Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother's bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character's life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished-a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship-as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.

In Karin Lin-Greenberg's Faulty Predictions, young characters try to find their way in the world and older characters confront regrets. In ""Editorial Decisions"", members of the editorial board of a high school literary magazine are witnesses to an unspeakable act of violence. Two grandmothers, both immigrants from China, argue over the value of their treasures at a filming of Antiques Roadshow in ""Prized Possessions"". In ""A Good Brother"", a sister forces her brother to accompany her to the Running of the Brides at Filene's Basement. A city bus driver adopts a pig that has been brought onto the bus by rowdy college students in ""Designated Driver"". The stories in Faulty Predictions take place in locales as diverse as small-town Ohio, the mountains of western North Carolina, and the plains of Kansas. Lin-Greenberg provides insight into the human condition over a varied cross section of geography, age, and culture. Although the characters are often faced with obstacles and challenges, the stories also capture moments of optimism and hope.

These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home-thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.