The People Who Report More Stress

November 1, 2022

Having debuted with The Town of Babylon, recently long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, Varela returns with a collection of interconnected stories focusing with bite and humor on parenting, relationships, racism, and class conflict. Among its characters are a queer man hunting for a partner and a childcare worker in Sweden trying to teach his charges Spanish while carefully observing the well-to-do in his employees' coop building.

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February 15, 2023
Anxiety from daily encounters with racism and homophobia plague the transracial gay couple at the heart of this debut story collection. Varela's second book, after The Town of Babylon (2022), experiments with form and point of view--employing first-, second-, and third-person in various stories--but returns again and again to the New York City lives of Eduardo, a public health expert of Salvadorian and Colombian heritage, and his White husband, a coder named Gus. The Eduardos and Guses encountered throughout the collection are not from a singular timeline or moment in their histories, however. "Grand Openings" offers a litany of different life paths for the pair, including polyamory, separation, untimely deaths, and differing relationships with their children. Individual stories offer more subtle variations--naming a child Julio versus Jules, a marriage ended by opening the relationship versus a marriage ended by Eduardo's frustrated retreat from a discriminatory world, a basil plant thriving or dying. The imagery may appear pedestrian (except in the standout "All the Bullets Were Made in My Country," which includes the story of the mythic L'Ampara), but the prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm. The stories are not constructed with equal precision, though, so the endings of some feel haphazard, and there are occasional instances of overly obvious moralizing. Nevertheless, the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft. An unbalanced but still rewarding collection that paints a vivid picture of navigating a hostile world together and alone.

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Starred review from February 6, 2023
Varela follows up The Town of Babylon, a finalist for the National Book Award, with a searing collection about gentrification, racism, and sexuality. In “An Other Man,” a queer Latinx man, restless in his relationship, gets permission from his partner to use dating apps. In “She and Her Kid, Me and Mine,” a Salvadorian Columbian father deals with a series of microaggressions during his son’s playdate with a classmate, whose white mother denigrates his parenting skills and pays his small apartment a backhanded compliment, one that stings especially as the mother is part of a wave of gentrifiers in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Slights also figure into “The Great Potato Famine,” in which the Latinx narrator struggles to hail a cab in Midtown until his white boyfriend steps in. “Midtown-West Side Story” features a Latinx couple who, hoping to buy a house in the suburbs and send their kids to Catholic school, supplement their meagre income from service jobs with a side hustle fencing stolen luxury clothing. Many of the atmospheric entries sting with a quick one-two, with Varela following up an unsettling racist encounter with wry commentary (after the narrator of “The Great Potato Famine” gets into a white cabbie’s car, he reflects on the driver’s icy manner: “This is what you get for leapfrogging someone in the hierarchy, for inverting the power dynamic”). Throughout, Varela provides invaluable insight on the ways stress impacts the characters’ lives, and how they persevere. Readers will be floored. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic.

March 15, 2023
Varela's collection of 13 interconnected short stories views the world through the eyes of gay men who deal with contemporary worries with varying degrees of exigency. Most of the tales are set in Brooklyn, which inspired the author to share searing commentary about gentrification, racism, sex, and political correctness. ""An Other Man"" tackles the complexities and overthinking involved when a gay man in a committed relationship is free to see other men. ""She and Her Kid and Me and Mine"" dramatizes the trepidation involved when a brown gay dad invites a white mom and her child on a play date. ""The Great Potato Famine"" takes aim at how society is quick to pursue lofty endeavors while forgetting the essentials: "People won't confront anything . . . like heart disease or the world's end if they can't first meet their own needs, like rent or diapers." Varela's stories are provocative and witty; while eliciting chuckles they also dispense uncomfortable truths that everyone thinks about but won't address out loud.

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