Hungry for What

María Bastarós writes domestic life as a site of quiet menace, and the strongest stories here refuse to resolve that menace into catharsis. A birthday wish curdles into threat, a pregnant woman absorbs her unemployed partner's contempt as a kind of daily tax, a trapped wife is pushed toward an impossible choice at gunpoint — the collection keeps returning to women whose bodies and labor are treated as household property. What makes it more than a grim inventory is the prose: spare, unshowy sentences that let the images do the damage rather than editorializing over them. The endings, consistently withheld rather than delivered, are the book's signature device — an insistence that these situations don't tie off neatly in life, so they shouldn't on the page. It's an assured, unsettling debut collection more interested in exposure than comfort.