Ms. Beatrice Hempel, new to teaching, new to the school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her idiosyncratic father, struggles to figure out what is expected of her in life and at work

From a Nigerian boy's friendship with his family's former houseboy to a sweatship girl's experience as a sister wife, from love and murder on the frontier to a meltdown in academe, these stories, for Díaz, have the economy and power to "break hearts bones vanities and cages."