenes of domestic bliss every day, until a new round of wildfires break out. Each story is transportive, no matter how bleak the subject matter. Readers will delight in Felicelli’s off-kilter vision. Agent: Melissa Danaczko, Stuart Krichevsky Agency. (Dec.)

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified the main character of “The Glitch” as a man.