Through her beautifully detailed, immersive portrayals, novelist Nicole Krauss explores gender, power and aging in her first collection of short stories. There is the woman in Japan seeking to stop an Iranian film star from attempting an imagined suicide. There is the husband who was lost, though perhaps wasn’t ever a husband. There is the stranger living in a narrator’s deceased father’s apartment. Together, the 10 stories reflect on what does—and does not—make men and women different.