The People Who Report More Stress: Stories

A linked story collection examining issues of parenting, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict in gentrified Brooklyn.

The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.

In ＂Midtown-West Side Story,＂ Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs. ＂The Man in 512＂ tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalog. ＂Comrades＂ follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a long-term relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little tolerance for political moderates, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one.

A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of the National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.

Alejandro Varela’s (he/him) debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His short story collection, The People Who Report More Stress, was one of Publishers Weekly’s best works of fiction in 2023, a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards, and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, The Story Prize, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Varela, who is based in New York, is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal andholds a master’s in public health from the University of Washington.