Michel ably handles modes from lyrical to ironic, but he is most comfortable in a purposefully flat style that reads something like translated Kafka. As one narrator, the superintendent of a building full of would-be suicides, pleads to a tenant: “No Earl, you can’t do this! Think of your family. Think of the butcher and the barber who depend on your patronage. Think of your dogs, the happy wagging of their tails.”

LOVERS ON ALL SAINTS’ DAY

Stories

By Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Translated by Anne McLean

241 pp. Riverhead, $27.95.

Toward the end of Vásquez’s sharp new collection, a character marvels, “It was incredible that life had so insistently proved the futility of any opening up, the greater wisdom of closing in on himself.” All of the characters here struggle with the self-imposed isolation of their inner selves, forced to watch as love fails to provide a way out. Take for example the husband in “The All Saints’ Day Lovers,” who chooses not to return to his wife after setting out on an errand, instead spending the night in the bed of a young widow he meets in town and wearing her late husband’s pajamas. “Maybe this moment didn’t have any meaning, after all,” he thinks. “Maybe pain and loss had meaning only in religion or in fables.” Other affairs are equally disastrous, like the one an aging hunter tries to rekindle with his friend’s wife in “The Lodger,” or the long and desperate one-night stand in “Life on Grimsey Island.” Although most of these stories are roughly contemporary, Vásquez’s Continental Europe feels prewar, with the curse of unexplained and unearned wealth providing the Porsches, the mansions and the boar hunts that serve as backdrop for love’s inevitable undoing.

FLYING HOME

Seven Stories of the Secret City

By David Nicholson

147 pp. Paycock, paper, $12.95.

All of these stories are set in Washington, D.C., but none are about politics — or anyway, not the visible power structure of government. Instead, Nicholson focuses on the “secret city” of the blue-­collar and no-collar workers, almost entirely black, who have survived for generations in the shadow of the Capitol. A recently laid-off father attempts to discipline his eldest son. A former Negro League pitcher is startled when the white boy his wife watches as a domestic servant crosses the tracks to hear the truth about the time he struck out Babe Ruth. And in the title story — the simplest yet most affecting of the collection — a successful father brings his daughter to his old neighborhood to see the conditions he escaped, only to encounter an old friend shambling and begging for change. In that story, a song from a passing car is described as a “naked wail that isn’t about love or sex but the desperate longing for completion . . . a longing so ingrained it might be racial, born out of being strangers in a strange land.” The characters here may be strangers in their country, and even in their city, but not in their neighborhood, which Nicholson depicts with sensitivity and grace.